Originally Posted by wma
Without getting too philosophical here, what's the big deal with having a pleasant conversation with the person sitting next to you. It's communicating with your fellow man or woman (whichever). We rush around so much and block everything out so not to communicate, roll-up our car windows, run or walk with headphones, use caller-id to avoid people, email so not to talk.
As other posters have said, nobody has anything against a good conversation, but there are far too many people on planes who seem to confuse conversation with interrogation or apparently try to make up for their lack of human contact in the real-world by forcing conversations on a captive audience.
To be frank, I don't even mind the nervous "I don't like flying" chatter around takeoff that some people churn out, just so long as if I want to retreat into my own world (for some reason I almost always fall asleep from push-back to cruising altitude), they take the hint.