Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 1

They’re the young adults in China who have spent so much play money or “QQ coins,” on magical swords and other powerful game objects that the People’s Bank of China intervened to prevent the devaluation of the yuan, China’s real-world currency.

Economist Edward Castronova calls it a “mass exodus” to game spaces, and you can see it already happening in the numbers. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time.

Whether Herodotus’ story of an eighteen-year famine survived through gameplay is true or, as some modern historians believe, apocryphal, its moral truths reveal something important about the essence of games.

Games gave them a better way to live when their circumstances were otherwise completely unsupportive and uninhabitable.

In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.)

We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers.

The crash of Air Florida Flight 90 is seen as a pivotal moment in the development of airline safety standards; it prompted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to study how often a plane should be de-iced, how to create longer-lasting de-icing chemicals, and how airplane instruments are affected by cold temperatures.

Most communication experts who listened to the black box recording concluded that copilots should be trained to be more direct with their captains. But my first thought when I read the transcript was that we need to train pilots to listen better.

The need for brevity and efficiency must be balanced with careful listening.

Mallery and France heard each other's voices for the first time since the earthquake and my cohost and I listened as the couple spoke with each other, relief and gratitude audible in every syllable.

It’s hard to overestimate the power of conversation. It’s hard to say too much about the gaps it can bridge and the wounds it can heal. At its best, conversation is a potent force for good.

A national conversation involved a large portion of the public talking about both important and frivolous stuff more or less at the same time.

No matter how much you like to think of yourself as a private person, your actions affect those around you in real, tangible ways.