Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

Melissa says that when this happens she wants to talk to her mother, but in the chaos at dinner, with everyone yelling, cell phones come out. Her mother disappears to get support from her friends on her phone. And Melissa does her version of the same thing. She goes to her phone and to Facebook—her network.

  It is hard for Melissa’s mother to turn to her upset daughter and give her the quiet conversation she needs. Our phones are not the cause of the new silences in our families. But they make it easy for us to avoid difficult conversations. From the point of view of our children and their development, these difficult conversations are necessary conversations.

  Left to her own devices, Melissa is not getting the help she needs. When someone is being empathic toward you, you learn that someone is listening to you, and that they have made a commitment to see things through. Melissa’s mother is in a position to express this commitment to her daughter, to say to her, “This situation is bad. I’m sorry that as an adult I’ve put you into it. Tell me how you feel. I can’t necessarily help right now, but we are in this together and I’m working to get us out of this.” Instead, she goes to her phone.

  Some parents tell me that (at least in some measure) they don’t put down their phones because they are intimidated by their children, who seem to live in an online social world they don’t understand. Parents say they are afraid of being “shown up” and so they try to keep up. They don’t want to feel irrelevant. “My phone feels like an equalizer,” says one mother in her early forties.

  Parents should not be looking for an equalizer, because all things are not equal. If parents fear their children’s technological expertise, it can lead parents to forget that they have a lifetime of experience to share—that their children don’t have.

  Your fifteen-year-old daughter who can set up your household network—printers, cable, and smart TV—is afraid to talk on the telephone because she has no confidence that she can find her words. She doesn’t know what to do about a bully at school. She dreads a face-to-face meeting with her teachers. She needs you.

  And we’ve seen that sometimes, parents will interrupt conversations to do online searches because they think it will make family conversations richer. From the parents’ point of view, they are not turning away from their children at all. They think they are bringing more data into the conversation. But that is rarely how children see it.

  Recall the fifteen-year-old who stopped her dad when he went online to “fact-check” a question that had come up at dinner. She said, “Daddy! Stop Googling! I want to talk to you!” She wants her simple presence to be enough. She doesn’t want to be trumped, quizzed, edified, or in competition with the whole online world. A college junior whose father is in the habit of taking out his phone during dinner in order to make conversations more accurate describes its effect as putting conversations on a punishing “time-out.” He says, “It’s like pushing the reset button that takes things back to square one. Conversations aren’t given a chance to develop.”

  Haley, a college junior, says that her parents “always placed a premium on talk and sitting down to dinner together as a family,” but this “broke down when my parents both got iPhones.” Now “they are hooked and they don’t even know it.”

  Only two days into Haley’s last visit home, there was a dinner table quarrel about the table settings at Thanksgiving the previous year. Both her parents took out their iPhones to call up photographic evidence.

  Haley asks her parents to put away their phones during dinner but they cannot hear her: “They don’t feel bad. They tell me they are looking at something quickly or checking the weather or writing a quick email and that they are sorry.” According to Haley, even when her parents don’t bring their phones to dinner, their phones are on their minds. All through the meal, she says, her parents are waiting for it to be over, and then, as soon as they possibly can, “they both stand up from dinner and get their phones.”

  Only a few weeks earlier, her parents took out their phones when the three of them were having dinner with her grandfather, her mother’s father. Haley says that when the phones came out, her grandfather was “flustered,” and as for her, she felt betrayed. When the four of them had been eating dinner and talking, she had felt she was in a special place, a closed circle that crossed generations. The phones broke the circle: “It felt like something stopped . . . and we had to start from square one.” But they couldn’t. The mood had shifted.

  When Haley talks to her parents about her concerns, they accuse her of being a hypocrite. They see their daughter on her phone and don’t think she has any standing to be the “technology police.” But Haley thinks she does have standing. She is a child who wants to talk to her parents. That should be standing enough.

  These days, Haley says that her strategy for talking to her parents is to save up things for when she thinks they are open to listening. “Sometimes this means waiting for the next day. Or maybe I will wait to talk to my mom the next time I see her.” By adolescence, children have learned that they are not always on their parents’ minds or the only things on their minds. But it makes them feel safe to know that they can always get their parents’ attention when necessary. Haley has lost that confidence.

  Asymmetry

  Relationships between parents and children are not symmetrical. It is natural that children want parental attention but don’t necessarily want to give attention back. In fact, children who say they want to talk to their distracted parents may make a show of shutting them out. Amelie, a graduate student, now twenty-seven, looks back on the “asymmetries” of her teenage years:

  When I was a teenager I would be angry at my parents for their using their phones, but at the same time, when my mother would reach to hug me or get close, I turned away from her and looked down at my phone. . . . That was just to frustrate her. I needed to separate from her. To show her I didn’t need her.

