The Future of Public Discourse

As a final installment to my civic issues blogs, I will be discussing the future of public discourse in the United States. In particular I will be talking about what I see today that is working and where I see we should and could be going.

If you read my last CI blog, you can see that there are some remote avenues where real discourse is taking place. I mainly focused on the Intelligence Squared organization and the debates they routinely hold. This week I would like to introduce another organization who’s premise is where I believe we need to be going for public discourse to regain it’s former significance. This organization was created by a professor here at Penn State, and mostly run their events near State College. Without further ado, I give you World In Conversation.

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World In Conversation  was co-founded by Dr. Sam Richards and his wife Dr. Laurie Mulvey. Sam teaches soc119 here at Penn State and if you haven’t already you absolutely must take it at some point if you can. World In Conversation is the embodiment of where I believe we should be going with public discourse for the future of this country. World In Conversation essentially gets people with different backgrounds to talk with each other. They host conversations and bring in people to participate. These conversations are typically done in small groups of around 8-10 people and are moderated by trained facilitators. The goal of these conversations is to get people to understand the other side, whatever the other side may be. Through interaction with people who have different experiences, beliefs, ethnicities, and cultures, people can leave each and every conversation with an increased understanding of the world and how it operates. 66% of people who have participated in a conversation left agreeing or strongly agreeing that they now “think differently.” 87% agree or strongly agree that they now “have new insights.” 88% agree or strongly agree that now “something will be different in their life.”

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What we are seeing through organizations like World In Conversation is that people are being directly affected; this is due to the personal, face-to-face dialogues that take place. For example, It’s a completely different experience to listen to a lecture about Buddhists than to personally speak with someone who practices Buddhism on a daily basis. It’s different hearing a newscast about what Arab Americans think about U.S. foreign policy than to meet face-to-face with an Arab American and hear their two cents. Just like anonymity over the internet dehumanizes discussion, conversations taking place in organizations like World In Conversation serve to infuse humanity into discussion.

The internet is great, but it can quickly shift into a battle ground where people put up fronts and refuse to give into what they believe because they have no real pressure to. Having face-to-face, personal dialogues with people who might have never really had an in depth conversation with serves to break the barriers of an ever increasingly individualized society. Imagine a world where we spoke to our enemies over a cup of tea and taught our children to go out of their conversational bubbles on a regular basis. I don’t know about you, but I see a much more pleasant world.

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Keep it cool,
K

http://www.worldinconversation.org
http://news.psu.edu/story/141813/2011/04/12/research/why-race-still-matters

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