143 - The Dying Art of Conversation

What this episode covers

Is the art of conversation dying, or is it just different? Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Comfortably loved by Soft and Furious When the blood driving the self by Soft and Furious Empowered Ending by Soft and Furious Line-by-line notes It’s funny Talking about the dying art of conversation to a medium of listeners that’s all about conversation But it’s a topic I talk about a lot to my friends about And it’s an important topic to designers The reason it’s important to designers is because so much of what we do is about conversing We have to have a conversation to sell our design work To discuss projects, goals and briefs And countless other parts of our job that require designers to be masters of the art of conversation But how does this change our job, if the art of conversation is dying This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC On April the 21st, 2006, the BBC ran an article about the dying art of conversation In it they spoke to two self styled expert conversationalists about how conversation is changing They talk about time being a factor, that everybody is busier now And they talk about old TV talk shows, where they used to have one guest on for an hour,  and now the same talk shows have five guests in the same time They talk about how our attention spans are shorter, that we have less patience for chit chat, and that we’re not good listeners All of which I agree with, but this article is from 2006, 11 years ago Now, in 2017, the situation is even worse The rise of so many text-based chat apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Twitter and all the rest, mean we’re even more text-baed now, and not conversation based We’re conversing with each other, but less and less, we’re actually talking to each other You know, actually looking each other in the eye and saying words Let’s talk about one final example In the UK The good old British Public House used to be the place to find a conversation, every night of the week Often called Pubs, pubs used to be everywhere across the UK Any night, you could turn up to your local pub, and talk with people over a pint of beer They’re used to be 3 pubs within 2 minutes walking distance from my house about 10 years ago And now there’s 0 Pubs are dying too, and they were one of the last bastions of the good old art of conversation Lots of people say pubs have lost their appeal in the UK because beer became so expensive at them But maybe it’s because people don’t like, or aren’t skilled in the art of conversation anymore Some people even point to the rise in the popularity of podcasts as an indicator that conversation is dying But... Maybe I’m wrong with all of this Maybe all this means is conversation is changing And there’s big signs that this is true too WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook Messenger and all those are absolutely thriving The younger generation spend hours every day chatting to each other over messaging apps And they’re actually spending longer than even chatting to each other in these formats than anybody ever did face to face It’s not dying, it’s just different from what I and loads of other people are used to Whether that’s true, or not, it’s important as designers that we understand how conversation is changing Whether young people’s conversation patterns are changing or not, it’s vital that designers are excellent communicators We need to sell our ideas, sell our our work, and sell ourselves every single day The only way we can effectively do that is through being excellent communicators, and being good at the art of conversation And then we need to understand all of this The changing landscape of conversation Because every design we produce has to communicate something And if we don’t understand how to communicate And communicate to anybody, regardless of age Then we might as well not bother designing anything else And regardless of all that, even when...