  Yet Amelie admits that she appreciated her parents’ phone-free dinner table conversations, often so engaging that they continued on past dinner. “Sometimes we would have people over—a neighbor or a relative—and they would continue talking after dinner. They would go into the living room and have coffee and cake. And my sister and I would follow and listen and sometimes say something. I would not have admitted it, but I really liked that.”

  I am reminded of Amelie when I talk with adolescents who grudgingly admit how much they appreciate conversations that family rules (such as no phones at the dinner table) make possible.

  Marni, fifteen, keeps up a small rebellion against her family’s “no phones at dinner” policy by keeping her phone tucked under her thigh so she can take quick looks. Nevertheless, she is happy with the “no phones” rule.

  She wants the rule and she wants to break it, just a little. I think of my students who tell me that in class they like to be able to glance at their phones, but that they also like it when professors insist, as I do, on class discussions with no phones. One says, “It shows that the professor cares.”

  As Amelie put it, when young people hit adolescence they have to push away from parents. Gratitude for rules you want to break seems a developmental norm. These days, it can express itself by declaring fealty to the world on your phone while being grateful to your parents for insisting that sometimes you put your phone aside.

  Thus Doreen, fourteen, expresses a grudging appreciation for her mother’s insistence that all family matters be discussed in person, face-to-face. Sometimes, she says, if there is a family problem, “my mother will play Monopoly and Clue with us” and the conversation will happen over the board game. “And no electronics are allowed in our bedrooms. We have this thing called the dock. And it has all of the chargers and stuff. So, like, at the end of the day all of the phones and tablets and laptops, they all go there.” Doreen is not happy to put her phone in the dock—she doesn’t want to miss any messages—but she admires what her mother is doing: The ritual of the dock frees the fam
ily up for talk. And she can get to sleep at night—her phone is off-limits.

  When Knowing Better Is Not Doing Better

  Paradoxically, the technology that offers us so many new ways to connect to each other can also make it harder to find each other.

  Jon, thirty-seven, wants a closer relationship with his seven-year-old daughter, Simone. A recently divorced management consultant in Los Angeles, Jon eagerly looks forward to time with Simone but he also finds it stressful. His time with his daughter is sporadic and out of their previous domestic routines. So, Jon explains, there are only so many times that it feels reasonable to take Simone to the museum or the American Girl store or the zoo. He finds it difficult to “just hang out” with her. That was easier when he lived at home with her mother. Then, his exchanges with Simone came easily. Now, things seem forced. So when Jon hears that Simone’s second-grade class is going on a field trip, he welcomes the chance to be on the bus. He looks forward to a “natural” way for them to spend time together.

  When I meet Jon, the field trip is fresh in his mind. He describes the time on the bus:

  Naturally, I brought my phone. Without my phone, I can’t work or read emails, or write to the women in my life. I can’t write to Simone’s nanny. I can’t take pictures of my daughter. You can’t do anything. The phone is you—a phone is your extension of your body. It’s like, “What can you do if we take your hands away for the next four hours?” . . .

  So number one, I took eight hundred pictures and I was sending out every picture, sending out every picture while I’m on the field trip. And then I’m writing and texting and people are responding to pictures, “Oh! So cute. Where are you?” And I’m writing, writing, writing. And all of a sudden I’m realizing as I’m sitting there that Simone has been sitting there for, like, an hour without me saying a word to her.

  And then I was like, “I’ve got to put my phone down.” Granted, it was all revolving around pictures of Simone—and I’m telling everyone I’m texting that I’m on a field trip. But then [on the bus] Simone said, “Put your phone down.”

  Jon wants to be with Simone, but talking with her makes him anxious. He loses confidence when he isn’t holding his phone. He tells me that recently his phone died when he was at a museum with Simone and he felt he had lost his inner world. “It was just like, ‘I’m not even a person.’” And talking to a seven-year-old takes patience and knowing how. Instead of settling down and figuring out what to say to his daughter, it is easier for Jon to show love by taking pictures and posting them to the network.

  I’ve said that a first step toward reclaiming necessary conversations can be to create device-free times and places for them to happen. For families, those places would be the kitchen, the dining room, the car (and in Jon’s case, the bus). Sometimes people take exception to this approach and suggest that it makes more sense for families to focus on how to spark engaging conversations. If people find that their devices help them have better conversations, the devices should be welcomed.

  When people make this argument, I ask them to illustrate with an example, a story. One mother of two teenagers talks about how her family, when discussing Game of Thrones, likes to pull up memorable gory scenes on their tablets. Another mother of three children in their twenties recalls a political conversation at a large holiday dinner. She wanted to make the point that politicians could start significant national conversations. She took out her phone and showed a few minutes of Barack Obama’s speech on race during his first presidential campaign. “Taking out the phone to show that—it made the conversation richer.”

  If you apply this way of thinking to Jon’s case, he could, if he is feeling shy with Simone, use his phone to find a photo of a trip they had taken together and begin a conversation about it. Or he could use his phone to play a scene from a recent movie they had seen together and start to talk about its characters.

