> The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this [electronic] talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each o

> The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this [electronic] talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other. ----------------------------- Electronics aside, is that new? If you read books like How To Make Friends and Influence People, it seems like most people were horribly self-centred even back then. If you've listened to Ira Glass' talk about creativity, one of the points he brings up is essentially that a lot of people lack interest in things other than themselves. He puts it a little more gently than that, but that's the core of it. Heck, I remember the idea that we're all looking for the unconditional love we thought we deserved as children. Now, I'm not saying that we're all like that, or that the majority of us are like that. But if you want to sing the praises of what we had before you have to paint a fairly rosy picture of humanity. Your null-hypothesis, so to speak, isn't electronic communication alone - that might just be making the pre-existing social dynamic easier to see. If you want to make a strong argument, general rule, if you want to make a strong argument - to be persuasive to people who value no-BS, "just the facts please mam" - you have to either prove that you don't live in the situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with, or show that your argument still works even if you're in a situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with. (Of course, for different people, different things are persuasive - one of the reasons this is written in the style of a story is that stories help us empathise with people and filter larger things through that empathy... I'd say there's too much of the reporter in this story for that to work as well as it should. But you can certainly get a lot of distance out of packaging up quite abstract thoughts into anecdotes. Even if, or perhaps especially, if they're not anecdotes about you. You may need a little bit of yourself in there as a hook but interesting people talk a bit about themselves and use that as a hook to talk about others - because they've got these interests in the world around them.)