I'm Telling You This Because I Want To Talk

Have you ever noticed that thing where when there is a group of people and a portion of the group is listening to one person while others are listening to another then all the attention shifts away from one of the speakers the audience-less speaker will just kind of stall while looking around for anyone to continue telling the story to, even if the new audience has no overlap with the old one. And there's that awkward bit of eye contact language as the story teller tries to drag people in and audience members try to avoid glances or get sucked in.

I find the whole eye contact communication fairly funny. But what I find especially amazing is how little it matters who gets sucked in to hear the rest of the story. If someone starts talking you can give the person the benefit of the doubt that she/he thinks there is information the audience would appreciate knowing (or would find amusing or...). Then when the audience is lost if the person only started again upon regaining the attention of the original audience it would be one thing. But as far as I can tell it rarely matters who gets sucked in by the eye contact game. Which I think eliminates pretty much any possibility other than the story teller is talking purely for his/her own sake. Not that this is such a terrible thing - telling others a story can be very therapeutic. But the instances of this scenario really make it seem like a huge portion of communication must be more for the sake of the speaker than listener. Yeah I know I'm far from the first person to come to this conclusion. And yes as I started writing this post I did realize the irony of writing about people who talk for their own sake without caring who is listening on my blog.