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Reclaiming Conversation

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by Sherry Turkle


  So it is not surprising that in the past twenty years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past ten years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.

  Why do we spend so much time messaging each other if we end up feeling less connected to each other? In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation. If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.

  I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right.

  But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiencies of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. And we forget that children who grow up in a world of digital devices don’t know that there is a difference or that things were ever different. Studies show that when children hear less adult talk, they talk less. If we turn toward our phones and away from our children, we will start them off with a deficit of which they will be unaware. It won’t be only about how much they talk. It will be about how much they understand the people they’re talking with.

  Indeed, when young people say, “Our texts are fine,” they miss something important. What feels fine is that in the moment, so many of their moments are enhanced by digital reminders that they are wanted, a part of things. A day online has many of these “moments of more.” But as digital connection becomes an ever larger part of their day, they risk ending up with lives of less.

  I’d Rather Text than Talk

  For many, a sentiment has become a litany, captured by the phrase “I’d rather text than talk.” What people really mean is not only that they like to text but also that they don’t like a certain kind of talk. They shy away from open-ended conversation. For most purposes, and sometimes even intimate ones, they would rather send a text message than hear a voice on the phone or be opposite someone face-to-face.

  When I ask, “What’s wrong with conversation?” answers are forthcoming. A young man in his senior year of high school makes things clear: “What’s wrong with conversation? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation! It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.”

  This reticence about conversation in “real time” is not confined to the young. Across generations, people struggle to control what feels like an endless stream of “incoming”—information to assimilate and act on and interactions to manage. Handling things online feels like the beginnings of a solution: At least we can answer questions at our convenience and edit our responses to get them “right.”

  The anxiety about spontaneity and the desire to manage our time means that certain conversations tend to fall away. Most endangered: the kind in which you listen intently to another person and expect that he or she is listening to you; where a discussion can go off on a tangent and circle back; where something unexpected can be discovered about a person or an idea. And there are other losses: In person, we have access to the messages carried in the face, the voice, and the body. Online, we settle for simpler fare: We get our efficiency and our chance to edit, but we learn to ask questions that a return email can answer.

  The idea that we are living moments of more and lives of less is supported by a recent study in which pairs of college-aged friends were asked to communicate in four different ways: face-to-face conversation, video chat, audio chat, and online instant messaging. Then, the degree of emotional bonding in these friendships was assessed both by asking how people felt and watching how they behaved toward each other. The results were clear: In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection and online messaging led to the least. The students had tried to “warm up” their digital messages by using emoticons, typing out the sounds of laughter (“Hahaha”), and using the forced urgency of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. But these techniques had not done the job. It is when we see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices that we become most human to each other.

  Much of this seems like common sense. And it is. But I have said that something else is in play: Technology enchants. It makes us forget what we know about life.

  We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.

  Yet these days, so many people—adults and children—become anxious without a constant feed of online stimulation. In a quiet moment, they take out their phones, check their messages, send a text. They cannot tolerate time that some people I interviewed derisively termed “boring” or “a lull.” But it is often when we hesitate, or stutter, or fall silent, that we reveal ourselves most to each other. And to ourselves.

  “My Tiny God”

  I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices. To the contrary, I’m suggesting that we look more closely at them to begin a more self-aware relationship with them.

  So, for example, I have a colleague, Sharon, thirty-four, who describes herself as “happily texting” since 2002. But she is taken aback when she hears a friend refer to her smartphone as “my tiny god.” The comment makes Sharon wonder about her own relationship with her phone. Are there ways in which she treats her own phone as a god? Perhaps.

  As Sharon talks with me, it becomes clear that her main concern is how social media is shaping her sense of herself. She worries that she is spending too much time “performing” a better version of herself—one that will play well to her followers. She begins by saying that all interactions, certainly, have an element of performance. But online, she feels involved in her performances to the point that she has lost track of what is performance and what is not.

  I spend my time online wanting to be seen as witty, intelligent, involved, and having the right ironic distance from everything. Self-reflection should be more about, well, who I am, warts and all, how I really see myself. I worry that I’m giving up the responsibility for who I am to how other people see me. I’m not being rigorous about knowing my own mind, my own thoughts. You get lost in your performance. On Twitter, on Facebook, I’m geared toward showing my best self, showing me to be invulnerable or with as little vulnerability as possible.

