by Veronica Bergschneider

Created on: April 08, 2009

As long as humanity continues to exist, so will conversation. The art of conversation will continue to evolve into different forms as human beings and the societies in which they live keep changing. People were never meant to stay static in one form, so everything they do individually, socially, and culturally varies from one generation to the next, making the each generation's forms of communication befuddling to the members of the groups before it.

Over the millennia, the forms and means of communicating and conversing have followed the patterns of the peoples and tribes trying to convey information. Early cave dwelling folks used simple drawings on the cave walls and grunts of different tone and volume to let each other know where to find food, a very simple form of conversing about basic daily needs. Eventually, this progressed into what anthropologists call a Mother Tongue that gave rise to the many linguistic families on earth today as the need for communication and conversation people needed to discuss their surroundings and share information.

As societies grow more complex, people invent new ways of conversing. Languages grow and change along with the people, sometimes even evolving into a sort of code among certain groups. Whether this type of code remains all verbal or comes to be written down, people outside the group using it often begin to wonder if conversation is breaking down due to their own lack of understanding. New technologies, when combined with the linguistic changes, often come to be viewed as threatening to conversation and relationships by those who do not learn to understand them.

In the current world, many people think the advent of text messaging and instant messaging are causing the art of conversation to be lost due to the fact that these forms of communication use a shorthand style rather than formal grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules. However, those who frequently use these modes of communication argue that they promote conversation by allowing people to express their thoughts and feelings about the world over a much greater distance than they could have before telephones and other technologies were invented. After all, picking up a cellular telephone and sending a friend a text message at a time that a call may not be appropriate can help pose a question to be answered at the friend's convenience and set up more in-depth when the sender and recipient of the message can talk or meet. Many users of online Instant Messaging services also log into there systems and meet friends to chat when the time is not right for a verbal conversation, such as when a child is in bed for the night and the parent does not wish to risk waking him or her.

Conversation has definitely not become a lost art. Society's needs have changed over the course of the millennia and with those needs, conversation and the tools to facilitate must also change. It is in these changes, and people who do not open their minds to change, that conversation appears to be lost. As long as people continue to walk the planet earth, there will always be conversation happening in some form and language, probably involving the use of a technology to keep it happening.

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