Originally published in the Cooperative Communicators Association Connect newsletter.

“We don’t know the long-term effects.”

This is phrase you hear a lot in news stories, and it is usually being spoken by a doctor or scientist of some kind. But it’s not just medicine that can create a long-term, negative change.

At least half of my job over the past 20 years has been editing other people’s writing. Also occurring over those same 20 years has been the introduction of social media and its eventual domination over practically the entire population of the planet. In my view, it’s only now that we are beginning to see the long-term affects of social media — both good and bad — on a generation that was raised on it, and who are now entering the work force, including my own three children.

Among these affects seem to be — and I’m only theorizing, here — the loss of the art of the conversation.

Why do I believe this? When I edit manuscripts written by some young people, usually college interns or recent graduates, I’m often appalled at the lack of information provided by the story, not to mention the quality of the writing itself, which I’ll leave for a future column. Based on the copy of many of these stories, it seems that the writer spent very little time interviewing the subject, and has gathered only the surface-level information required for a publishable story. These kinds of pieces appear to be written only to satisfy a word count and to fill layout space.

You may have a different opinion, but I attribute a lot of this to the influence of social media. It trains us to communicate more with our keyboards and iPhone cameras and less with our in-person faces and voices. The critical skill of listening goes unused and has essentially withered on the vine.

Social media communication is mostly one-sided. We display a sanitized and slightly-to-entirely artificial version of who we are and express this to the world at large. Our culture has become about the Empowerment of Me, and has little to nothing to do with real conversation.

There could be volume’s worth of material related to the long-term affects of social media on our culture at large — I may write one myself — but how about on the quality of story-telling and journalism?

As feature writers, our jobs are to discover an interesting angle to a story, something beyond the number of acres or square footage of the barn, the names and ages of children, and how many years the subject has been doing this or that. Sure, the statistics need to be included, but the real story is in the why, not the what.

For an interviewer, this requires an actual conversation. It begs for a glass of iced tea or a cup of coffee around a kitchen table. Or a long, bumpy ride in a cluttered pickup truck. The interviewer must make a human connection — not a technological one — to get at the good stuff, those colorful stories that make a article worth reading.

Otherwise, we’re only satisfying the requirement of putting out a magazine. There. Job done. Paycheck, please.

I don’t blame you, young journalist, for finding yourself in this predicament. The blame falls to my generation, not yours. I do, however, blame you for keeping yourself in this predicament. As a professional, you have to be better than only an Instagram post writer. You must consciously and intentionally develop your skills of conversation. Go sit down with your granny and ask her about her life as a young girl. Find out what your papaw was really thinking and feeling as he stepped onto some faraway battlefield as a terrified kid. And when you interview that farmer or lineman or craftsperson for your publication, find out why they do what they do, not just that they do it.

You see what I’m getting at. Social media trains us to be narcissistic, and that trait has no place in journalism, and especially not in great story-telling.