John Locke sees no lack of communication in modern society. What he sees is a lack of conversation of the old-fashioned type: face-to-face chat among friends, relatives, and neighbors. It is no small thing to Locke that most of our communication is concerned with transmitting information to people we cannot see. He holds, in fact, that transmitting information, as we presently think about it, is only the secondary purpose of communication. Conversation is a vital component in building enduring and worthwhile societies. This is why most of the conversation that bonds human beings involves no real exchange of hard information at all. But the present lack of bonding communications, Lock insists, is not just a problem of our modern, technology-based society. The foundations were set with both urbanization and the creation of the printing press, which for the first time allowed large-scale communication between people who never met. Cybertechnology has just thrown the process into high gear.
The book analyzes several modern phenomena to make his point, such as communities where cellular phones and e-mail are used specifically to avoid face-to-face conversation rather than to expand upon it. We risk, he says, becoming an autistic society as our computers become more versatile communicators and we become less so. His worry is that we will soon discover that "societies capable of building machines that almost pass the Turing test are in danger of producing humans that nearly fail it." While you may not agree with all of Locke's gloomy conclusions about the state of interaction and communication, his presentation of communication technology offers some clear-sighted critiques of contemporary and future pitfalls. --Elizabeth Lewis
From Publishers Weekly
While cellular phones, e-mail and Internet services proliferate, opportunities for face-to-face contact and intimate conversation are shrinking, leaving an increasingly atomized society of insulated, TV-watching individualists, laments neurolinguist Locke in this disturbing, if not exactly surprising, report. A former Harvard Medical School lecturer who teaches human communications sciences at the Univ. of Sheffield, England, Locke traces the decline of social talk to a general withdrawal from community life, the proliferation of isolating technologies and amusements and a loss of places where people can assemble. Echoing points made by Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he argues that talking fulfills a biological need for species and group connection deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. This leads him to draw not always convincing parallels among human interactions, monkeys' alarm calls and our hominid ancestors' sound making. His witty analysis of the varieties of communication?gossip, self-disclosure, small talk, networking, bonding talk?reveals that talking is often not so much factually informative or intellectually complex as personal, intimate and emotional. But today, he warns, "the exchange of information is too often the reason for speech, the personal relationship relegated to a position of secondary importance." The solution? Locke suggests joining groups, curtailing time with the TV and computer monitor and opting for interpersonal activities over time-consuming jobs?possibilities that have already been much talked about.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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