Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Escaping to something like video poker when you come to a moment of boredom has become the norm. But when senators are comfortable saying that going “elsewhere” is normal during a hearing on the crisis in Syria, it becomes harder to expect full attention from anyone in any situation, certainly in any classroom or meeting. This is unfortunate because studies show that open screens degrade the performance of everyone who can see them—their owners and everyone sitting around them.

  And we have to reconsider the value of the “boring bits” from which we flee. In work, love, and friendship, relationships of mutuality depend on listening to what might be boring to you but is of interest to someone else. In conversation, a “lull” may be on its way to becoming something else. If a moment in a conversation is slow, there is no way to know when things will pick up except to stay with the conversation. People take time to think and then they think of something new.

  More generally, the experience of boredom is directly linked to creativity and innovation. I’ve said that, like anxiety, it can signal new learning. If we remain curious about our boredom, we can use it as a moment to step back and make a new connection. Or it offers a moment, as von Kleist would have it, to reach out and speak a thought that will only emerge in connection with a listener.

  But now we turn away from such reverie and connection. The multitasking we can do on our digital devices makes us feel good immediately. What our brains want is new input—fresh, stimulating, and social. Before technology allowed us to be anywhere anytime, conversation with other people was a big part of how we satisfied our brains’ need for stimulation. But now, through our devices, our brains are offered a continuous and endlessly diverting menu that requires less work.

  So we move away from the slower pace, where you have to wait, listen, and let your mind go over things. We move away from the pace of human conversation. And so conversations without agenda, where you discover things as you go along, become harder for us. We haven’t stopped talking, but we opt out, often unconsciously, of the kind of conversation that requires full attention. Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.

  Does Technology Make Emotions Easy?

  Clifford Nass was a cognitive psychologist and communications professor at Stanford University who also worked as a “dorm dad,” living in a freshman dorm as a counselor and academic adviser. Nass describes how he tried to connect with one freshman by talking to her about his own high school emotional ups and downs. The student’s response was that she and her friends were beyond those kinds of worries. Nass was surprised. Teenage angst was over? That’s exactly what the freshman was saying, and she had a theory of why: Social media had stepped in to smooth things out. Her summation: “Technology makes emotions easy.”

  This freshman’s comment inspired Nass to explore the relationship of online life and the emotional life of teenage girls. Was this young woman’s intuition correct? In short, the answer was no. Technology does not make emotions easy. Social media can make emotional life very hard indeed.

  Nass compared the emotional development of young women who considered themselves “highly connected” with those who spent less time online: The highly connected young women did not have as strong an ability to identify the feelings of other people or, indeed, to identify their own feelings. They felt less accepted by peers and did not have the same positive feelings from interacting with friends as those who used social media less frequently. Online life was associated with a loss of empathy and a diminished capacity for self-reflection.

  This is not really surprising. If you are only partially present, it’s easy to miss out on the emotional and nonverbal subtext of what people are saying to you. And you are not focusing on your own feelings either.

  For Nass, the emotional tone of social media is another possible source of trouble. When students go online, some of what appeals to them is that they meet a world of good news. Facebook, Nass reminds us, has no “thumbs-down.” You can feel disappointed if something you share doesn’t get the number of positive reactions you want, but you train yourself to post what will please.

  So, on social media, everyone learns to share the positive. But Nass points out that negative emotions require more processing in more parts of the brain. So if you spend a lot of time online—responding to positive emotions—you won’t get practice with this more complex processing. As a result, says Nass, your reaction time will be slowed down. This may be what happens to frequent users of social media: They can’t respond quickly to others or to themselves. When they respond slowly to others, they “seem insensitive and uncaring.” When they respond slowly to themselves, they lose crucial capacities for self-reflection.

  Nass worries that in the “thumbs-up” world of online life, young people learn the wrong life lessons. Among the wrong lessons they learn: First, negative emotions are something that unsuccessful kids have rather than normal parts of life that need to be addressed and coped with; second, it is natural to allow distraction and interruption to take you away from other people.

  This is a lot of bad news. But here again, there is good news as well: Conversation cures. Nass compares the parts of the brain that process emotion to a muscle: They can atrophy if not exercised, and can be strengthened through face-to-face conversation. Nass says, “The one positive predictor of healthy emotional interactions as well as feelings of social success (statements such as ‘people my age understand me’ and ‘I feel accepted by my friends’): lots of face-to-face communication.” Nass sums it up: “Technology does not provide a sentimental education.” People do.

