A junior admits that she wants to ask her friends to put away their phones at meals but she can’t do it because she would be socially out of line. “It’s hard to ask someone to give you their undivided attention.” She elaborates: “Imagine me saying, ‘I’m so happy to see you, would you mind putting your phone away so that we can have a nice breakfast conversation?’ And they would think, ‘Well, that’s really weird.’” Asking for full attention at a meal, she says, “would be age inappropriate.”
What is “age appropriate” is that “rule of three,” the mealtime strategy where you make sure that enough people are participating in a group conversation before you give yourself permission to look at your phone. Young people recognize that full attention is important, yet they are unwilling to give it to each other. They treat their friends the way that made them feel so bad when they were growing up with distracted parents—parents on phones.
Some young people accept their vulnerability to being distracted and try to design around it. They come up with a dinner game, usually played at a restaurant. It recognizes that everyone wants to text at dinner, but that the conversation is better if you don’t. The game is called “cell phone tower.” All the dinner guests take their phones and place them in a pile in the center of the table. No phones are turned off. The first person to touch a phone when it rings pays for the meal.
Why do you need a game to force you to pay attention to your friends? One college junior says that “rationally” she knows that if she sends a text to a friend during the dinner hour, it is reasonable that she won’t get a reply until after dinner. And that’s fine. But if someone sends her a text during dinner, she can’t relax until she has responded. She says, “I tell myself, ‘Don’t read it at the table!’ But you want to read it, you do read it; it’s a weird little pressure to have.”
This comment about the “weird little pressure” to respond immediately to a dinnertime text reminds me of a conversation I had with a student in one of my undergraduate seminars—a class on memoir—who came to office hours to tell me that although she felt committed to the seminar, she had been checking her phone during class time. She had been feeling guilty—in the class, after all, students had been telling their life stories—and she wanted to talk to me about her texting. She said she felt “compelled” to check her messages. Why? All she could offer was that she needed to know who was reaching out to her, who was interested in her. Her formulation: “We are not as strong as technology’s pull.” Phones exert a seductive undertow. The economies of the “cell phone tower” help individuals swim against the tide.
In all of this, there is no simple narrative of “digital natives” at ease in the world they grew up in. On the contrary. The story of conversation today is a story of conflict on a landscape of clear expectations.
Indeed, when college students talk about how they communicate today, they express seemingly irreconcilable positions. In a group of college juniors, one man goes from saying “All of my texting is logistical. It’s just a convenience” to admitting that he can’t follow most dinner conversations because he feels such pressure to keep up with his phone. Another makes wistful remarks about the future of communication, such as “Maybe something new will be invented.” The implication is that this “something new” might be less distracting than what he has now. Two women say that they don’t look forward to what they have now being in their future—but they can’t imagine alternatives. One man suggests that maybe there isn’t a problem at all: Humans are “co-evolving” with their phones to become a new species. But his note of optimism ends when he jokes about being “addicted to texting” because it “always feels safer than talking.” He throws up his hands: “It’s not my fault, my mother gave me my first phone.” Advertisers know their customers. I look up at a sign in a San Francisco subway station for a food delivery service that will deliver from a wide range of restaurants in the Bay Area. It reads, “Everything great about eating combined with everything great about not talking to people!”
“I’m Sorry,” Hit Send
In this atmosphere, we indulge a preference to apologize by text. It has always been hard to sit down and say you’re sorry when you’ve made a mistake. Now we have alternatives that we find less stressful: We can send a photo with an annotation, or we can send a text or an email. We don’t have to apologize to each other; we can type, “I’m sorry.” And hit send. But face-to-face, you get to see that you have hurt the other person. The other person gets to see that you are upset. It is this realization that triggers the beginning of forgiveness.
None of this happens with “I’m sorry,” hit send. At the moment of remorse, you export the feeling rather than allowing a moment of insight. You displace an inner conflict without processing it; you send the feeling off on its way. A face-to-face apology is an occasion to practice empathic skills. If you are the penitent, you are called upon to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. And if you are the person receiving the apology, you, too, are asked to see things from the other side so that you can move toward empathy. In a digital connection, you can sidestep all this. So a lot is at stake when we move away from face-to-face apologies. If we don’t put children in the situations that teach empathy (and a face-to-face apology is one of these), it is not surprising that they have difficulty seeing the effects of their words on others.
The “empathy gap” starts with young children and continues throughout life. A graduate student in economics comments on what is missing when her friends apologize by text. She calls it an “artificial truce.”
