One of the great benefits of attending an academic conference is the opportunity to make small talk with interesting people. You're standing in the coffee line, waiting for an elevator, or loafing between sessions and you just start chatting with someone in the same boat, and before you know it you're laughing or learning something or, at the very least, thanking your lucky stars that you're not in that person's predicament.
I fear, however, that these serendipities are coming to an end. I base this on my experience at a recent academic meeting where no one was interested in small talk, preferring to spend down time staring at tiny screens.
Now I'm the first to admit that I'll never win the Most Outgoing prize, but over the years I've developed some pretty reliable techniques for engaging in meaningless chatter with strangers. These skills, however, failed utterly at the meeting I attended over the weekend. In a daylong event, I managed to engage exactly one person in chit-chat; every other opportunity was rebuffed by devotees of tiny screens.
I realize that it's a waste of time to try to chat with people engrossed in their phones or tablets in public, but finding anyone not so occupied is a challenge. It's as if they're so fearful of venturing into public alone that they have to stay tethered to the nanny lest someone approach with poisoned lollipops.
I know I'm not the first to notice the impending death of small talk with strangers in public places, but this was the first time I felt utterly cut off from everyone around me simply because I was busy watching people instead of screens. People-watching was once a pretty interesting practice, but people attached to screens are boring. It's like being surrounded by zombies, except the brains being consumed are their own.
The cure is simple, of course: join the crowd devoted to avoiding engagement with the crowd. But I'm not quite ready to zombify myself. I hold out hope that somewhere out there in smartphoneland there exist a few other holdouts who still hold dear the art of conversation. If only I could figure out where they're hiding.
(Maybe there's an app for that?)
5 comments:
Yep, good luck with that.
Because evidently some people are so very important that not checking their email or facebook or whatever for 3 minutes at a time would be disastrous!
Since I started teaching again at high school after staying home for five years with young kids, I notice how QUIET it is whenever there is any down time in the room. All the teenagers are checking their phones instead of talking to each other... it is positively eerie.
I know! I go into class a few minutes early with a hearty "Hello" and try to make conversation, but no one is interested. They're all staring at their laps. How will they ever learn to look people in the eyes and make small talk?
Mind you, the last decent sized conference I went to announced all the corrections to timings, cancellations, reminders of talks etc. AND had all the questions being asked via Twitter rather than using any kind of public speaker system, notice board or announcements in sessions - so NOT having a device was quite excluding.
I want to know how everyone is going to cope with the eye strain and neck and hand strain of doing tiny screen stuff all day every day - it's fine at age 20, but at age 40?
Call it the zombie ap-pocalypse.
D.
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