Since our OLLI course has been suspended, I’ve been searching for a way to resume our attempts to reinvent civic space. Conveniently, but also perhaps treacherously, the online space offers enticements to colloquy “until we get back to normal.” Those are scare quotes: either the normal we were used to may not be available post-virus, or the normal we were used to isn’t worth revisiting. Will the conversations in our living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms contain and produce that species of communication that Buber says is the “cradle of actual life”? Or will they reproduce, like a viral load, the exclusive reliance on It that renders our lives on Earth a disease?
Here’s my first-ever “retweet,” a real-time addition to the virality of informationopinion (that word is my own coinage):
So we will, this week or next, engage in one of the online platforms that are proliferating: Living Room Conversations promises to provide connective tissue to heal our divisions. Let me know, if you have experienced one of these conversations, how it works.
