Given our current communicative ecosystem—which is, thanks to the internet, both gargantuan and high-speed—you could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed. In his satire of the pandemic-era internet, Bo Burnham (2021) summed up our collective exhaustion: “Is it necessary that every single person on this planet, um, expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs all at the same time? … Or to ask in a slightly different way, um, can … can anyone shut the [expletive] up?”
Both the cover image—a crowd of speakers, heads turned unexpectedly this way and that—and the title of Sanford C. Goldberg’s new book evokes this familiar, maddening cacophony. In its best moments, Conversational Pressure imposes order on the clamor. Goldberg aspires to limn, if only partially, exactly what we do and don’t owe to those who seek to tell us things. It turns out that we generally owe them...