  Research tells us that being comfortable with our vulnerabilities is central to our happiness, our creativity, and even our productivity. We are drawn to this message, weary, it would seem, of our culture of continual performance. Yet life on social media encourages us to show ourselves, as Sharon puts it, as “invulnerable or with as little vulnerability as possible.” Torn between our desire to express an authentic self and the pressure to show our best selves online, it is not surprising that frequent use of social media leads to feelings of depression and social anxiety.

  And trouble with empathy. Research shows that those who use social media the most have difficulty reading human emotions, including their own. But the same research gives cause for optimism: We are resilient. Face-to-face conversation leads to greater self-esteem and an improved ability to deal with others. Again, conversation cures.

  To those with Sharon’s doubts, this book says you don’t have to give up your phone. But if you understand its profound effects on you, you can approach your phone with greater intention and choose to live differently with it.

  Pro-Conversation

  So, my argument is not anti-technology. It’s pro-conversation. We miss out on necessary conversations when we divide our attention between the people we’re with and the world on our phones. Or when we go to our phones instead of claiming a quiet moment for ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that surfing the web is the same as daydreami
ng. That it provides the same space for self-reflection. It doesn’t.

  It’s time to put technology in its place and reclaim conversation. That journey begins with a better understanding of what conversation accomplishes and how technology can get in its way. As things are now, even when people are determined to have in-person conversations, their plans are often derailed. Across generations, people tell me, “Everyone knows you shouldn’t break up by text. That’s wrong. A breakup deserves a face-to-face conversation.” But almost everyone has a story to tell in which they or a friend broke up a relationship by text or email. Why? It’s easier.

  We are vulnerable, compelled and distracted by our devices. We can become different kinds of consumers of technology, just as we have become different kinds of consumers of food. Today, we are more discerning, with a greater understanding that what tempts does not necessarily nourish. So it can be with technology.

  A ten-year-old in New York tells me that he and his father never talk alone, without the interruptions of a phone. I ask his father, forty, about this. The father admits, “He’s right. On Sunday morning, when I walk with my son to get the newspaper, I don’t go out without my phone.” Why is that? “Because there might be an emergency.” So far, no emergencies have come up, but on the walk to the corner store, he takes calls.

  The real emergency may be parents and children not having conversations or sharing a silence between them that gives each the time to bring up a funny story or a troubling thought. A counselor at a device-free camp describes a common experience that the staff is having. If you go on a walk in the woods with a camper who has been acting up (perhaps getting into fights, perhaps bullying younger boys in the dining hall), an hour can go by in silence. Sometimes two. “And then,” the counselor says, “and then, there will be the question. And then, there will be the conversation.”

  The Three Wishes

  Our mobile devices seem to grant three wishes, as though gifts from a benevolent genie: first, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone. And the granting of these three wishes implies another reward: that we will never have to be bored. But in creative conversations, in conversations in which people get to really know each other, you usually have to tolerate a bit of boredom. People often struggle and stumble when they grapple with something new. Conversations of discovery tend to have long silences. But these days, people often tell me that silence is a “lull” from which they want to escape. When there is silence, “It’s good to have your phone. There are always things to do on your phone.” But before we had our phones, we might have found these silences “full” rather than boring. Now we retreat from them before we’ll ever know.

  I said that I began my research planning to investigate the sentiment “I’d rather text than talk.” Technology makes possible so many new kinds of connections—on email, text, and Twitter, just for a start. I thought I would explore what makes them appealing and unique.

  But soon my interviews—across generations—put another issue at center stage. What people say to each other when they are together is shaped by what their phones have taught them, and indeed by the simple fact that they have their phones with them. The presence of always-on and always-on-you technology—the brute fact of gadgets in the palm or on the table—changes the conversations we have when we talk in person. As I’ve noted, people with phones make themselves less vulnerable to each other and feel less connected to each other than those who talk without the presence of a phone on the landscape.

