The Fading of Dialogue

In art school, my conversations with friends were often intense and personal. It made sense. We were already exposing our innermost feelings through our work, so there was no point in keeping them secret in conversation.

As I got older, I realized most people don’t talk that way, which explains the popularity of psychotherapy. Conversations also change with age. By our 50s, most of us have reconciled our ambitions with reality. We look back on the period of struggle with a kind of melancholy. Only later do we see that the struggle and suffering gave us our glow. We’ve learned to live with peace and comfort, but the glow faded. That’s partly why films about middle age rarely feel compelling.

Another shift came with the transition from synchronous (phone) to asynchronous (email) forms of communication. People say text lacks emotional cues like tone or facial expression, but that was never convincing to me. If text couldn’t carry emotion, why do so many say the book was better than the movie?

A novel is a one-way expression. In dialogue, what matters is how the other person changes what you said. It’s like radar. You send a signal, but what matters is the echo. The signal itself is meaningless, like yelling “hello” into a canyon. The difference between an expected and actual interpretation is the primary content in a dialogue.

A written text can be more concrete and better articulated, but it removes the spatiotemporal context of the sender and receiver. The mental and physical states of people change between the time the message is sent and returned. It’s like a radar pulse that freezes, then unfreezes after everything has moved. The transformation of the signal can no longer be interpreted reliably.

The convenience and efficiency of asynchronous communication help businesses but harm our social well-being. Seeing someone in person isn’t about more data; the less can be more. It’s about shared context, so the echoes you get back still mean something.