Social media and mobile phones are major disruptors of face-to-face conversations. Recent research has conclusively demonstrated that the indiscriminate (and borderline addictive) use of mobile phones has a direct impact on the quality of our interactions.
Our compulsive relationship with these devices drains our attention, preventing us from listening and sustaining meaningful conversation. Studies have found that the mere presence of a mobile phone, even if it is on silent, divides people’s attention. It reduces the likelihood of starting and sharing interesting conversations, as participants subconsciously anticipate the device demanding its owner’s attention at any moment. Accordingly, people often decide to “skim” the topics of conversation rather than exploring them more deeply.
Children and young people growing up in households where family meals have been colonised by screens (television, tablets and the ubiquitous mobile phone) show a clear deficit in communication and conversation skills. They struggle to interpret non-verbal cues, activate fewer mirror neurons (the cerebral basis of empathy), and fear exposing themselves to real, “unedited” conversation.
They know how to speak, but they struggle to comfortably navigate the cooperative exchange of ideas that allowed humans to reach the 21st century.
Learning to converse
Articulated language is a genetic, intrinsically human ability – any human being, no matter where they were born, can speak. Everyday conversation comes very naturally to us, but it is also a skill that can be taught. We learn how to enter conversations appropriately, how to maintain a friendly tone, and how to approach difficult dialogues with empathy and assertiveness.
Put simply, language is an innate ability, but conversation is culturally acquired.
This means that families play a vital role in educating and developing children’s conversational abilities. Just as our families provide us with a certain amount of economic capital – some people, for example, inherit a house while others do not – families also provide us with linguistic capital.
A child can therefore inherit access to a broad, sophisticated and perhaps even multilingual vocabulary, while those less fortunate are endowed with a simpler, more limited one. The same can be said about syntax: childhood contact with complex syntactic constructions allows some children to develop more sophisticated thinking, while others receive only simple, disjointed structures from their verbal environment.
In the same way, our families also grant us a certain amount of conversational capital. We have all witnessed this: children who can calmly engage in conversation with adults, even those senior to their parents, while others struggle to respond appropriately. Some young people learn to refrain from speaking over others and to wait their turn, while other children (and many adults) never receive this guidance.
Ideally, schools should level the playing field by allowing children who have grown up with simple linguistic and conversational practices at home to come into contact with richer and more stimulating linguistic models. This can enable them to better recognise and express their emotions, feelings and arguments. However, this process of equalisation does not always work as it should.
Your conversational fingerprint
Being educated – and educating ourselves – in language and conversation is crucial for many reasons, but it boils down to the fact that the way we converse has a decisive impact on the way other people perceive us.
Our conversations define us, shape us as individuals, and can create or destroy our social relationships, personal and professional alike. The sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it this way in her metastudy on conversation: “The quality of our conversations is directly tied to our personal happiness, and to our social and professional success.”
Why we need conversational literacy
Different human habits – breathing, eating, speaking, and so on – are treated with striking inequality. While issues like nutrition have become a public health priority, we know very little about the extraordinary human capacity that is articulate language.
Many of us do not understand how to confront an awkward conversation. We struggle to engage in dialogue with people who are different from us, and often forget to listen to others when they speak, which is the bedrock of empathy and cooperation.
For this reason, we urgently need to make conversational literacy a matter of public interest. This skill enables us to be more reflective and aware of the extraordinary potential of everyday conversation, and helps us to identify when we are faced with harmful conversations that, like junk food, damage instead of nourishing us.
When we have a human conversation – one that takes place in the here and now, where our bodies are present and our attention is focused – fascinating things occur.
First of all, the bodies of people interacting synchronise, adapting, unconsciously imitating and coordinating with one another. And it’s not just bodies – scans also show synchronisation in the brains of people engaged in conversation. The deeper and more meaningful the conversation is for those talking, the more intense their synchronisation.
You can start building conversational literacy today, with something as simple as having dinner at home with no mobile phones or other devices in sight. Engaging in genuine conversation will have a huge impact on the success and development – both personal and professional – of the youngest members of the family.
- is a Professor of Spanish Language, University of Barcelona, University of Barcelona
- This article was originally published in Spanish
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
