deepstash
Beta
Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring articles like this one:
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
6
Key Ideas
Save all ideas
Not everyone enjoys small talk. It is not that they are not comfortable talking, but one-on-one, small talk remains an issue.
Small talk precedes big talk in the normal course of human affairs. Most people feel the need to connect first before they delve into the serious conversation or ongoing friendships - which means those who avoid small talk are removing themselves from meaningful social interaction.
164 SAVES
340 READS
Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski noted in 1923 that a great deal of talk "does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas" but "to establish bonds of personal union." He also said that small talk was merely a way to fill the silence.
He was wrong. Small talk is not just for those seeking companionship. It enacts and reinforces social roles in a whole range of social, commercial, and professional settings.
132 SAVES
262 READS
143 SAVES
266 READS
The daily human interaction speech is a social, relational behavior. It reveals the social fabric.
Small talk is not void of semantic content. Even saying "I am doing well" has some information. But, the primary function of small talk is to do something. It is meant to serve the purpose of social bonding.
114 SAVES
191 READS
To "talk well" in the social sense is to send the correct social signals and is different from "talking well" in the communicative sense.
Few people can master both. Most people are either extremely verbal and eloquent but socially inept or intuitively at ease in a social situation but inarticulate beyond that.
113 SAVES
205 READS
Not everyone needs small talk. For some small talk feels like their head is a haze of white noise and they desperately want to escape the interaction.
But, they feel comfortable if you dive straight in and ask about politics or religion or the meaning of life.
138 SAVES
237 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
2
Key Ideas
It’s a brief conversation between you and someone you don’t know very well.
Small talk is an essential stage of a casual conversation, especially in English-speaking cultures.
7
Key Ideas
E-thinking has moved us into habits of grabbing our phones to answer the simplest of questions: finding the map directions to a known address, or calculating the square root of four.
Attention is selecting which elements you look at, interact with, and remember. Attention can get tired, like a muscle.
The internet is a very powerful stimulus for attention. It offers information constantly, demanding and overloading a system that was designed to function in the low to medium social networks of the natural world.
Trying to protect oneself from boredom and the fear of missing out (FOMO), has caused people to switch from tab to tab, or screen to screen on the desktop.
People switch between content on computers every 19 seconds, viewing the content for less than a minute. Multitasking this way breaks concentration. You lose time with this and context-switching and deplete your available mental energy.
2
Key Ideas