Do you consider an exchange of tweets a conversation? What about an exchange of comments on a blog? When you’re drinking a cup of coffee and exchanging ideas and opinions online, do you consider it coffee and conversation?
Conversation is generally thought to be the spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions, and feelings, but when the keyboard becomes the enabler, the silent facilitator of sorts, is conversation without a spoken word still a conversation, and does it really matter?
The answer to this question depends on how you define conversation. If your definition is rigid, then no. If your definition is loose, then yes. How I understand conversation has evolved to the point where I don’t necessarily believe that it requires a spoken exchange of words. This is not to say that online conversation can or should replace face to face, but that words not spoken, transfered through an online medium, which are then reciprocated with a response is dialogue. And dialogue is conversation. According to Chris Falzon:
Dialogue is no longer restricted to symbolic face-to-face oral or gestural communication. It becomes any kind of reciprocal interaction between ourselves and the world.
When I go to coffee shops and see laptops plugged in with browsers open to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media tools—with a cup of coffee in hand—I know that people are striking up and continuing online caffeinated conversations.
Because no words are being spoken, I interrupt from time to time to strike up a face to face because nothing can substitute. But nevertheless, the world is moving forward, and conversations once never thought possible are happening, and the Internet is leading the way.
Stewart Lee Allen writes:
The Net is the latest manifestation, or equivalent, of the coffeehouse as a social institution, a place where anybody can gather, regardless of social standing, and exchange intelligible opinions.
Do online exchanges meet your “conversation” standard?
2 Comments
I have to agree that online communication and even text messaging are 100% forms of conversation. I think it is a very effective and efficient way of having a conversation. Yes you loose a little of the emotion that would be found in a face to face conversation, which truly can’t be replaced but you still convey thoughts, opinions, facts and just general b.s. whether it’s via twitter or a face to face communication. Also in many ways the social platforms allow you to almost know someone a lot better through pictures and other blurbs on their profile than you would by just talking with them face to face.
@Erica Great point about the ability to get to know someone through pictures, blurbs, etc. on social platforms. I’ve learned many things about friends online, which didn’t surface during face-to-face conversation.