There are ways in which we talk in public, there are ways in which we deliberate, and they are not the same speech. We now talk in public as if our democracy is theater: it is not participatory, it is staged; it is not real, it is artificial. It is scripted by soundbites and doesn't deal with nuance, with shades of gray. "It's very immature," one psychologist told me, "in the sense that, when babies are born, they can only see black and white; they cannot see gray. And it is by the process of the brain developing and becoming more sophisticated that we learn how to see gray."

Unfortunately, in our public conversation we only see black and white. We shout at each other, we deride each other, we dismiss each other, we parody each other. When we think that we are listening, we are not listening in order to understand; we are listening impatiently, waiting our turn to respond and then dismiss.

If we think that public speaking is an adversarial enterprise, in which we only have winners and losers -- and in which everyone clearly wants to be a winner, because the winners get all, and the losers get nothing -- we think about it simply as voting, up or down, as if after everyone speaks, we're going to have an applause meter and decide who won that conversation and who lost. Then we are encouraging a very negative kind of spectatorship, in which we diminish the role of the audience, and in which we elevate not just the role of the politicians or the other newsmakers, but the role of the journalists themselves. Because the journalists then become the medium by which we adjudicate who is right, who is wrong, who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's losing.

 I don't think there are many more important challenges than how to keep the "losers" playing the game. The legitimacy of our democracy depends on having everyone participate in our deliberations. If people think that government is the problem, they are going to become alienated and hostile. Voting should occur after we talk, not in lieu of talking. And indeed, a lot of research on jury deliberations confirms the importance of having a different kind of conversation, a different way of relating to each other, that's not just about choosing sides and voting.

Those who have studied juries have discovered that the juries which seem to function best -- meaning that they come to a verdict in a way that incorporates all of the views of all of the participants and in which those who participated in the jury feel best about their experience -- are those in which the jurors don't take a vote immediately, but, instead, talk about the facts of the case. They discovered that everyone remembers something very differently, and as a result they have a much better collective memory of what happened, because everyone has gone around and talked about the facts. And at that point, they can start to talk deliberatively and ultimately vote.

Those juries, on the other hand, that take a straw ballot first tend to be the most polarized, because once people take a position, they are invested in that position, they feel they must defend that position, and they only recollect facts that are supportive of that position. Often, those juries end up deadlocking. They do not leave the jurors with a sense of satisfaction about the process.

The challenge to journalists is how they can help us to conduct a "democratic" conversation. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I teach a class in public conversation; we teach the students the importance of active listening. Now law students are known not for their listening skills, but for their talking skills. Lawyers are trained never to ask a question to which they don't already know the answer. So, as a result, they are asking rude questions, questions to which they think they already know the answers. They're just waiting for somebody to confirm their pre-existing assumption, and then they are going to take what is said and lift it out of context, and use it in a way that supports or confirms their position.

What we're training our students to do, by contrast, is to be able to repeat what somebody said, so that the person who said it owns the paraphrase. So that when you say, "Is that what you said?" the person who originally said it can say, "Yes, that is what I said and that is what I meant." We are learning how to paraphrase, not to parody, what other people say.

 This is a technique that I think many journalists need to learn.

Ultimately, the challenge of democracy, and the challenge to journalists, is to help us have democratic conversation. Can we get to the point where it's not just about talk, or talking differently, but it's about solving problems differently? Can we get to the point where we can talk to resolve issues, not merely to fight about them?

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