Conversation: Why is it so important?

BENEFITS

The most depressing, yet still timely, image is that of two people sitting in a restaurant waiting for their food. They don't look each other in the eye, they don't even speak a word, and they're both glued to their smartphones. They're fiddling with their phones instead of conversing.

La conversazione, which for centuries has represented the platform for building lasting human relationships, has been overwhelmed by technology. Like stamp collectors, who with the advent of computers have become pandas, an endangered species. Conversation is out of fashion, partly because we are dominated by the presentism of virtual conversations and the obsession with talking a lot and listening little. The opposite of what we should do, as dear Plutarch said, reminding us that it's no coincidence that we are equipped with two ears and one mouth. And not vice versa.

IMPORTANCE OF CONVERSATION

Just think of the wealth of opportunities we wasteEvery day, we forgo the most natural and spontaneous conversations—the ones with family, children, wives, husbands, partners, boyfriends, and girlfriends. With our entire world of friends. Sometimes it feels like we're living among the deaf. Let's talk, we talk, as if we were all inside a giant television talk show, but we don't listenWe don't grasp the essence of what our interlocutor is telling us and we remain prisoners of our own small certainties, as if they were rafts during a shipwreck. Thus we lose the importance of dialogue and the pleasure of conversation: two essential things for a good life of social relationships, of authentic human contact, of seeking out others.

HOW TO RECOVER DIALOGUE

At a conference of medical scientists, an entire session was dedicated to this topic: the importance of the conversazioneStrange, you might think. And yet, conversation, the recurring dialogue, fully belongs to that condition that we can define as the a person's well-being. Even on a psychological and physical level. He who does not know how to converse, he who does not like to converse and does not even want to try, is sooner rather than later condemned to deal with forms of solitudeand psychological autism. Conversation, on the other hand, has positive effects on mood and on our human relationships, and its benefits are also organic, from improved blood circulation to a relaxation that helps us sleep well.

HOW TO IMPROVE DIALOGUE

Often, even without wanting it, we suffer from autism, and we are unable to communicate with others. TV, computers, cell phones and tablets They push us toward virtual dialogue and keep us at a worrying cybernetic distance from our interlocutors. Have you ever considered the waste of human relationships and connections that are consumed every day? Conversation, the pleasure of being and being together (from the Latin conversari), the light-hearted search for a sense of "we" to escape the burdensome autism of the ego, has been submerged by the long wave of technological seductions and increasingly integrated tools, whose invasiveness effectively prevents us from speaking and cultivating natural dialogue.

TO KNOW MORE: In Praise and the Virtue of Patience in the Age of Speed

IN FAMILY

In the family, where if all goes well the average time spent together, often by chance, does not exceed 45 minutes a day, we live surrounded, in a sort of unconditional surrender to conversation killer objectsThe television is on, blaring in the background while you're having dinner; the cell phone is always on, even placed on the table like a pistol in a saloon so as not to miss a single fragment of a WhatsApp message or text message.; the computer, the tablet or the iPhone in fibrillation because the vast web community, the one we frequent most, does not allow for breaks. Just six years ago in Italy there were 200 thousand Facebook members, now we are at 26 million. And precisely Mark Zuckerberg's creature, with its extraordinary potential, twenty years after its birth (2004) has given us so many contacts but also so much loneliness in a world of weak relationships, which however have the power to crush conversation. We talk more, thanks to the Internet, and we communicate less under the deluge of electronic words which thus lose meaning, depth and therefore real usefulness.

VALUE OF CONVERSATION

And yet, here's the news: the murder of conversation is beginning to be examined and judged by the court of public opinion. And a cry goes up: let's resurrect it. In America, the most popular topic in public debate concerns individual and collective countermeasures against the excessive power of technology, and its powerful and billionaire alchemists, combined with the rediscovery of old, but precious antibodies, such as conversation. Sherry Turkle She has become the real star of this discussion, which takes place through television and radio talk shows, which in the United States are not monopolized by political squabbles, magazine investigations, and university conferences. Turkle is a typical product of the best American academia: she graduated from Harvard, teaches social sciences at MIT in Boston, and her highly critical book on the pervasiveness of technology, Alone Together (in Italian translated with the title Insieme ma soli) became a long-seller published in 38 countries around the world.

HOW TO MANAGE THE CONVERSATION?

Now Turkle has the sequel ready, with the title Reclaiming Conservation (Give us back the conversation), and meanwhile previews the contents of the new book through interviews and talks at TED conferences. With concepts like this: "I'm not an enemy of technology, and I'm not asking to abolish anything we have thanks to new communication tools, but let's get back to talking to someone, and not just someone over the Internet. Knowing that the magical moment of exchange, of dialogue, is sparked perhaps after an initial phase of slowness, pauses, and even boredom, which then suddenly transforms into the warmth of a genuine conversation." Yes, the slowness of the approach that warms up the conversation and allows thought to mature: the opposite of the speed and compulsion to multitask that fuel the constant, feverish chatter of emails, text messages, social networks, and various telephones.

TO LEARN MORE: In praise of slowness, if we are too fast the brain doesn't work well

THE PLEASURE OF CONVERSATION AND BEING TOGETHER

If in America the return to conversation will still have to deal with the frenetic metabolism of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in perpetual competition, in Italy, for once, we have an advantage:Conversation, the pleasure of being together, is a genetic code of our civilization. It is a piece of the cultural and social identity made in Italy. Starting from the roots of Seneca's philosophy, which advocated conversation as an essential tool for breaking out of isolation and creating community, and from treatises such as Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversatione and Giovanni della Casa's Galateo, Guazzo, long before Professor Turkle, recommended adapting language to the desire for authentic relationships, without raising any barriers between interlocutors. «whether they are young or old, bourgeois or noble, educated or ignorant, ecclesiastics or laypeople, men or women». And it was the conversation in modern Italy, first of all that of the economic boom, shaping our relationships as communities, as people, and as ruling classes, even shaping the rituals of the most emblematic places of collective togetherness: the bar, the town square, the clubhouse.

DIALOGUE WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

Today, in the solitude of our troubles, in the anguish of uncertainty that pushes tribes of children orphaned of intimacy and gaze into isolation, we have one more card to play: to restore to conversation its vital energy, its leverage to build strong relationships, not compromised by the accumulation of weak thoughtsA lever to help us regain lightness and irony, tolerance and knowledge, true things that have been part of us for centuries and, as much as we may have forgotten them, we now miss them so much. Too much, like the faces of Italians who can no longer smile.

FAMOUS QUOTES

• "One should, at least every day, say and hear a few reasonable words." Wolfgang Goethe

Conversation is an exercise, not just in dialectics. There's one aspect we often underestimate: through dialogue, the path to reasonableness becomes easier. And faced with so many unreasonable things we see and hear, we might also ask ourselves: couldn't it be because we don't converse enough?

• "Talking with men from other centuries is almost the same as travelling" Descartes

Travel is an absolute pleasure, but we can also enjoy it through conversation. It's not virtual,
but real. Think of the story, driven by our questions, of a grandfather who drags us into the universe
of his memory.

• "A good conversation is a compromise between speaking and listening." Ernst Junger

The richness of conversation lies in this magical balance between speaking and listening.

• "To frank speech I will respond with frank words" Francesco Petrarch

Candor is another direct consequence of the habit of conversing. Especially if we do it in a
frank, open, almost forcing our interlocutor to do the same.