Conversational Cues

FACEBOOK has been offering me friendly tips to help generate "meaningful conversations" which, apart from the fact that my own must be completely dull and meaningless, reminds me of the scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in which a waiter invites a bored American couple to choose from a list of restaurant discussions. After being encouraged to select Philosophy from the menu, the diners become very confused and finally complain that "this conversation isn't very good".

The Facebook version, or so we are told, is "judgement free" and that probably means we're not allowed to exercise any judgement of our own. To misquote Marx (and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to misquote Marx): "Human interaction repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."