  In the midst of our great experiment with technology, we are often caught between what we know we should do and the urge to check our phones. Across generations, we let technology take us away from conversation yet yearn for what we’ve lost. We reach for a moment of correction, an opportunity to recapture things we know by heart. When we invest in conversation, we get a payoff in self-knowledge, empathy, and the experience of community. When we move from conversation to mere connection, we get a lot of unintended consequences.

  By now, several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and caretakers to be only half there. Many parents text at breakfast and dinner, and parents and babysitters ignore children when they take them to playgrounds and parks. In these new silences at meals and at playtime, caretakers are not modeling the skills of relationship, which are the same as the skills for conversation. These are above all empathic skills: You attend to the feelings of others; you signal that you will try to understand them. Children, too, text rather than talk with each other at school and on the playground. Anxious about the give-and-take of conversation, young people are uncertain in their attachments. And, anxious in their attachments, young people are uncertain about conversation.

  These days, the first generation of children that grew up with smartphones is about to or has recently graduated from college. Intelligent and creative, they are at the beginning of their careers, but employers report that they come to work with unexpected phobias and anxieties. They don’t know how to begin and end conversations. They have a hard time with eye contact. They say that talking on the telephone makes them anxious. It is worth asking a hard question: Are we unintentionally depriving our children of tools they need at the very moment they need them? Are we depriving them of skills that are crucial to friendship, creativity, love, and work?

  A high school senior tells me he fears any conversation that he cannot edit and revise. But he senses its worth. “For later in life I’ll need to learn how to have a conversation, learn how to find common ground.” But for now, he is only wistful. He says, “Someday, someday soon, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn to have a conversation.” His tone is serious. He knows what he does not know.

  The Pilot in the Cockpit

  Walking through a campus library or almost any office, one sees the same thing: people in their own bubbles, furiously typing on keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene at his office: Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptop, tablet, and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

  The senior partner realizes that the junior associates retreat to their cockpits in the name of efficiency. But he says that if they end up not interacting with their colleagues, the fallout will be more damaging than what they gain from doing “all of those emails.” He worries that life in the cockpit leaves the junior associates isolated from ongoing, informal conversations in the firm. He wants reassurance that the new recruits are part of the team. He believes that in the end, success at his firm demands a commitment to in-person collaboration.

  There are times in business when electronic exchanges are the only choice. But in the law firm where the “pilot” works, many are actively finding ways around face-to-face conversation. There, the young recruits are forthright about wanting to avoid even the “real-time” commitment of a telephone call. And the senior partner says that the strategy of hiding from conversation “is catching,” rapidly crossing generations. In fact, it is an older lawyer who first tells me that he doesn’t like to interrupt his colleagues because “they’re busy on their email,” before he corrects himself: “Actually, I’m the one; I don’t want to talk to people now. It’s easier to just deal with colleagues on my phone.” He, too, has become a “pilot.” The isolation of the cockpit is not just for the young.

  And we use technology to isolate ourselves at home as well as at work. I meet families who say they like to “talk problems out” by text or email or messaging rather than in person. Some refer to this practice as “fighting by text.” They tell me that electronic talk “keeps the peace” because with this regime, there are no out-of-control confrontations. Tempers never flare. One mother argues that when family membe
rs don’t fear outbursts, they are more likely to express their feelings.

  A woman in her thirties lists the advantages of online disagreements with her partner: “We get our ideas out in a cooler way. We can fight without saying things we’ll regret.” And she adds another benefit: Fighting by text offers the possibility of documentation. “If we fight by text, I have a record of what was said.”

  In all of these cases, we use technology to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It’s another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It’s part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

  At home, at school, at work, we see a flight from conversation. But in these moments of flight, there are moments of opportunity. We can reclaim conversation. Consider dinner.

  Table Manners 2.0

  Young people tell me it would be nice to have the attention of their friends at meals but that this has become an unrealistic expectation. Social norms work against it, plus “you don’t really want to give up what’s coming in on your phone.” For anyone who grew up with texting, “continuous partial attention” is the new normal, but many are aware of the price they pay for its routines.

  I interview college students who text continuously in each other’s presence yet tell me they cherish the moments when their friends put down their phones. For them, what counts as a special moment is when you are with a friend who gets a text but chooses to ignore it, silencing his or her phone instead. For one woman, a college sophomore, “It’s very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person.” For a senior man, “If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.”

 

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