The texted “I’m sorry” means, on the one hand, “I no longer want to have tension with you; let’s be okay,” and at the same time says, “I’m not going to be next to you while you go through your feelings; just let me know when our troubles are over.” When I have a fight with my boyfriend and the fight ends with an “I’m sorry” text, it is 100 percent certain that the specific fight will come back again. It hasn’t been resolved.
The “I’m sorry” text is a missed opportunity. These opportunities can be seized. Parents can insist that their children’s apologies be done in person. One mother explains that her always-connected son, now thirteen, had a habit of canceling family plans by sending an email or text to announce his intentions. She has changed the rules. Now, if he wants to cancel a plan—say, dinner with his grandparents—he has to make a phone call to break the date.
That real-time telephone call teaches that his proposed actions will affect others. His mother says, “He can hear how my mother made the roast chicken and it’s already in the oven. He can hear that his grandfather has already bought the syrup to make ice cream sundaes.” In sum, he can hear that he is expected and that his presence will be missed. She adds that since the new rules have gone into effect, there has rarely been a cancellation.
In-person apologies are no less potent in business settings. Managers tell me that a big part of their job has become teaching employees how to apologize face-to-face. One CEO says he cries out in frustration, even to longtime employees, “Apologize to him. Face-to-face. You were wrong. Say you are sorry.” Another tells me that in business, not being able to say you’re sorry face-to-face is “like driving a car but not knowing how to go in reverse.” Essentially, it means you can’t drive. In his view, he is working with a lot of people who need driving lessons.
“I Would Never Do This Face-to-Face. It’s Too Emotional.”
When we move from conversation to connection, we shortchange ourselves. My concern is that over time we stop caring—or perhaps worse, we forget there is a difference. Gretchen is a college sophomore who doesn’t see a difference. She sits in my office and tells me she is having a hard time concentrating on her coursework. It’s roommate trouble. She’s been flirting with a roommate’s ex-boyfriend. She started out meaning no harm, but things escalated. Now the ex-boyfriend is using her as a weapon against her roommate. When we speak, Gretchen is distracted. Her gra
des are a disaster. I ask her if she wants to talk to someone in the counseling center. She says no, she needs to make things right with her roommate. What her roommate needs to hear, says Gretchen, is her apology and “the honest truth.” Gretchen adds, “That is what will restore my concentration.”
I ask Gretchen if she is comfortable going home now; it’s close to dinnertime and her roommate is probably at the dorm, no more than a ten-minute walk from my office. Gretchen looks confused as though my question has no meaning. “I’m going to talk to her on Gchat,” she says. “I would never do this face-to-face. It’s too emotional.”
I was taken aback when Stephen Colbert—as his “character,” a right-wing blowhard political talk show host—asked me a profound question during an appearance on his show: “Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?” My answer was no. Many sips of connection don’t add up to a gulp of conversation.
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work so well for an apology. It doesn’t work so well when we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view. In these cases, we have to listen. We have to respond in real time. In these exchanges we show our temperament and character. We build trust.
Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of our online connections, we want immediate answers. In order to get them, we ask simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to a life of constant interruption.
Interruptions? “This Is My Life.”
On a balmy evening in June, I interview a group of twenty-five young people, from eighteen to twenty-four, who are in Boston for a summer study program. During our two hours together they tell me that if I really want to know how they communicate, I should be in their group chat. They are having it on an application for their mobile phones called WhatsApp. They invite me into their group, I accept, and our meeting continues. Now we are together in the room and online. Everything changes. Everyone is always “elsewhere” or just getting on their way. With everyone on the app, people switch rapidly between the talk in the room and the chat on their phones. At least half of the phone chat takes the form of images—cartoons, photos, and videos—many of which comment on the conversation in the room. As the students see it, images connect them, equal to any text or any talk.
In the room, the topic turns to how hard it is to separate from family and high school friends during college. But it is hard for this discussion to go very far because it is competing with the parallel activity of online chat and image curation.
Yet I see how happy these students are. They like moving in and out of talk, text, and images; they like the continual feed. And they like always having someplace else to go. They say that their greatest fear is boredom. If for a moment students don’t find enough stimulation in the room, they go to the chat. If they don’t find the images compelling, they look for new ones. But sharing an image you find on the web is a particular kind of participation. You don’t turn to your own experience, but pull instead from external sources. You express yourself but can maintain a certain distance.
