The Death of Conversation | Not What It Used To Be

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Nothing to say?

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Hmmm. The art of conversation is not what it used to be.

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But let’s just hold up one second there, Pardner. Since when was conversation an art anyway? It’s simply a case of two or more people in the same place at the same time waiting for their turn to speak. Nothing really artistic there.

Granted some conversations hold more value than others, but I’ve yet to be involved in one that’s struck me as having an implicit artistic value. I know for a fact that there’s nothing I’ve ever said that warrants framing and mounting on a wall in the Louvre. In fact, most of the conversations I’m involved in would be best served up with a government health warning.

But maybe that’s just me.

I digress. Conversation has indeed died. A slow, lonely death at the foot of Mount Technology, just down the road from Failure to Communicate Avenue.

There has been a problem with communication for a long, long time. Think of every awkward silence you’ve ever sat through, just wishing that the other person would say something like “Great to have met you, but I must be off”, or for the remotest chance that Aliens would choose this moment to invade the Earth, giving you one of two options: the opportunity to make a hasty retreat from conversation hell; or something to finally talk about.

There is a communication breakdown in all walks of life. For example: Greedy, arrogant politicians and an electorate they’re completely out of step with; Married couples who’ve run out of things to say to one another; A bewildered adult population at odds with a clueless youth.

In fact, the Generation Gap has never seemed wider with kids now talking a completely different language to their parents, as their parents once had to their own. However, a great deal of today’s kids are not only at odds with their parents, but with society as a whole, creating the feral youth of today I have discussed before.

They are bound together by a common lack of respect that their parents have so successfully failed to instil in them and gravitate to the dangerous gangs we hear so much about these days. With the increase in both knife and gun crime, and a clueless government without a single feasible idea on how to tackle it through fear of offending some pressure group or other; nowadays, conversation for some is nothing more than the build-up to confrontation.

Frightening.

Next time I shall be laying the blame for the death of conversation firmly at the door of mobile phones and modern technology.