Conversation

This comes from Andy Crouch's book The Tech-Wise Family, commitment number 7 - "Car time is conversation time:"

"The author Sherry Turkle, who has done so much to help us realize the dangers to real relationship that come along with technology's promised benefits, suggests in her book Reclaiming Conversation that most conversations take at least seven minutes to really begin.  Up until that point, we are able to rely on our usual repertoire of topics - the weather, routine reports about our day, minimal and predictable chitchat.  But around seven minutes, there is almost always a point where someone takes a risk - or could take a risk.  The risk may be silence; it may be an unexpected question or observation; it may be an expression of a deeper or different emotion than we usually allow.  All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths."

What implications does this have for our device-usage?  More Crouch:

"The tragedy of our omnipresent devices, Turkle suggests, is the way they prevent almost any conversation from unfolding in this way.  A conversation interrupted several times before the seven-minute mark does not get deeper more slowly; it stays shallow, as each party makes room for the other to opt out and return to their device.  What might be on the other side of the seven-minute mark, we never find out." (157-158)

This is fascinating to me: why seven minutes?  What is it about humans that is simultaneously risk-averse with other people, and also risk-inclined to the point that given enough time and the right settings, we naturally, eagerly, take risks in conversation with others.

Obviously, we're fallen people and there are folks who could use this to manipulate others.  We should be extremely careful to "take risks" in conversation with people who could betray our trust or tempt us away from covenental relationships to spouse, family, church.  But in a society that can be so relentlessly shallow where we don't take risks in conversation with anybody, where our not trusting people has nothing to do with their trustworthiness and everything to do with our determination to hide from others, we should see if we can stay put in a conversation for seven minutes.

Portable computers have probably taken their toll and made all of us more indifferent to person-to-person conversation than we used to be.  I love the creativity of a family that takes stock of that and begins to revitalize the art of conversation - not in a Victorian-era drawing room, not at a dinner party - but in the car on the way to the soccer game!