The Death of Dialogue

As a kid I didn’t have many friends but soon found that I preferred books anyway. I soaked up facts and character histories like a sponge at a swimming pool convention. I didn’t need to experience things to know them. Instead I read hundreds of other people’s experiences and considered myself an expert. I felt superior because I knew more arbitrary information than most kids my age and quite a few adults.

 I’m pretty sure you can all see that that sort of attitude wouldn’t be very beneficial to me at school. While I was building my random thought library through hours of reading, it soon became apparent that the part of my brain in charge of social interaction was being neglected (Which is why at the age of 24 I still think it is perfectly appropriate to flirt with a guy by telling him that the price of pistachios is directly related to the fact that they can spontaneously combust and thus are a danger to transport). For a person who talks so much, I have sadly had few true conversations.

Recently somebody brought to my attention that most conversations were intersecting monologues instead of dialogues. This means that instead of really listening to what someone is saying, taking a moment to mull it over and then forming a response, we tend to half listen and then formulate what we are going to say based on our vast internal library before that person has even finished speaking. We are so used to soaking up information through reading monologues that a lot of us have forgotten the art of true dialogue. I know that I am guilty of it.

The Greek philosopher, Socrates (469-399 BC), had a very interesting view on knowledge. He strongly objected to writing, worrying that if relied on that it would destroy memory. More importantly he feared that those who learnt from reading would be misled into thinking that what they had was knowledge when in fact all they really had was data. He believed that real knowledge could only come from dialogues which require both questions and answers. Dialogue allows one to form and interrogate ideas so that actual knowledge can be extracted and truly understood. This suggests that a book could never really give you knowledge unless you had access to the author to dissect the ideas written about. In essence, all writing presents itself as a monologue.

Socrates himself never wrote down any of his thoughts but his protégé Plato (a philosopher in his own right) recorded all of his dialogues. This is one of the dialogues on the deficiencies of writing.

“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”

With the invention of the printing press and then the internet, writing is everywhere and everyone has access to it. There is so much information available and thrust upon us on a daily basis, from television programmes, Google to social media.  Instead of learning from actual experiences and teachers, we can get all our information off the internet and through the media. There is no need to commit things to memory because we know that we can refer to the internet for any of our information needs. Some say that we are “outsourcing our brain to the cloud” implying that technology is making us dumber because we don’t need to think for ourselves. 

So in order to combat this we need to be able to dialogue and find true knowledge – thoughts that have been dissected and proven through your own means. I think we also have to be a lot more discerning with what information we take in. An information snob if you will. 

Sherlock Holmes summed it up quite beautifully while explaining how he ‘furnished his brain attic’:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

To avoid the inevitable brain clutter that we tend to pick up while reading endless amounts of 9gag, Reddit, news articles and the like, I offer you a piece of advice that I gleaned from a site called Pocket Anarchy. Treat journeys into cyberspace like most men do supermarket shopping trips: get a list, get in, buy what you need, then get out!

I think that the internet and print media is incredibly ingrained in all of our lives and it would be damn near impossible to avoid it completely. However, I don’t think that we need to be slaves to it. If we start to use technology as an aid to gaining knowledge and not as a source of knowledge then I think we will be ok. I think the trick is to truly understand the effect of mass media in order to gain power over it. Resurrect the almost lost art of dialogue and de-clutter your brain attic. 

This is what we are trying to avoid people!