Trinidad & Tobago walks the talk for World Conversation Day · Global Voices
Promotional graphic for Conversation Day TT courtesy Trini Good Media, used with permission.
It's funny how conversations start — and even more interesting where they can lead. <PERSON> and <PERSON>, founders of the digital startup Trini Good Media, regularly have conversations via their podcast “Talk ‘Bout Us,” but the pair decided to stretch their conversation skills even further when they heard their UK-based friends — who are involved in The Talking Revolution , an initiative dedicated to training and advocacy for conflict management — tweet about World Conversation Day.
The event started in 2013 in the United States and has spread to other countries around the globe. Trini Good Media, in conjunction with Bocas Lit Fest, led the first event in Trinidad and Tobago on June 8, 2019. “Given the way the world is going,” <PERSON> says, “it's very important for people to try to understand each other and their differences by having conversations.”
<PERSON> spends a lot of time online, and she became dismayed by the tone of conversations happening in the Trinbagonian blogosphere. She believes that so many issues could be resolved if people simply spoke to and understood each other. “Not just talking,” she added, “but listening. A lot of people listen to respond without actually listening.”
Screenshot of <PERSON> and <PERSON> as they co-hosted the Conversation Day TT livestream on June 8, 2019.
<PERSON> suggested they could curate questions, get an interesting group of people together and live stream the discussions. Conversation Day TT was the amazing result.
I sat down with <PERSON> (and one of the event participants, filmmaker <PERSON>) at a popular coffee shop to talk about how their foray into offline conversations went and why it is important for us not to lose the art of having face to face conversations.
<PERSON> (JMF): How did you decide on which people you would throw together in the different groups?
<PERSON>, co-founder of Trini Good Media and one of the organisers of Conversation Day TT. Photo courtesy Trini Good Media, used with permission.
<PERSON> (FP): We just matched people to conversations — not necessarily based on their being experts, but intelligent people who we know think about things. We tried to put people together who did not know each other so you'd get a genuine, interesting conversation.
<PERSON>: What were some of the topics they discussed?
<PERSON>: We did six topics. 550
The first topic was a conversation between myself and <PERSON>, who won the 2019 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, in which we talked about the creative life. We ended up talking about creativity in so many different ways … including how technology is affecting the way that we are being creative.
The second conversation raised the question of who different people considered to be national heroes and how they would honour them. The third topic was about music: You're stuck on a desert island and can only have three songs. Which would you pick and why? The fourth topic asked people how their mortality motivates them.
The fifth was, “What would you give up to make Trinidad and Tobago better?” It was really provocative in that we got two young people —<PERSON>, the young man from Laventille [an economically disadvantaged area] who's going off to Princeton University and <PERSON>, who will be going to the University of Sussex — and their view of what Trinidad needs to change is really interesting. They talked about attitudes to productivity, about politicians and how pointless they seem to be in giving us leadership and setting examples. The last conversation asked how people were dealing with the prospect of growing old alone and even though it was a heavy topic, it was a very lively discussion.
<PERSON>: You talked about how technology affects creativity, but technology also affects how we have conversations, many of which happen online now, on various social media platforms. How is the dynamic different and why did you think it was important to take the discussion offline?
FP: Well, like how you and I are talking, you can look at my face, you can see my body language, I can react to you quickly, there's no barrier of a screen and I can really be real with you. What online conversations have done is created a whole generation of what people are calling keyboard warriors. People are able to throw insults, able to be threatening, abusive and all the rest of it and there are no repercussions most of the time. You don't get anything resolved that way. There's no real space when you have a conversation online with strangers to have that deeper reasoning. 941