  Technology Does Not Provide a Sentimental Education

  Reclaiming conversation begins with reclaiming our attention. These days, average American adults check their phones every six and a half minutes. We start early: There are now baby bouncers (and potty seats) that are manufactured with a slot to hold a digital device. A quarter of American teenagers are connected to a device within five minutes of waking up. Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day. Eighty percent sleep with their phones. Forty-four percent do not “unplug,” ever, not even in religious services or when playing a sport or exercising.

  All of this means that during the dinner hour, the typical American family is managing six or seven simultaneous streams of information. Scattered about are laptops, tablets, phones, a desktop, and of course, in the background, a television, perhaps two. College students who are using any form of media are likely to be using four at a time. If students are on Facebook, they are also on Netflix, a music blog, and their class reading. What happens to conversation here? We want it to be something to which we can pay attention in the same way that we pay attention to other things—that is, we want it to be something we can drop in and out of. Something like the “crawl” on the bottom of a cable news screen.

  Again, we live in a world of unintended consequences. Hyperconnected, we imagine ourselves more efficient, but we are deceived. Multitasking degrades our performance at everything we do, all the while giving us the feeling that we are doing better at everything. So it makes us less productive no matter how good it makes us feel. And recall technology’s deficiencies as a “sentimental education”: Frequent multitasking is associated with depression, social anxiety, and trouble reading human emotions.

  What is most hopeful is our resiliency. If children develop problems with self-esteem and empathy when they turn to screens at an early age, conversation, remarkably, seems able to reverse it. So, instead of doing your email as you push your daughter in her stroller, talk to her. Instead of putting a digital tablet in your son’s baby bouncer, read to him and chat about the book. Instead of a quick text if you find a conversation going stale, make an effort to engage your peers.

  But the talking cure is no simple matter. For one thing, we are wired to crave in
stant gratification, a fast pace, and unpredictability. That is, we are wired to crave what neuroscientists call “the seeking drive,” the kind of experience that scrolling through a Twitter feed provides. And people who chronically multitask train their brains to crave multitasking. Those who multitask most frequently don’t get better at it; they just want more of it. This means that conversation, the kind that demands focus, becomes more and more difficult.

  A twenty-four-year-old young woman who works at a start-up tells me that she is no longer able to focus on one thing or one person at a time. And that’s the problem with conversation; it asks for a skill she no longer can summon. “If I try to do one thing, I’m not good. I pick my nails off. I can’t do it. I physically can’t do one thing.” At first her multitasking made her feel like Wonder Woman. Now she feels she needs help.

  One college junior describes her “problem with conversation” in similar terms. It rules out multitasking, and multitasking is how she copes with life: “When you deal with people face-to-face, you are only seeing one of them at a time. When I get used to messaging with my Facebook groups, talking to one person at a time seems slow.” After college, she took a break from Facebook. She deleted the app from her laptop and her phone. She was off Facebook for only a few weeks, but she says the experience “calmed” her. “I am less impatient with people,” she says. “And for the first time I know I can be alone.”

  We could say we are “addicted to multitasking,” but this is not the most helpful way to frame the problem. Our phones are part of our media ecology. We have to find a way to make our lives better with our phones. I prefer to think in terms of technological affordances—what technology makes possible (and often attractive and easy)—and human vulnerabilities. If you are addicted, you have to get off your drug. If you are vulnerable, you can work to be less vulnerable.

  Thinking in terms of technological affordances and human vulnerabilities positions us to design for vulnerability. I meet with an inventor who observes that when people engage with smartphones, they are compelled into a new kind of vigilant behavior. “They want to make sure they’re not missing anything,” he says, “so they keep interacting with their devices.” He makes this intriguing suggestion: “What if we designed a smartphone interface that made it easy for us to do a specific task (such as messaging a friend or family member) and then, instead of encouraging us to stay connected as long as possible, would encourage us to disengage? The interface would be designed to reduce our usage, and make spending more time on our phone a deliberate action.” The point is not to make connection impossible or difficult. But it should demand intention; it should not be something the system helps you slide into. He says, “So instead of a phone that keeps us mesmerized, we may want to build a phone that lets us attend to our business and then gradually releases us because that is what is best for us.”

  We can design technology that demands that we use it with greater intention. And in our families, we can create sacred spaces—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the car—that are device-free. We can do the same thing at work—for certain meeting spaces and classes. We can plan for a future in which the design of our tools and our social surroundings encourages us to be our best. As consumers of digital media, our goal should be to partner with an industry that commits to our using their products, of course, but also to our health and emotional well-being.

  “They Look like Deer Caught in the Headlights. They Don’t Want to Have Another Conversation.”

