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Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee Thought Leadership Laurence Lock Lee

The Dying Art of Conversation

I started out composing this blog post with the intent of informing on how to start and sustain a good online conversation. As part of my research for the article I came across MIT Professor Sherry Turkle’s book on ‘Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age’. There is substantial material available for helping us conduct more effective online conversations. However, if you are like me, there is always that nagging doubt about whether online conversations ever achieve the level of fidelity and depth that a face to face conversation can take. Turkle’s book turned this nagging doubt into full scale distress. The book opens with a story about a junior high school that contacted Turkle with concerns students had lost the ability to naturally converse and develop empathy for each other. The school attributed this behaviour to their pervasive use of online communication devices. This immediately raised a question to me. By pushing more of our conversations online, are we actually harming future generations’ ability to converse in the way that most of us have taken for granted? Are we doing more harm than good?

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