Flight from Conversation

The "flight from conversation" is a diagnostic phrase — coined by Sherry Turkle and taken up in McCormick's historiographical framing — that names the contemporary cultural and communicative shift away from face-to-face, spoken discourse toward digital, asynchronous, or text-mediated forms of interaction. At the level of the concept, it identifies a retreat from the intersubjective demands of live conversation: the obligation to respond in real time, to tolerate silence, to manage the unpredictability of the Other's presence. In this sense it functions as a socio-historical index of what, within a Lacanian frame, one might describe as an attempt to manage or attenuate the anxiety provoked by the encounter with the Other — replacing the living, responsive Other with a technically mediated, controllable substitute.

McCormick's theoretical move is specifically historiographical: the phrase serves as the contemporary terminus point toward which the book's entire reconstructive project — bridging conversation analysis and literary history — is oriented. The "flight" is thus not merely a technological observation but an epistemological provocation: if we do not understand what conversation has historically been and meant, we cannot properly account for what is being fled, nor evaluate the stakes of that flight.

Within the source (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive), "flight from conversation" functions as the book's motivating problem — the contemporary phenomenon that makes the historical and analytical project urgent. It sits at the intersection of the two cross-referenced canonical concepts: Conversation Analysis and Literary History of Conversation. The concept presupposes that conversation has been an object of systematic study (via Conversation Analysis — its turn-taking structures, its normative rules, its intersubjective mechanics) and also an object of literary and cultural elaboration across centuries (via the Literary History of Conversation). The "flight" is legible as a problem precisely because those two traditions have documented how deeply ordered, socially constitutive, and culturally freighted spoken conversation is.

The concept is best understood as an extension of both canonicals: it takes Conversation Analysis's picture of conversation as a richly rule-governed, intersubjectively demanding practice, and the Literary History of Conversation's picture of conversation as a civilizational and aesthetic form, and uses them together to sharpen what exactly is at stake when digital media displace spoken talk. Rather than a specification or critique of either canonical, it is a re-application of their combined analytical weight onto a historically novel phenomenon — making the "flight" visible as a loss with determinate content, not merely a vague cultural anxiety.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.14)

Sherry Turkle calls this uneasy shift from spoken discourse to digital talk 'the flight from conversation.'

The word "uneasy" is theoretically loaded: it signals that the shift is not neutral or simply convenient but involves a kind of discomfort or ambivalence, implying that something normatively significant is being abandoned. The opposition between "spoken discourse" and "digital talk" is equally weighted — "discourse" carries the full freight of intersubjective, rule-governed oral exchange, while "talk" applied to the digital registers as a diminution or simulation, underscoring that what is fled is not conversation as such but the living, demanding form of it.