  Conversation implies something kinetic. It is derived from words that mean “to tend to each other, to lean toward each other,” words about the activity of relationship, one’s “manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society; behavior, mode or course of life.” To converse, you don’t just have to perform turn taking, you have to listen to someone else, to read their body, their voice, their tone, and their silences. You bring your concern and experience to bear, and you expect the same from others.

  When we express our anxiety about conversation, we express our anxiety about our ability to do all of this. A sixteen-year-old boy tells his mother that he has just received a text from his best friend. His friend’s father has died. He tells his mother that he has texted his friend to say he is sorry. His mother, almost uncomprehending, asks, “Why didn’t you call?” She is thinking about consolation. The boy says, “It isn’t my place to interrupt him. He’s too sad to talk on the phone.” The boy assumes that conversation is intrusive even at moments that beg for intimacy.

  I tell this story to a twenty-one-year-old college senior who has been working with me at my home every day for months, organizing my papers for an archive. She says that she wouldn’t call me if she heard that there had been a death in my family. She says that she knows I would be more comforted by a call, that it would mean more to me. But she echoes the sentiments of the sixteen-year-old boy. She says, “Anything having to do with the voice feels like an interruption.”

  One high school senior talks about a plan to put himself on a self-improvement program. He is going to “force himself” to use the telephone. I ask him why. “It might,” he says, “be a way to teach myself to have a conversation . . . rather than spending my life in awkward silence. I feel like phone conversations nowadays will help me in the long run.”

  This is a poignant admission. This young man acknowledges that for all his many hours a day texting and messaging, he has not learned how to listen and respond. At news of a death, he, too, would send an email. These days, there are college courses on conversation. The curriculum includes how to pay attention to someone on a date. How to disagree with someone politically. It is an acknowledgment that students are comfortable going to bed with each other but not talking to each other. They will know each other’s sexual preferences but not if their partner has a widowed father or an autistic sister. They may not even know if their partner has siblings at all.

  Employers have come to appreciate the vulnerability of the new generations. Some businesses explicitly screen for an ability to converse. A vice-president at a large pharmaceutical company tells me her strategy for hiring new recruits. “It’s very simple,” she says. “I have a conversation with them.”

  Most applicants are prepped for one conversation. And then at the end, I tell the potential recruits that their homework is to organize what we’ve discussed and from that make an agenda of interesting themes for our next conversation . . . hopefully tomorrow or the day following. They are stunned. They look like deer caught in the headlights. They don’t want to have another conversation. They were hoping for some follow-up emails.

  The Three Chairs

  In the chapters that follow, I look at the kinds of conversation Thoreau envisaged when he described the three chairs in his cabin. The story begins with one-chair conversations, those of solitude. Solitude does not necessarily mean being alone. It is a state of conscious retreat, a gathering of the self. The capacity for solitude makes relationships with others more authentic. Because you know who you are, you can see others for who they are, not for who you need them to be. So solitude enables richer conversation. But our current way of life undermines our capacity for solitude.

  I’ve said that, these days, being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved, and people try to solve it with technology. But here, digital connection is more a symptom than a cure. It expresses but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem—a discomfort with being alone. And, more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It is shaping a new way of being. I call it “I share, therefore I am.” We share our thoughts and feelings in order to feel whole.

  In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don’t know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to
fully experience others as who they are. We take what we need from them in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.

  If you don’t have practice in thinking alone, you are less able to bring your ideas to the table with confidence and authority. Collaboration suffers. As does innovation, which requires a capacity for solitude that continual connection diminishes.

  A love of solitude and self-reflection enables sociability. Many think of Thoreau as a recluse. He was anything but. In fact, his friends joked that he could hear the Emerson family dinner bell from his cabin in the woods. Thoreau’s two-chair conversations are with friends, family, and romantic partners.

  These days, parents complain that children won’t talk to them because they are so busy with their phones at mealtime; children have the same complaints about their parents. Parents respond that children don’t have the “standing” to make this kind of complaint. During meals, children go to their phones. We are at an odd standoff with neither side happy.

  In a television commercial for Facebook, a large, gregarious family sits down to a meal. It is a Norman Rockwell moment. In our positive associations to family dinner, myth and science come together. We know that for children the best predictor of success later in life is the number of meals shared with their families. The dinner in the Facebook commercial looks like one of those dinners that everyone knows they are supposed to love.

  Just as the viewer locks on to this image of unconditional “good,” the narrative is disrupted. An older woman at the table—let me call her “boring Auntie”—begins a painfully dull story about trying to buy a chicken at the market. A teenage girl at the table does the predictable: She pulls out her phone and goes onto Facebook. Immediately, the scene is populated with scenes from her newsfeed: A friend plays the drums, another performs ballet, yet others are in a snowball fight. The teenager is no longer at dinner. She is elsewhere.