  But this is not what Jon does. When he brings out his phone in what he says is a high-stakes family situation (he hasn’t been spending enough time with his daughter—the field trip is his chance), he ends up using it in a way that isn’t good for his daughter or for his feelings about himself as a father.

  We imagine (as when the mother of three describes “screening” a political speech at a family dinner) that bringing out a phone will enhance conversation. And sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. But more often, once a phone is out, it is hard to resist the temptation to also check our email. Or we notice that a text has come in. And we give it a quick response. When we have our phones in our hands, we are invited to stay in the world of our phones. Our phones give the false sense of demanding little and giving a lot. One of the most consistent lessons I have learned from studying families: We have to be more compassionate with ourselves. We are vulnerable. Our phones exert a strong holding power and we want to stay with them. But our families need us.

  Jon never considered going on the school trip without his phone. The idea of time without his phone makes him feel less than himself, like “half a person,” a man “without hands.” Jon has to find a way to see himself as a whole person without his phone so he can bring that person to a conversation with Simone. She has to learn that she, too, can grow up to be a whole person without her phone. Right now, her father can’t teach her that.

  Jon’s story illustrates how we have all learned to put our face-to-face relationships “on pause” when we send or receive a text, image, email, or call. And Jon did all of this without thinking. It was only, he says, after more than an hour on the road that he realized he hadn’t said a word to his daughter.

  When on late night television Louis C.K. discussed why he doesn’t want to give cell phones to his daughters, he was led to a meditation on the importance of feeling the deep sadness of life. He said that when he senses this feeling coming on, his first impulse is not to let himself feel it, but to “get the phone and write ‘Hi’ to, like, fifty people.” And then wait for the responses to come in. Louis C.K. was talking about using phones to block sadness, but we use them to block other feelings as well. Jon, feeling uncomfortable, disrupts the potential for quiet time with Simone by sending out a blizzard of messages to friends, relatives, and women he is dating.

  So, Jon’s frenetic sharing is part of a larger story. We become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We’ve seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they’re not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation.

  When I speak with Jon, he makes it clear that, as he sees it, he began the field trip with the intention to spend the day with his daughter but his phone stood in his way. He admits that his phone also stands in the way of talking to Simone when they are at home. He says, “If I want to talk to somebody, whatever, I will put on a cartoon so she can watch. I don’t usually acknowledge this, but I am right now. . . . You know, I don’t think I’m so bad with her, but I am somewhat bad with her.”

  Here is how Jon describes Simone’s objections when he plants her in front of a television cartoon: As on the bus, she puts up with it for a while and then objects. (Jon speaks in the second and third person—describing Simone as “she” and himself as “you”—when he talks about Simone’s objections.) “She will tell you to put your phone away and stuff . . . and then you get sad. You are like, ‘God! I’ve been on my phone a lot.’ You know? . . . I think kids are probably suffering a lot.”

  Indeed, for many parents, knowing their children’s unhappiness is not enough to make them put down their phones. There is a flight from responsibility. It can be addressed.

  First, parents need a ful
ler understanding of what is at stake in conversations with children—qualities like the development of trust and self-esteem, and the capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy.

  Second, parents need to move beyond thinking of their own attachment to their phones with simple metaphors of addiction or, more usually, a smiling reference to a “semi-addiction,” as in “I’m semi-addicted to my phone and can’t do anything about it.” The fact is, we are all vulnerable to the emotional gratifications that our phones offer—and we are neurochemically rewarded when we attend to their constant stimulation.

  Once we recognize the affordances of a technology—what a technology makes easy or attractive—we are in a position to look at our vulnerability with a clearer eye. If we feel “addicted to our phones,” it is not a personal weakness. We are exhibiting a predictable response to a perfectly executed design. Looking at things through this lens might put us halfway to making new choices, needed changes.

  In our families, we can take responsibility for using technology in the same way as we take responsibility for the food we eat: Despite advertising and marketing and the biochemical power of sugar, we recognize that healthy foods in healthy amounts serve our families’ best interests. And over time, we have put pressure on food producers to change their offerings. Right now, the apps on our phones are designed to keep us at our phones. Their designers profit from our attention, not from how well the technology supports us in the lives we want to lead.

  Exporting Conflict

  In Colin’s family, the three children are taking paths very different from those their parents anticipated. All were sent to New England prep schools in the hope that they would pursue traditional professions, but Colin, a college junior, is on his way to a career as a musician, and his older brother teaches skiing in Vail. His parents would like to get the family together for periodic trips; only his sister, who works as a programmer for an Internet company in New York, feels she can structure her time sufficiently to make these kinds of reunions possible. Colin tells me that when his family has conflicts, usually about the children not meeting parental expectations, “we take our disagreements to Gchat conversations.” He likes this because he says “it makes things smoother.” He appreciates that this smoother operation gives him time to collect his thoughts. But when he pauses to ask if something might be lost, a question as much directed to himself as to me, Colin responds with a business metaphor: “What would be the value proposition of disagreeing with each other face-to-face?”