The Art of Conversation

I'm beginning to suspect that conversation is a dead art.  Certainly as far as pubs are concerned.  The problem is that when other people say they want to have a conversation, what they really mean is that they want to engage in a monologue, where you are simply expected to nod or murmur words of agreement at the appropriate moments.  Even if other participants in the 'conversation' make the mistake of trying to actually engage in any kind of discussion not directly related to the original monologue, then its originator will simply keep butting in and derailing the discussion until they can get it back to the subject they want to pontificate about.  What's clear to me is that a 'conversation' no longer represents an exchange of ideas, but is rather a one way street, with one party forcing their 'ideas' on everyone else.  Maybe I've just been unfortunate in my recent conversational experiences, but everywhere I look, I see the same thing - people just want to talk at me instead of to me.  Indeed, I've lately witnessed too many pub conversations which have consisted of three or four of these monologists simply shouting at each other, each hoping that they can drown out the others.  Conversation as competition - none of them has any interest in what anybody else is actually saying, they just want to be the loudest and therefore the dominant voice.

To be honest, I've recently been shocked by the lengths some people will go to in order to guarantee dominance of the 'conversation'.  Only the other night I was in the pub, enjoying a couple of pints and reading the paper, making clear to anyone who approached that, due to my ongoing vocal problems, I was trying to rest my voice, so had no intention of engaging in any conversations.  Yet at at least one acquaintance seemed to see my self-imposed silence as an opportunity to talk at me without interruption.  They then got annoyed when I broke that silence to tell them to 'Fuck off'!  But where does it come from, this trend toward non-conversation?  Is it another manifestation of the increasingly self-centered society we live in?  Perhaps it is all down to the growth of blogging, texting and tweeting as the main mediums for communication.  All of them involve the individual engaging in a one-sided 'conversation'.  In the case of blogging, the only interaction comes via the comments and can be tightly controlled by the author.  Both tweeting and texting are effectively a form of 'stream of conciousness' communication, pouring out ideas, musings and the like to an audience, be it an individual in the case of texting or an amorphous cloud of 'followers' in the case of tweeting.  None of them involves a true exchange of ideas.  Misanthropic as I am, I really think that, as a society, we need to start working on our communication skills and start trying to talk to each other again.