River: small talk

[mdlbear]

I may have occasionally mentioned that I don't seem to be very good at "small talk". (Note that I'm not talking about the programming language Smalltalk here; I can do that.)

Yeah, I know, it's yet another social skill I don't have, and have never been interested in acquiring. But it means that I have no way to hold up my end of a conversation once I run out of things I particularly wanted to say.

Comments

[brmj.livejournal.com]

"That's not a bug, that's a feature!"

I, too, share this "feature". Though it accounts for some of my social awkwardness I wouldn't change it if I could.

Small talk seems to be what people do when they don't have anything interesting left to say. In my opinion, once there is nothing interesting left for either party to say the conversation ought to be over. Otherwise, I find that boredom ensues. Even if it's nice just to be around someone, I fail to see how exchanging inanities is any better than a comfortable silence.

If you have trouble with dealing with running out of interesting things before the other person does, my advice is to just listen and respond appropriately or try and think of something they might find interesting.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

Feel free to disregard the previous comment. I am exactly the wrong person to take advice from on this topic, in all likelihood.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Ask questions. Either about something you are actually interested in, or about something where you only have to nod encouragement.

I like ambiguous questions, it gives the other person a chance to talk about something they want to talk about, though this is not foolproof--sometimes people are so invested in wanting to answer precisely what they think you want to hear that they find ambiguous questions to be perplexing, even when specifically invited to interpret them however they want.

[donsimpson.livejournal.com]

I don't do small talk either. I wanted to have a talk with you at ConSonance, because I like you, I like your work, and we seem to have a lot in common, but I didn't have a topic, and kept visualizing conversational awkwardness....

[mdlbear]

Just come up and say "hi" -- we can improvise from there. I'll see you at Baycon, if not before.

[donsimpson.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll give it a try. :)

[firecat]

I agree with "ask questions." But I always wonder what questions to ask and worry about asking questions that the other person will find dorky or offensive.

I also think there's nothing actually wrong with companionable silence, between consenting parties. :)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

"Gee, aren't the walls perpendicular tonight?"

I suck at small talk myself. I find it insincere, shallow, and annoying.

[mdlbear]

See the_s_guy's comment, below. It's largely the conversational equivalent of ping -- keeps the connection open until you find something real to talk about.

Which is why it's starting to matter to me.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Well, there's small talk, and there's small talk. I "get" the keep-alive messages, although they're pretty boring, and therefore somewhat difficult for me to do well. I also get the preliminary-finding-out-what-the-other-person-is-interested-in stuff - that's often very exciting, almost to the point of NRE. But the semantically null chit-chat that most people engage in leaves me baffled, bored, and slightly disgusted. "Oh my gawd, I don't believe who won {insert pointless, over-hyped, televised artificial "competition" here} last night!", or "I wish summer would hurry up and get here - I'm tired of all this cold weather!", or "Gee, the economy is so terrible!" are meaningless noises to me. Frankly, it's a relief to me to talk with geeks instead of "mundanes", because geeks get to the point.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

It's the semantic equivalent of keepalive packets, but what it actually accomplishes is being the grease in the gears. It doesn't mean anything by itself, but it's a social excuse to shift the topic around a bit.

In fact, it's almost a _requirement_ to slowly cycle through a number of relatively standard topic areas, like stirring a bucket, until you hit on something the other person can link to an actual conversation. In that manner, it's somewhat like the clutch pedal in a car - it's the accepted way of getting from topic A to topic B without abrupt shifting of mental gears.

Technically inclined folk don't seem to need the clutch so much - the focus is often very much on the conversation rather than largely on the social interactions going on between and around nearby people and the other person in the conversation.

Small talk standards are generally whatever would be inoffensive and/or expected for a given situation. "So, what brings you here?" might be small talk at a large public event, but probably less so if talking to someone on death row. Business networking events can stretch to "So, what do you do / what business are you in?", because people expect to be asked that in that situation.

Part of it is picking up on when the other person wants to say something or thinks they can contribute to the topic, and letting them take the lead, using little open-ended cues to keep them talking. It's a two-person balancing act between not running out of things to say and not monopolising the conversation.

On the plus side, it can be a great slow-data-mining tool, even if the results it returns are not immediately topically relevant. It's not just a data swap, it's being able to tell someone later "Hey, I was talking to Dave earlier, he's into boating/platemail/astronomy as well, you guys should chat."

Smalltalkers are (possibly automatically) trying to find out about you-the-person, not just what you're saying, in order to fit you into their world a little better.

Anyway, enough of me rambling on. Tell me about that thing that happened to you that time...

[donsimpson.livejournal.com]

_Very_ well said. Small talk is also used as a way to slowly approach a possibly painful or offensive topic and see where the boundaries are. Or to indicate interest in or support for the other person. It can be a pastime like playing cards or chess. Language is such a multi-use tool; but I can remember a time when I thought it was only for important information, and how baffling and useless I found any other forms to be.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

I also don't "get" small talk. I think it's partly because the world is so filled with actual interesting things that spending time on the completely trivial ones irks me some. ("Yes, it's windy outside. It's March!")

