To become intelligent and wise, you must master the art of conversation.

(Click "To..." at left for more detail.)

Today's social media has prevented the art of conversation from being passed on to young people. Young people today think that responding to the thoughts of another person means clicking a "Like" button or replying with an emoji. Today's social media does not facilitate a conversation between people who thereby become acquainted with each other and each other's thoughts on a subject.

In the early days, unlike today, there were many "chat rooms" on the Internet where you could have public conversations and become acquainted with people. In the early days of the Internet, people conversed, and got to know each other, using "bulletin board systems", which were computers that other computers could "dial in" to over telephone connections, using modems and "bbs software". As the Internet developed, people migrated their conversations from bbs's to "newsgroups". The next innovation, in 1984, was the concept of a "moderated" newsgroup. Ten years later, oo lawyers posted an advertisement on over 5,000 Usenet newsgroups. Usenet and its predecessors provided what today are called "chat rooms", which were places that made public conversations between a small number (e.g. 2 - 8) of participants, but viewed by an unlimited number of "lurkers", possible. In 1994, Justin Hall created the wo'th blog on his home page, "which contained 'essentially a review of HTML examples he came across from various online links,' according to HubSpot.". [See] In 2006, "microblogging was introduced with the launch of Twitter".. [See] The concepts of a (static) web site, a blog, and a microblogging web site, are all variations of the concept of a publication, and are functionally descendants of brochures, newspapers, magazines, and books. What most people experience as "social media" today is microblogging, not chat rooms.

Today's social media is designed to be addictively titillating and entertaining, not to inform or to bring people together to chat or experience social interaction. The name of the game is to maximize profits from advertising by developing an audience that is brainwashed into clicking on ads and purchasing the products offered in those ads.

Today, to practice the art of conversation on the Internet in way that it was easily done in the early days, you must find a platform that has these features:

1. It is text only. (When people have face to face conversations, the interaction is verbal, not multimedia.)

2. Posts for each topic are presented chronologically.

3. For each post, the poster is identified in some way (so that you can get to know each poster by his or her posts).

4. Replies can identify either the poster or the post being replied to.

5. Posts are retained for at least a month (so that a complete record of a particular conversation exists throughout its life).

6. Postings are moderated (so that the experience is not ruined by bad behavior).

Send us an email to suggest additions to the following list of web sites that might offer good chat capabilities:

1. [matrix]

2. [Discord]

To master the art of conversation, do these things:

1. Do not waste time entertaining yourself by browsing social media.

2. Use social media only to have conversations.

3. Use your Internet conversation time in a way that enables you to build relationships.

4. Be sincerely interested in what other people think, especially when they see things differently.

5. Master the art of making the interaction "win-win".