I used to have a friend who often used this preamble. It comes off as a way to say Let us have a conversation. I found that in practice, this friend was actually saying, alternately, either I have some things to say or You have information I need.
Neither of these are conversations. The first is an exercise in messaging. The other is an exercise in data-mining.
This is an era where people are becoming divorced from any sense of value in two-way conversation...which, ironically, reviving the public square as a place of social focus and presence was the first, finest and most powerful aspect of blogging.
Now... we are being lied to (and more often than not) lying to ourselves when we say, as my erstwhile friend once did:
I'd like to have a conversation.
So... how would one go about actually having a conversation these days, when it seems the Scylla/Charybdis focus is on messaging and mining? When other people are there for traffic, for donations, for long-tails to podcasts and little else?
There is a lot of pining for the days of 'having a conversation' on the blogs - the famine of actual conversation is acute here. We don't see bloated bellies and stick figures from malnourished followers lists, nor rickets from lack of mojo, but there is definitely something missing from the online diet.
Because it was missing for decades in our wider society and here, for a while, we found an oasis of actual 'having a conversation'.
And now it's gone.
So perhaps we should return to first principles:
1. Do we really need to 'have conversations'? For most of a century, mass media has been very much about NOT have conversations. It's been about blanketing the newstands, the airwaves and the websites with What "We" Have To Say. Whoever and whatever that 'we' might be.
2. Put another way - Is messaging more important than discourse? We had a few years there where people sickened of having poor quality information sent their way. The Internet surprisingly gave consumers of story and commentary a way to beta-test the news product in real time.
3. We kinda got away from that. Assuming a movement away from conversation has taken place, is this more a movement we made as a blogging community or at a larger scale? Maturation of the medium? Changing demographics of participation? Adjustments in strategy as a political movement? A fundamental shift in consumption behavior as an online civilization?
4. How much have challenging financial times played a role? The 2000s for the most part were prosperous.. just run by Republicans? The 2010s are hard times.. just run by Democrats. It's a very different political economy from a pundit/blogger vantage
5. That point's been touched on many times but it's worth some review - how much of the angst du jour actually IS painful adjustment of the progressive blogosphere from external to internal commentary? How much of the pain is renegotiation in the relationship between established online presences, up and comers, changing relations with power (now that 'teh gates' are crashed).
6. Perhaps we are not forward looking enough - how much have concepts changed, such as 'speaking truth to power', 'citizen activism' and - this is a sensitive one - loyalty, and the associations on which loyalty depends?
7. I ask this last because when the very nature of conversations is changing, the tokens of status in these conversations are changing as well. What are the tokens of status these days? The mechanics of TU status here? Affiliation in the Democratic Party? Attendance at conventions? Demographic traits and consumer behavior that aligns with an evolving standard of person-in-good-standing?
8. Does national identity matter now? This goes to the next question
9. Does party identity prevail these days? On just one side of the aisle? Do you see attempts to assert strong party identity - how do you feel about those efforts when you detect them? When, on occasion, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the line in another person's judgment? How do you respond? Does it make you want to show more 'tokens of acceptability' to detractors... or throw the whole sack of them at your critics?
OK, clearly I could go on.
I think it's premature to set ground rules for conversation... because we have not even asked the question why, after a short-lived experiment, we as a society seem to have fallen once again in a famine for actually having conversations.