As all of this is going on, I remember saying to my daughter when she was three, “Use your words.” At first I wonder at my association. I appreciate the pertinence (and the wit!) of the students’ shared images, but to me, going to the images is also a way for these young people to slip away from our group conversation just as it becomes challenging. When things get complicated, it’s easier to send a picture than to struggle with a hard idea. And another child-raising truism comes to mind, this one in my grandmother’s voice: “Look at me when you speak to me.” We teach children the outward manifestations of full attention because we hope that by working backward from behavior we can get them to a more profound feeling state. This is the feeling state of attachment and empathic connection. We don’t ask children to use their words or to look at us to make them obedient. We want words to be associated with feelings. Eye contact is the most powerful path to human connection.
The students who invited me onto WhatsApp said I could understand them best if I shared their app. But once we shared WhatsApp, their faces were mostly turned down, eyes on their phones.
On this June evening, in the mash-up of talk, texts, and images, the students keep returning to the idea that digital conversations are valuable because they are “low risk.” The students talk about how, when they are online, they can edit messages before sending them. And whether the text is to a potential employer or a romantic prospect, if it’s important, they often ask friends to go over their writing to help ensure they are getting it “right.” These are the perks of connection. But in conversations that could potentially take unexpected directions, people don’t always try to get things “right.” They learn to be surprised by the things they say. And to enjoy that experience. The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.” Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that “appetite comes from eating” and observes that it is equally the case that “ideas come from speaking.” The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery. Notably, von Kleist is not interested in broadcasting or the kind of posting that social media would provide. The thrill of “risky talk” comes from being in the presence of and in close connection to your listener.
The idea that risky talk might be exciting is far from my students’ minds during our evening on WhatsApp. In fact, someone in the group says that one of the good things about sending images is that it makes communication even less risky than sending edited texts. Like text, images can be edited. They can be cropped and passed through the perfect filter. And the more you manipulate them, he says, the more you can keep them ambiguous and “open to interpretation.” He sees this as a good thing because you can’t be hurt if you haven’t declared yourself. But if you haven’t declared yourself, you haven’t tried out an idea. Or expressed a feeling. Declaring and defending yourself is how you learn to be forthright. It is a skill that helps in both love and politics.
In Boston, once the group is both talking out loud and attending to WhatsApp, all communications are constantly interrupted. Phones interrupt talk; talk interrupts phones. I ask everyone how they feel about these interruptions and my question hardly seems to make sense. This group doesn’t experience the intrusions of WhatsApp as interruption. One young man says, commenting on the buzz, “This is my life.”
In the new communications culture, interruption is not experienced as interruption but as another connection. Only half joking, people in their teens and twenties tell me that the most commonly heard phrase at dinner with their friends is “Wait, what?” Everyone is always missing a beat, the time it takes to find an image or send a text.
When people say they’re “addicted” to their phones, they are not only saying that they want what their phones provide. They are also saying that they don’t want what their phones allow them to avoid. The thing I hear most is that going to your phone makes it easier to avoid boredom or anxiety. But both of these may signal that you are learning something new, something alive and disruptive. You may be stretching yourself in a new direction. Boredom and anxiety are signs to attend more closely to things, not to turn away.
We don’t live in a silent world of no talk. But we drop in and out of the talk we have. And we have very little patience for talk that demands sustained attention. When talk becomes difficult or when talk turns to quiet, we’ve given ourselves permission to go elsewhere. To avoid life’s challenges and boring bits.
Life’s Boring Bi
ts
A college senior has a boy in her dorm room. They’re in bed together. But when he goes to the bathroom, she takes out her phone and goes on Tinder, an app where she can check out men in the area who might be interested in meeting—or more. She says, “I have no idea why I did this—I really like this guy. . . . I want to date him, but I couldn’t help myself. Nothing was happening on Facebook; I didn’t have any new emails.” Lying there in bed, waiting for her lover to come out of the bathroom, she had hit one of life’s boring bits.
When I share this story with people under thirty, I usually get shrugs. This is how things are. A dull moment is never necessary. And you always want to know who is trying to reach you. Or who might be available to you. But the sensibility in which we want a constant stream of stimulation and expect to edit out life’s “boring bits” has also come to characterize their elders.
A young father, thirty-four, tells me that when he gives his two-year-old daughter a bath, he finds it boring. And he’s feeling guilty. Just a few nights earlier, instead of sitting patiently with her, talking and singing to her, as he did with his older children, he began to check email on his phone. And it wasn’t the first time. “I know I shouldn’t but I do,” he says. “That bath time should be a time for relaxing with my daughter. But I can’t do it. I’m on and off my phone the whole time. I find the downtime of her bath boring.”
In a very different setting, Senator John McCain found himself feeling restless on the floor of the Senate during hearings on Syria. So he played poker on his iPhone to escape the feeling. When a picture of his game got into the press, McCain tweeted a joke about being caught out. “Scandal! Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing—worst of all I lost!”
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