When was the last time you had a proper conversation? I’m talking a real-life, animated conversation with eye-contact and gestures and the occasional accidental hurling of spit at your fellow conversationalist? And don’t even try to say it was in a meeting, because both of us know that absolutely doesn’t count. If you’re like a lot of people today, particularly young people, there’s a good chance that it’s been a while between chats.

This question came to me while I was sitting at dinner last Saturday night, and led me to start wondering when we, as a community, had all lost the art of conversation. One of my dining friends spent most of the meal glued to his iphone checking the football scores with an OCD-like determination, which tended to inhibit the communication flow just slightly. Then, when a discussion came up about whether a broken nose is counted as a head injury, there was no spirited debate where each person knows there’s a good chance they’re wrong but argues the point with steely determination regardless. Instead, someone just Googled the answer.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying – ‘great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people.’  Well, I’d like to make an addition please: ‘even smaller minds don’t discuss anything at all because they’re too busy playing Draw Something on their iphone’.

Now I love technology, and I only wish I could get as excited when I create something at work as I do when I create a great illustration of Lady Gaga in Draw Something and send it to my boyfriend (who may or may not be sitting right next to me). But I also love conversation, and I’d give up all my technology if it meant getting to have real talks with real people on a more regular basis. I was a tad frightened when I was doing some reading for this blog post and I found a study suggesting that 53 per cent of 16-30 year olds would rather give up their sense of smell than their technology. That doesn’t bode well for the future of great and lively conversation (or our ability to tell when our toast is burning).

But fear not, because there’s a couple of Australians who have made it their life’s quest to keep the art of conversation alive, through a very cool ‘game’ called TAOC (The Art of Conversation). TAOC is a card-based game (which incidentally, is also available as an app), where participants select a card and ask their fellow players to answer the question on the card. Instead of trivia or maths or quotes, the questions on the card are along the lines of “What was the first song you learnt” and “Happiness. What comes to mind?”.  So really, the game has absolutely no point other than sparking conversations and discussions, which I totally love.

The wonderful and talented Editor-in-Chief of this blog Mr John Horn and I used to have some amazing cubicle conversations, most of which started with truly ridiculous questions like “what are your three favorite things about my short sleeved shirt and tie combination today, Jilly?”.

So how ‘bout it? When you’ve finished reading this, I dare you to start a proper conversation with someone – co-worker, boss, partner, child, checkout guy, whoever. And see how awesome you feel afterwards. I guarantee that you’ll feel something, learn something, and hey, maybe you’ll even smell something with the sense you didn’t have to trade to make it happen.

Masthead photo from this photostream, body photo from this photostream. Both used with the permission of a Creative Commons license.