THE WORLD IS ALWAYS ALREADY ENDING
So are you tired of all these awesome posts yet? Ready for something sloppy and derisive? Me too!
Check out this NYT piece about the dying art of conversation. Did you know that there are more, worse conversations now than in any other time in human history? Your suspicions have been confirmed: The past was way better than the present. Conversation was awesome back when everyone was Cicero or Montaigne or Hume and everyone hung out in salons all the time, but people now are dipshits. Especially Americans, of course.
The article is not at all worth reading, but I want to point out this typically anemic paragraph:
O.K. But listen to “talk” radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or “talk” shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or “talk” news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.
Prepackaged formulas? Is the grapheme sequence {CUL8R} inherently worse that the sequence {see you later}? One is prepackaged and the other is not, I guess.
And again with the frackin “isolating iPods.” Truly, if it werent for those dreadful WALK MEN, (and newspapers and magazines and scenery), our buses and trains would be idyllic oases of stimulating, non-formulaic discourse and informed democracy.
Aside from that, the article is paltry. The prose is so stiff and lifeless I’m having trouble deciding if it’s meant to be a mockery of it’s own thesis? I mean, if you conclude your stilted, boilerplate essay about the decline of conversation with the paragraph, practically undergraduate in it’s earnest banality,
“It is an ideal worth talking about,”
you may feel a sting. That’s irony fucking with you. And irony only hurts; it never helps.
Anyways, I look forward to the year 2050 when conversation will have died completely, because of neurocasting.