When I get together with other writer friends, some other people in the arts, even, we usually don’t converse with question-and-answer conversations. We usually volunteer information in a back and forth manner.

“I’m going to the museum later.”

“Oh, really? I love that museum. I used to go there all of the time with my family. I love the impressionists.”

“Me too. I’ve always been captivated by Monet.”

“Monet? Nah, Van Gogh, he’s the real master…”

One could go an entire — fulfilling, polite, engaging — conversation like that, without really asking questions of the other person. I’ve had whole round-tables like this with family and friends. But thinking of Jane Austen and how “polite conversation” is theoretically supposed to work, are we being rude by not asking the polite, requisite questions without which this style of conversation can still happily exist? Are we missing out on something? Are we being insufferably self-centered, all of us?

This volunteering of information rather than asking about it also ties in with the basic “Hi, how are you?” issue I’ve been thinking of lately. How many people say “How are you?” or “What’s up?” sincerely, waiting for an answer, versus saying it as a greeting in and of itself? (The ritual “Well” or “Good” barely counts as an answer, either.) Some people I know just say it as a standard greeting in and of itself.

Thinking of conversations I’ve had with friends either on the phone, in person, or over the internet, usually they start or get around to talking about something one of us said/posted online. For instance, someone changes their Facebook status to announce a break-up or an acceptance to grad school or a change of employment and I’ll ask them about it, and we’ll talk about that already-volunteered piece of information.

Which leads me to wonder: are we all a little bit more self-centered in this age of readily available status information?

Thinking about this the other day, I asked a friend about it. My question had been specifically about writers: are writers inherently self-centered? But as the conversation evolved I wondered, are we all a little bit differently focused in this age? In the world of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, online photo albums, family websites, IM, email… are we all, or mostly, living under the assumption that when something important happens to a person we know, they’ll announce it using an internet social medium? When I was in middle school or high school, it was all about IM away messages, used mainly as statuses, as places for people to quote song lyrics that fit their mood, to inform the world of away message stalkers that stuff had happened in their lives. I feel like I was informed about more college acceptances or rejections of my friends that way than the traditional way.

In college, it was similar, but we also then had cell phones a lot more frequently. (When I entered college, only about 2/3 of my friends had cell phones; I didn’t have one to start college. When I graduated, every single person I knew had a cell phone.) Texting became popular over the years, as did the frequency, rapidity, and importance of email as the primary form of communication. I talked to my parents — and still do — more frequently via email than phone. I’m not usually comfortable picking up the phone to call someone, so this change in technology has been really interesting for me, personally.

Facebook came along when I was a freshman in college. It became, and remains, the number one way I have been keeping in contact with my college and high school friends. Without it I am fairly certain we all would have lost touch after those first classes or moments together. But because of it, because of people updating statuses, work information, contact information, we’re all in touch in a way we could not have been a generation ago — scant years ago. And we’re in touch while barely communicating. I haven’t heard the actual voice of many of my friends who live far away in months and years. We talk casually via the internet and social media and that’s it. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other “IRL” or “in RL” or “in real life” — but is that bad? (And what’s real or, conversely, fake, about these online communications?) Does this represent a degeneration of personal communication, or is this an efficient streamlining of it? We can stay in contact with multiple people at once; we can multitask socializing. Is that a good thing?

Are social media changing the way we all communicate? Are we becoming people who are less concerned with asking about statuses of people we know and instead relying on being informed? Is this a less or more effective form of communication? Is it strange? Are we asking less and talking more — and is that a good thing?