The challenge for this post comes from Rebecca Bardess, one of my co-conversants on AirChat, a new social medium that allows for asynchronous voice-to-voice conversations.

Rebecca, a pioneer of the Blogosphere (remember when that was a thing?), has challenged the members of the Blogging channel on AirChat to write a post without any regard to SEO.

‘I want you to look at the real conversations that you’re having on AirChat and elsewhere, the real stuff, and what inspires you and then journal on your blog, just kind of like, these are my thoughts for today….’ she says.

I feel myself inwardly groaning at the challenge already.

What?—no talk of film or French literature? no explications of aspects of my complicated æsthetic philosophy of flânerie?

This isn’t even going to be what I call (with an eye towards SEO) a ‘lifestyle post’—one of those occasional, more informal entries where I talk about what it’s like to be a Melburnian flâneurial writer.

Nope. This is pure stream-of-consciousness rambling, and I have no idea where this post is going.

O.K., Rebecca:—‘the real stuff’, the real conversations I’m having on AirChat and elsewhere. What is inspiring me there?

The first words that leap to mind are that ‘it’s all about the vibe’: When I think back on the first couple of chits I posted on AirChat more than two months ago, I feel like my voice is stiff and shy—like someone arriving at a party where he knows no one and who is seeking to introduce himself to people when the party is well underway.

But after more than two months on this platform, having asynchronous ‘voice-to-voice’ conversations with people in all parts of the world, the barriers to authentic communication are largely down and some of the playfulness that only my most intimate IRL conversational partners get to experience in face-to-face chat starts to shine through.

And as demonstrated by the current debate in the Film Channel on who, among directors, might be the GOAT, a certain ludic spirit attends even my participation in serious attempts at collective sensemaking.

As one of the few Australian accents to have taken to AirChat, I was surprised and moved to hear that, despite a small following, my voice is regarded in certain quarters as one of the most significant sources of signal on the platform.

Of course, since AirChat is still in its early days, hardly anyone apart from the co-founder, Naval Ravikant, has what might yet be considered a ‘large’ following, but as a user in the Australia Channel noted, those Aussies who have adopted this social medium early account for 0.0006% of the population.

That’s less than 200 people.

Anyone who has been in a real-life rap session with me knows that I’m not nearly as eloquent in conversation as I am on the page. I tend to talk around my points rather than land a direct blow on them. I often need a bit of labyrinthine conversational runway before I can find the right path to approach what I am trying to say.

What can I say?—I’m a writer, not a speaker.

The time to think, to draft and to craft a message is where my forte lies. And yet, on occasions when I have read my writing aloud, I’ve often been told that I have ‘a good voice’—a compliment I take as graciously as possible because, to quote Canadian chanteuse Diana Krall, I don’t think that I have a particularly ‘pretty voice’.

But it’s also the case that however incompetent I feel as a conversationalist, there’s something in my Proustian longueurs and labyrinthine searchings for my point that my conversational partners seem to find compelling when we get a good rap going between us.

And so, as someone who is paradoxically precise in his written communication and yet scatty in his conversation, it should be strange that I have been an early adopter of a social audio medium in these days when an ill-formed thought or informal word can be so costly.

But the early adopters of AirChat are all people of goodwill, genuinely committed to reviving the moribund art of civilized conversation. This has caused me to state that what Naval styles as a ‘dinner party in your pocket’ is really more like a salon: We early adopters are the leaders of fashion and culture meeting in Mr. Ravikant’s drawing room, modelling the future etiquette of a new ‘informal formality’ with one another.

And as a flâneur, as a graceful wanderer through, loiterer within, and observer of the social scene, perhaps I am the perfect creature of this conceptual drawing room designed by Naval: As a passive assistant at others’ conversations and as an active interlocutor in my own, I navigate the channels and topics aired on the platform, whether grave or gay, with the grace of the dandiacal flâneur who finds himself in his natural element—the crowd.

And this is perhaps entirely appropriate for, as I wrote in the preface of the second edition of my Œuvres back in January, ‘The flânerie is an ambulatory intellectual parcours; an investigative promenade through some embodied thought, feeling, idea, impression, sensation, experience, memory, dream, or intuition….’

Not only have I found a social medium that suits the peripatetic quality of my thought, one that I can engage in during my random peregrinations, but the varieties of channels of thought that the feed opens up to me is one that I can indulge in flâneuristically, whether as active participant in a conversation or passive assistant at the conversation of others, floating in and out as one might wander through the rooms of an enormous house where a party is going on.

But this platform may not be for everyone, and I wonder if it has the capacity to scale.

Despite Naval’s concerted efforts to limit performativity, which has been one of the significant externalities of social media, because users are thrown back on the unvarnished nakedness of their own voices, there is definitely a sense early on that when you press down your thumb on the record button you are in some literal sense ‘stepping onto the public stage’.

And as a couple of users have noted, with the damage that has been done to Generation Z’s social skills, there are unfortunately few young people on this app, which I think is probably a prerequisite for mainstream take-up.

If all of your social interaction has taken place behind keyboards and avatars, pressing the record button and speaking in your natural voice to a stranger on the other side of the world might be too confronting for most young people.

I hope that changes in the short to medium term, for it’s ‘the real stuff’, the real conversations that are being had on AirChat, that have been inspiring me these past several weeks. I would love young people to be able to experience a genuine human pleasure that all their living forebears know: the positive joy of having a truly generative conversation with a partner of goodwill.

You can check out my feed to listen in on the conversations I’ve been having or follow my flâneries on AirChat @themelbflaneur.