Regarding private and public conversations

There are two kinds of conversations: public and private. Private conversations are those between two people with no witnesses present. Everything else is public speech: it involves either more speakers or two speakers and an audience. By audience I mean persons not participating in the conversation yet profoundly influencing it by their mere paying of attention because the speaker(s) being aware of their presence tailor(s) their speech to the needs of the audience as well as that of his immediate interlocutor.

Such public conversations are per force shallower – the larger number of participants (even if be merely passive audience) means that the range of possible subjects of conversation is limited to those of general interest; the depth at which each subject is covered is also limited – by the shortness of the attention span of the weakest link among them; above all, the extent to which the participants of such conversations are willing to commit themselves to it is severely limited: in front of groups – and anything more than two is a group – people are afraid to make mistakes, to appear uninformed, to lose an argument, or to say anything of personal significance.

In private conversations, all these obstacles can be avoided. Conversations held in twos can be honest and intense in a way in which public conversations cannot; one can thus learn more from them: both about the topics (because sustained in-depth discussion is possible) and about the inner workings of our human fellow beings (and therefore ourselves) because with no one else present our interlocutor just may dare tell us something important.

To me such private conversations are very much worth having while the public conversations, whether debate or chatter – not much.

I have made these reflections last year when a well meaning friend took me round to numerous parties in order to introduce me to a large European city. She noticed the plan was not working: I was not mingling. She thought it was a kind of stage fright; but the truth was a little more complex than that: I generally cannot be bothered to participate in general party talk just as I usually cannot be bothered to join in on an online discussion.

Online discussions, including blogs and Facebook entries, suffer from all the constraints of public conversations: possible topics are limited, depth of discussion also, and all performance being public, it is all chiefly a show: posturing outweighs content. It is in that sense – dishonest, a pretense.

Which explains perhaps my failure in all my attempts to establish private correspondence with bloggers. The reason why bloggers are bloggers is that by nature they are publishers, and therefore public speakers. As such, they have no time for private conversation – why spend a great deal of time on a private letter when one could use the same time to write some sort of urbi and orbi – address himself to millions?

But what’s more, possibly they do not feel any need for it? (After all, if they did, they would write a personal note sometime, too). Just why this should be seems so puzzling: does not everyone need private conversation from time to time?

But perhaps not. It is perhaps possible that some bloggers – the blogger personality, shall we call it – do not feel the need for intense private conversation because their own, private attitude to their own selves is also in a sense public. By this I mean the hypothesis that these friends do not have an intense, searching and intimate relationship with their own selves. Perhaps their private thoughts are all aimed at the burnishing and buttressing of their public persona (how would it look if I?… and what else could I do to influence more people and make more friends?...) Perhaps their private diaries, if they have any at all, are like their blogs: a succession of arabesques calculated to look good, a kind of private public performance, with the self both an actor playing to fool his audience as well as the fooled audience itself. A kind of inwardly directed PR exercise, interrupted by jokes and changes of subject?

(Later: Theo Angelopoulos on RF: Parfoit la communication avec des milliers et milliers des hommes c’est une communicaton plate... rien... facile...)