Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes society is in a paradoxical age. Thanks to technology, most of us are talking all the time. We text. We tweet. We Skype and update Facebook and communicate on our blogs and communicate in a hundred other ways. However, Turkle says we’re losing the ability to converse.

That’s a huge loss, according to Turkle, because it’s during conversation—as messy, awkward and sometimes meaningless as they sometimes can be—that relationships truly develop.

“You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.” (The Atlantic)

Paul Asay has covered religion for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for Plugged In and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He lives in Colorado Springs with wife Wendy and his two children. Follow him on Twitter.