Last week I had my first face to face group meeting since early March. Seven of us set up lawn chairs in a distanced circle on a beautiful lawn. Apart from not being able to hear each other without speaking up and needing something better to draw on, it was wonderful. I could talk about the out of band signals that face ot face conversation has, but something else struck me. Our group tells stories and listens. We have a real dialog - our group is smarter than the smartest individual.
Dialog was one of the terms the social science group I was associated with banned. Many people equate dialog with debate. My favorite way to communicate with small groups (often one other person) is to have a dialog. We tell stories and listen to each other discovering and learning about each other and ourselves along the way. Both of us can be smarter than each of us as individuals. Debate - where one person says something and the other challenges - is the opposite of dialog. It attempts to convince. When people with different strongly held opinions engage in debate both parties are dragged into the mud. Debate fuels emotion and happens to be easy to jump into and highly addictive. It's a form of communication that is easily weaponized with the aid of machine learning to promote engagement and sell advertising.
Social media platforms focus on social comparison, competition, competition, unsupervised debate and so on. Some allow isolated groups where learning and dialog can place, but tools rarely support that and these groups depend on excellent moderation to survive.
Zoom and other conversation tools have a lot of warts, but allow open conversation that can be turned into dialog. They tend to use subscription models. People have speculated on the design of real dialog platforms, but I suspect much of the magic is in the same category of picking the perfect members of a team. My friends tend to be those I can have interesting dialogs with - those who I can learn from. i only hope our conversations are half as useful to them.
There's a special kind of dialog. The face to face meeting I mentioned had little breadth in educational background. We get things done, but I've found a lot of creativity seems to happen after talking to or working with someone who is smart, but in a very different field. The process of learning from them seems to populate and connect parts of your mind that had never connected. Two weeks ago I had a long conversation - a dialog - with someone who is very different. Over the next week new thoughts came almost daily and one gave me insight into something I've been thinking about for over a decade. Lightning in a bottle dialogs. Are there ways to support them? I suspect the answer won't come from technology.
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