Also, as suggested above, it's situational. For some people, "What are your reading these days?" or "What are you listening to these days?" is small talk, while to me it's information that's vital to my mental health and enjoyment of life. :)

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

You may not do "small talk" conversation quippets comfortably, but you certainly hold your own in actual conversations about meaningful topics in which you are interested. That may be enough for friends and cons, with like-minded individuals.

Most people don't actually *listen* to what others say in small talk; they're waiting for their own turn to spout about weather, what brings them, aren't my kids wonderful topics. When you actually answer honestly to the question "How have you been doing recently?" with something other then "Fine, how 'bout you?" you will surprise and shock people.

[mdlbear]

... and I do, on a regular basis. But it's useful for getting a conversation going with someone I don't know well. Though if I do manage to come up with something that makes sense in whatever context we're in (airplane, conference, ...) the conversation rarely gets beyond that.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

And, the majority of the time, that is the socially appropriate amount of talk expected from both parties, hence: small talk.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Interpret the following in a slightly world-weary semi-bitter tone.

In my experience, the secret to success in meaningless social small talk (in your "ping" sense) is that 90% of people don't actually care whether their conversation partner is "holding up their end" of the conversation, as long as they have regular substantial feedback that said conversation partner is paying attention to what they have to say. In this context, all one has to do is regularly insert questions or comments on what the other person is saying that A) confirm that you're paying attention; and B) encourage the other person to continue or expand on what they're saying.

The system fails either when the conversation is between two of the remaining 10% and one of them is not good at small talk, or when one is conversing with one of the 90% and cares about being listened to as opposed to being content to be a listener.

Case in point: I've found that mentioning having written Baby Names For Dummies is an excellent small-talk generator -- not because anyone actually cares to know what I might have to say on the topic of names, but because everyone has an endless supply of anecdotes and opinions on the topic of names and naming and will cheerfully spend the next half hour telling me about them.

This is one of the reasons why weather is a classic small-talk topic: everyone has an opinion and a supply of experiences. You push the button and stand out of the way.

[mdlbear]

The system fails either when the conversation is between two of the remaining 10% and one of them is not good at small talk, or when one is conversing with one of the 90% and cares about being listened to as opposed to being content to be a listener.

Which are exactly where I have problems. Most of the people I want to talk to are in that 10%, and when I'm talking with someone interesting I want to talk some as well as listen.

May be in the genes

[kanef.livejournal.com]

I suspect that some people are born social butterflies and quickly learn a culture’s social skills, while others are born with less skill at interaction, or less need for it, or both. Both may even have evolved as an ESS. (Group selection theory, favored in the halls of SF cons but not by evolutionary biologists, would put it this way: Society needs at least a few people capable of tending a lighthouse.)

I noticed an interesting hole in the English language. One can define "loneliness" as "The discomfort felt, for example, by a very extroverted person who is receiving a level of social interaction that a very introverted person would find perfect." Agreed? OK, then what’s the word that means the exact opposite?

There may be a whole continuum of social interaction styles, one of the extreme ends of which has been given names but is still not well understood. Did you read the novel "Wake" serialized in last year’s Analog? The protagonist is a contemporary blind-from-birth teenager who’s extremely active on LiveJournal. Sawyer mentions a number of the more minor things that bother her about being blind, and one of the first things he mentions is that it bothers her to think that people might be looking at her without her knowing it. Another is that her physicist father is maddeningly uncommunicative, and she likes to think that she’s missing all kinds of nonverbal communication: smiles, his loving gazes at her mother, the warm handshake he hopes he gave her date. But later she finds out that her father is autistic and is uncomfortable being looked at, and has trouble meeting people’s eyes. A third character speculates that the protagonist inherited those genes, and no one ever noticed she was socially awkward because no one expects a blind person to look them in the eye. She mentions that her mother trained her to look toward the sound of a voice when someone speaks to her, and is surprised to learn that most blind people do that naturally. Anyway, at one point she asks her father why he never says he loves her, and he points out that he did tell her that several years before. She realizes that from his point of view, since the status had not changed in the meantime there was no reason to mention it again.

Ever since I read The Blank Slate, I’ve come to think that many behaviors are genetic. So people who crave social contact but aren't good at it may be struggling against a disadvantage, compared to people it comes easily to. Which does not mean that it's not possible to improve. Just as a person prone to diabetes can ward it off by being extra careful with diet and exercise, a person with the bad luck to have a craving for social contact but a low aptitude for social skills can work extra hard to learn the skills that others find so easy (or to reduce the craving).

Re: May be in the genes

[mdlbear]

No, I haven't read Wake; may have to add it to the stack.

I think you're right about the combination of a craving for contact and low social skills. I suspect that my aptitude is higher than I give myself credit for, but that I've let many of the skills get rusty, if indeed I ever learned them in the first place.