Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless
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I think, little cards like they had in the old days and you can hand them to people so that they know who you are. You could write suggestions for topics on them:
"I DO NOT wish to talk about Prince Albert's piercing!" -
I'm lucky that I am in that demographic that is both mass-produced and invisible (even though I'm not a small person). I can meet people several times and they have no recollection or meeting me, or think I'm someone else. Just as well that I also have a poor memory for faces, although I can identify people by the way they walk or move, sometimes without seeing them for many decades.
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Perhaps apposite. Social phobia not shyness.
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I am, in fact, married to my hairdresser. Or more accurately, my wife runs the clippers over my head every now and then. Mostly because I miss bits at the back if I try it solo. No problems with hairdressers, just too cheapass to pay for a number one clipper cut when I have sweatshop labour at home.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Heh...a bit obvious, though. Voice recognition might be sneakier...the phone could buzz you when it gets the name.
However. If you've gone to the trouble to enter their name and picture and voice into a database, it's highly likely you'll remember them anyway.
Small talk is in some respects a learned skill, for some of us. However, I'm not sure that it's a skill worth acquiring....
Personally, I found being socially awkward quite distressing as a young teen. It limited my ability to form relationships, particularly with the opposite sex. It's a skill I will most certainly endeavour to teach my children. It is extremely teachable, way less work than, say, a foreign language, which many people study for years and years only to get to a pathetic level of proficiency. It's more like learning a jargon.
The hard part is not the small talk, it is overcoming the fear and pride. That's why the book is called Pride and Prejudice. I know this and I've never even read it.
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Sacha, in reply to
facial recognition software
The update of the Android OS released today can apparently unlock the phone/tablet when it recognises your face.
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JacksonP, in reply to
It is extremely teachable
While I agree with you to a degree, I don’t think instilling self-worth and confidence in young children (or adults) is all that easy, otherwise we would be living in a different world, no?
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Sacha, in reply to
instilling self-worth and confidence
Though self-esteem can be unhelpful.
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BenWilson, in reply to
While I agree with you, I don't think instilling self-worth and confidence in young children is all that easy, otherwise we would be living in a different world, no?
Indeed. The small talk is only a small piece of the picture. But every skill one acquires increases confidence, which goes with self-worth. I guess I'm just saying that it's one of the most basic things, rather like the 3 Rs, but even more so, even more important.
In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that declining ability in this basic skill is a source of lack of self-worth and confidence. Being unable to make friends because we can't get past Hello, doesn't help kids out of their shells. It seems to me that we care more often about our kids ability to read Shakespeare or balance chemical equations than their ability to make conversation. But I feel damned sure I know which one is more likely to give them lifelong assistance.
Maybe it is inherited to a large degree, either by nature or nurture or both. I don't mean to get down on any parents with socially awkward kids. But I do stand by the point that it is teachable. Some will learn it faster than others.
It's a bit like being able to drive a car. You can do without it. In some settings it would be entirely superfluous. Some people do have troubles learning it, too, it's an unfamiliar and scary thing. But that does not really make being unable to drive a virtue in itself. And it can be learned in a remarkably short time from a competent teacher, and it can open up a whole new world once learned.
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HORansome, in reply to
It may be a skill that can be taught but it won't necessarily enrich your life. For example, I can do small talk (indeed, arguably I was taught the how and why of small talk due to my having a speech disability and needing to know ways to get around said disability) but it negatively impacts my life when I use that skill. I hate small talk with a burning passion. It drains my will to live and I can feel myself switch off when that part of my brain activates (it's an innate skill, because it was taught at a young age, so I don't have to work at it). Indeed, my circle of friends are people with whom I do not need to small talk with (which is not to say that they can't engage in small talk), which makes my life immeasurably easier.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Personally, I found being socially awkward quite distressing as a young teen. It limited my ability to form relationships, particularly with the opposite sex.
Just leave copy of these lying around where your kids can stumble across them. Bosh. Job done.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Small talk is in some respects a learned skill, for some of us. However, I'm not sure that it's a skill worth acquiring
It's one of those interesting skills where being bad at it can be a positive disincentive to further practise. Like falling off the bike so much you can't be bothered learning to ride, or your first attempts at a new instrument making people laugh at you so you are too embarrassed to touch it again.
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Isabel Hitchings, in reply to
Small talk is learnable. The only real question is: Can you be bothered?
For me the question isn't can I learn it? Or can I be bothered? (The answers are yes and sometimes respectively). The question is can I do it authentically? And a lot of chit chat involves not telling people what I really think in order to keep things 'nice' and that is very, very wearing.
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The other side of the coin is everyone else learning ways to communicate and build relationships that respect different levels of comfort or proficiency with small talk.
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BenWilson, in reply to
It may be a skill that can be taught but it won't necessarily enrich your life.
No, that's true. But it's got a high probability of doing so. Maths is much the same. Some people want to die from maths, sure. But of itself, it's a great boon to humanity. Small talk, being the first talk most strangers engage in, and most people being strangers to each other, is up there.
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recog-ignition...
...whether they’re in your ‘Inner Circle’,
or if in fact you are married to them.Or indeed, if they are just a hat
- and we're not talking de Bono here... -
JoJo,
I really wish supermarkets would stop demanding their check-out staff ask customers "How are you?" "How's your day going?". There have been times when I've been tempted to reach over and shake them for not knowing that someone close to me has died, or I've got the flu, or I'm just in a feral mood. Can't they just say "Hello"? Why ask a question that is close to meaningless. But I don't really consider that small talk - it's more like a faulty greeting.
I do hate small talk, and can be a quite an introvert. I recently went to a party where three of us sat in a stairway for hours and only talked to each other and the few people who came to join us. I met no new people and only talked to the host for about 3 minutes. Best. Party. Ever.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
The question is can I do it authentically? And a lot of chit chat involves not telling people what I really think in order to keep things 'nice' and that is very, very wearing.
Oh, this.
My favourite people know (because, basically, I've told them specifically) that I will never flatter them, and if I think they're wrong about something that matters, I'll tell them. And I really hope this means that when I say something positive, they can have absolute assurance that I mean it. And that, actually, can be very difficult to deal with, because we're used to being told that we're attractive or talented or smart in a context where we can shrug it off as flattery, as unauthentic.
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Yamis, in reply to
I tend to actually enjoy seeing what useful information I can get out of cabbies if they won't shut up. There's so many directions you can take a conversation that aren't their boring hobby horse.
I don't get many taxi's in Auckland because I'm too broke to go out much on the piss but most of the times I've caught one I've had immigrants from war torn places like Iraq, or the other night Somalia so I'm usually interrogating them about their life there and how they find life here.
I really should leave them alone.
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Or indeed, if they are just a hat
- and we're not talking de Bono here...No sir.
de Bono's work never inspired an entire four sitcom seasons about an entire family who mistook a discarded sock for an alien. -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
...who mistook a discarded sock for an alien.
are we talking ALF here ?
(the link denied access) -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
Yup, "Just a sock" Alf.
The pic's working for me.
(You're not getting that dodgy DNS server thing by any chance? There's been a bit of it about.) -
The worse small talk starter ever (and one I use distastefully often) is "And what do you do?" How the hell do you answer that? Need to discourage it by answering: “Hand job twenty, blow job fifty, full monty two hundred (with a rubber). No anal, bondage or kinky shit. Especially with shit. Or piss. Or animals. How about you?”
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stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz, in reply to
One, I believe, of the Queen's favourite lines :-)
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3410,
... which largely explains why Craig is yet to be knighted.
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