ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, in our current cultural environment, the pursuit of personal attention is endemic and epidemic, much to the detriment of truly developmental dialogue. In a culture that celebrates individualism, "competition for attention is one of the key contests of social life" (Derber, 2000, p. XII) resulting in the cult of the "perfect" body, public self-disclosure of personal intimacies (e.g., Jerry Springer's "confessions" and the Internet's "blogs"), and conversational narcissism. This last is of particular concern to us. The prevailing practices of active and passive conversational narcissism function to take the topic away from a conversational partner by overuse of topic shifts and underuse of topic support (Derber, 2000). The result, for a pair of such users, is dueling monologues rather than relational dialogue. Neither conversant affects the other and the talk serves merely pseudo-attention. This sort of "interaction" is not developmental. That anyone currently arrives at dialogic awareness through relationships is the wonder. Nevertheless, some do. Let's take another look at that process before we project to futures.
