I've been raging recently about "small talk" - it's come to dominate my experience. It covers the everyday exchanges in my workplace and in the street as well as the mass of social media, especially the social network that shall not be named. I know most people are hungry for more meaningul conversation, but we're not (I speak for my bit of the UK anyway) well-practiced in getting beyond "Hello, how are you, oh mustn't grumble, lovely weather etc"
I'm railing too against the social media previously known for more in-depth conversation - blogging and podcasting, which have become newspaper articles and radio shows respectively - this is what the Spotify stuff is about: you can't cry about lack of freedom of speech, we all have that if we have access to the internet. You might not have access to the platforms you want, but that's not the same as being censored or silenced and it's still way better than the situation before all this when we really were dependent on gatekeepers to let us speak to large groups of people.
Something's been bothering me for a while, which was the type-lifting technique of making collages - I'd seen someone making them and struggled to identify just how it was done. So yesterday I just googled the term and bingo, now I understand how to do it. The picture here is a first stab (Hemingway's rule of firsts applies)
I was just reminded of my work more than ten years ago on Human Scale Conversations - here's a piece I wrote after having made an experiment at an event in London. It was an interesting time for doing things like that, 2009, we were reeling from the 2008 crash, everything still seemed up in the air, maybe the financial system wouldn't survive even if it had been bailed out. It also reminds me of Miller's Law which is interesting to think about in the context of now knowing that I have ADHD
It's February already. Recurrent themes (apart from "grrrr.... small talk") were performing more and reunions (school and college). Obviously there are also crossover points between these two (no three - the reunion small talk is not what I want, I want to know who these people really turned out to be!)
