conversation...

The enticements of the virtual world and a cornucopia of personal-entertainment diversions have pushed discourse to the side.

Aided by the Internet, more and more people are joining what Miller calls ''anger communities,'' like-minded individuals who empower each other's pique and reinforce shared prejudices.

Meanwhile, in a polarized time, an inability to entertain opposing views civilly has made certain topics - politics, for example - treacherous terrain, and thus ground best avoided.

All this strikes me as true, but I would also underline several other ideas.

One would be erosion of a common conversational denominator.

Movies long ago replaced books as favorite topics, but these days it's less and less common for people to have seen the same film.

A second is a general notion that it's fine to be ignorant of the news. Certainly few would say of contemporary Americans what a French visitor to London observed in the 1730s: ''All Englishmen are great newsmongers.'' These days, there's no shame in advertising that one is uninformed about public affairs. Sit next to someone at a social event who announces, ''Oh, I never read the paper,'' or, ''I don't follow current events,'' or even, ''I get all my news from the Daily Show,'' and you're in for a tedious time indeed.

Further, the notion of cultivating conversational abilities, or of making oneself more interesting by reading or learning, is in eclipse in a culture whose therapeutic norms call for celebrating everyone as he or she is. Put another way, the self-esteem movement has rendered the intellectual self-improvement impulse antique.

Finally, if you hold that a person need command more than, say, four adjectives to be an engaging conversationalist, then the poverty of expression that marks our trite TV culture is a pox on memorable talk.

Or to express that idea in everyday terms, hearing today's exchanges, a person who values rich and varied conversation is, like, arrggh.

(read the full article here)