One of the weird things about our age is the way that communication and discourse has become a largely one-sided interaction; not in the sense that it doesn't receive a reply, but in the way that it is increasingly happening via social media and digital interfaces that basically operate on a send-receive basis.

Unlike face-to-face communications, these often have a much larger focus on the response you receive rather than really communicating with people.

To get off on a tangent, while instant wireless communication is often thought of as giving us unlimited instant access, most of our communications with others happens in ways that are not instantaneous. Instead there's a time gap between when we send a communication and when we receive it. Since this is the sort of thing that we experience with our most important parts of our lives; professional e-mails, personal texts and messages, and conversations in forums/chat rooms with communities that we know, and a large number of the remaining interpersonal interactions are scripted (for instance, work interactions with subordinate-superior roles), we've forgotten in general how to actually communicate and socialize without any sort of built-in hierarchy.

In any case, though, sharing attention is very difficult. We psychologically need it, but due to the ways that we're used to interacting we've become used to sort of these small, intense bursts of attention, but we generally don't view our everyday social interactions as really involving attention paid to us. There's an element of balance here, like holding a good conversation, where you need to spend some time listening, and that's a skill that a lot of people trying to break into the hobby don't necessarily even know they need.