The collapse of dialogue (1)
A travel influencer recently faced online backlash after posting a TikTok video asking whether the Philippines would be “cleaned up” 10 days after the typhoon. The Melbourne-based vlogger asked locals to let her know whether Boracay and Palawan would be clean by the time she arrives, or if she should travel to Thailand instead. Online users quickly pointed out how tone-deaf the post was. Upon seeing the scale of the typhoon, she was more alarmed about the possibility of losing a vacation than the reality of people losing their homes, livelihoods, or even their lives.
However, some replies to her posts were just as concerning. While a few respectfully explained how her questions had diminished the suffering of the communities she hoped to visit, many more chose to leave insults and character attacks on her social media accounts, long after the original video had been deleted. Just weeks after the country rallied for online kindness following the death of a young local influencer, it seems that the online mob is back to calling out someone’s lack of empathy with the same callousness and cruelty. It is a small but telling example of how disjointed the online discourse has become. People talk endlessly, not to understand one another, but to be validated.
Sociologist Sherry Turkle described the slow decline of genuine dialogue as the “flight from conversation.” She said that people now have the growing tendency to favor quick bite-sized connections that social media or texting offers over meaningful conversations. She argues that this trend is undermining our ability to truly connect with others because the versions of people that we are more likely to engage with are curated self-presentations rather than their genuine selves.
This has an impact on the quality of conversations we’re having both online and offline. Online, we have been conditioned to stay within echo chambers where we only hear amplified versions of our beliefs. And since social media rewards performative sharing, we choose, edit, and package our “supposed authenticity” to optimize visibility and engagement. Offline, it has become normal for groups of people to be physically together but isolated by their device-focused attention, reducing opportunities for spontaneous, meaningful exchanges.
Over time, this has compromised our patience with and ability to navigate the unpredictability of human dialogue. As Turkle notes, people have learned to express themselves instantly and incessantly, but not to engage in the uncomfortable work of self-reflection or the generosity of listening that interpersonal communication requires. The result is a constant but superficial connection that leads to feelings of loneliness, diminished empathy, and reduced social skills essential to healthy relationships.
But if social media has considerably weakened our conversational muscle, artificial intelligence is now accelerating its decline. In the past few months, I’ve had to call out some employees for replying to work emails with copy-pasted responses from ChatGPT. Instead of responding with data-informed, context-specific insights, I had to sift through paragraphs of winding, ornate statements to decode what they actually want to say. It becomes especially problematic when the topic requires real dialogue. When called out for an infraction, one employee kept insisting on the correctness of her argument by replying with ChatGPT-generated rebuttals, while refusing to absorb a word of what our HR manager was trying to explain. Even though the message wasn’t addressed to me, reading the exchange was very exhausting. How do you properly reason with someone who isn’t trying to understand but is only focused on winning the argument?
In principle, AI is a valuable tool for cognitive offloading—we can rely on it to help with certain tasks to free up our mental bandwidth so we can allocate it better to more important tasks. But as experts have cautioned, we are seeing increasingly how people are using it for cognitive outsourcing. People are relying on the tool for the entire mental process, providing minimal or no human input. In a recent study conducted by OpenAI on consumer use of the platform, they found that while 49 percent of ChatGPT requests fall under “asking” or seeking guidance for a task, 40 percent are classified under doing, where the model is enlisted to generate outputs or complete practical work. Writing was also identified as the most common work task.
As we increasingly depend on AI for communication, we are not only eroding our ability to converse but also our ability to think critically. What passes between humans are polished but hollow paragraphs, regurgitated patterns rather than original and nuanced thoughts. The result is a communication loop with no space for self-reflection or empathy. If technology once mediated our conversations, it now risks replacing them altogether. And in that shift, our capacity to listen, to understand, and to respond with sincerity is quietly slipping away.
eleanor@shetalksasia.com
