Conversation

I continue going to random meetup events... I'm studying the social behavior of humans. Interaction is mostly in the form of verbal communication - although gestures come into play. Tone of voice is often just as important as the actual words used.

1. Storytelling is a sizable chunk of the communication.

1.1 Sometimes the story is to hype something up - like a comic book store or a city. I suppose the evolutionary underpinning that humans should share important people places and things with each other. It's a natural way to cause people to share useful things. They feel joy if they get somebody interested in something they like or if they find something new.

Standard responses are something like - oh I've been there too - maybe some more details - or maybe a similar thing.

1.2 Sometimes the story is to share some emotional experience - e.g. somebody's grandmother thought her music was from the devil. Maybe an underlying motivation here is to get confirmation from the group that her music is not from the devil.

2. Some people will lead a conversation - sometimes a moderate amount, sometimes too much - so that nobody else can get a word in. There are two basic approaches for the leader - totally define the topic autonomously or look into the crowd, identify what they have interest in, and attempt to bring it out.

Sometimes the leader walks off and the entire conversation will stop.

Sometimes there is no leader - probably a more robust architecture - as it won't fail when one link breaks.

3. Humor
Humor is some sort of an semi-unconscious approval mechanism. In purest form, the laughter of a small child is unconscious approval. As people grow up, they still have some unconscioius laughter, although it's mixed in with intensional. Sort of the way people clap for musicians, they laugh for the short performances that occur within any typical conversation.