Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  He can’t think of an answer. His family takes care of conflict by cooling it down online. Colin thinks they are now more “productive” as a family. But what is a family’s product? Should a successful family produce children who are comfortable with “hot” emotions?

  Margot, a mother of two in her late forties, uses texting and messaging for difficult family conversations. Like Colin’s family, she finds it an improvement on all other options. Her practice began with a failed face-to-face conversation with her son Toby, a high school senior. Toby was upset and told his parents that he wanted to have a conversation, but one in which he could present his case to them without being interrupted. He had a message and he wanted to be “heard out.” In person. The message: He wanted his parents to accept that he was working as hard as he could in school even if he was not living up to their expectations.

  The conversation took place in the family’s kitchen. But Toby’s father broke the rules. Instead of listening in silence, he made a comment and Toby stormed out and retreated to his bedroom. From there, he began furiously texting both his parents, inundating them with angry messages. Toby’s father did not want to respond to these messages, but Margot began to reply. In response, Toby sent more texts saying that he wasn’t going to read any of her texts, but Margot persevered. “I kept copying and pasting the same messages over and over until my son began to read them.”

  In the past, this situation might have called for a bit of time to cool off, and then for what some refer to as “a family meeting.” A family would get together and commit to hearing each other out. Or, matters such as these could be discussed at dinner. Even if the atmosphere was tense, the fact of regular dinners meant that families knew that tomorrow there would be another dinner and another chance to sort things out. But in this case, Margot made a conscious effort not to bring this discussion into any “in person” space. Instead, conflict was explicitly exported to the world of online interactions. This is the “family meeting 2.0.” Margot liked how it worked, so she and her family decided to keep it up.

  Margot calls what her family does when they work out problems by texting each other “conversations.” As she sees it, they are exchanges designed to minimize the risk that family members will say something they might regret. Margot says her family works better as a result. In their first set of exchanges, Toby was able to tell his parents that he felt his academic efforts were unappreciated because he wasn’t always successful. And Margot was happy that she got to express her point of view: She feels that Toby does not use all the help he is offered.

  For Margot, the key to successful family conversations is preparation and editing. Margot says she is able to have more successful interactions with Toby because she composes her thoughts before sending them. Without the “time delay” of texting, she says she could not find the right words to reach him. And in her view, the right words matter. And the right emotional tone, caring but cool, is also something she doesn’t think she could consistently achieve in person.

  Margot could, of course, take the time to think through what she wants to say to Toby, and then have a face-to-face conversation with him. Margot rejects this option. She says that if she had been face-to-face with her son in that first argument, her emotions would have taken over. And she would not have had the self-discipline to keep saying the same thing over and over. “It would have felt weird.” But it did not seem weird to repeatedly copy and paste the same message in a text box. And Margot is certain that this is what the situation called for.

  Now, Margot is a true believer. There is no need, in her view, to let emotional turmoil get in the way of solving important family differences. In fact, she and her husband began to use online exchanges to work out their own disagreements in the aftermath of their argument with Toby. Toby’s spotty achievement in high school had a cost. He is not going to attend a prestigious college; instead he will attend the college he was able to get into. Margot became angry with her husband because she felt he was not at peace with how the college admissions process had ended. She felt her husband was undermining their family’s chance to be fully accepting of each other.

  This disagreement was not about something trivial. It began about a child’s college plans but ended up about the meaning of family commitment. Yet Margot and her husband chose to have their entire argument over text. Margot says that this allowed them to do away with many of the “messy and irrational” parts of a fight. As when she discusses her texting marathon with her son, Margot stresses that in this medium, you have time to compose your thoughts. As Margot sees it, in the controlled world of the digital fight, there is less danger of doing “lasting damage.”

  In Margot’s view, technology enables family fights to be what they always should have been: cleaner, calmer, and more considered. Therapists have been telling family members to calm down and slow down for years. The point of that advice is to help them better listen to each other, in each other’s presence. Margot thinks that what she calls “fighting by text” is a method in that spirit. You don’t get face-to-face contact, but family members get to hear each other out and have time to reflect on each other’s point of view.

  Certainly this tool opens new channels of family communication. But to say to a child, partner, or spouse, “I choose to absent myself from you in order to talk to you,” suggests many things that may do their own damage. It suggests that in real time, it is too hard for you to put yourself in their place and listen with some equanimity to what they are thinking and feeling. Being able to be enough in control of our feelings to listen to another person is a requirement for empathy. If a parent doesn’t model this—if you go directly to a text or email—a child isn’t going to learn it, or see it as a value.

  Telling a family member that you will get back to them when you have composed yourself is a time-honored way of handling a difficult turn in a relationship. What is different in “fighting by text” is that a moment becomes a method. It may send the message that you are so reactive that you can’t even try to process your feelings in real time. Or perhaps that you don’t think they can. And even if you don’t mean to send this message, this may be what is understood.

  And there is this: Since fighting by text puts the emphasis on your getting the “right” message out, it sets up the expectation that you require the “right” message back. This implies that you think there is a way for people to talk to each other in which each party will say the right thing. Relations within families are messy and untidy. If we clean them up with technology, we don’t necessarily do them justice.

  Colin and Margot are content in their technologically mediated conversations. Others feel that when it comes to emotional things, only face-to-face communication counts. So, for example, when Haley is home on college breaks, “house rules” require her to call or text her parents to tell them if she will be out all night. Haley says that she sometimes forgets and this produces a predictable response: alarmed text messages from her mother. Here is how Haley describes them: “There are texts saying that she is about to call the police, that she hasn’t slept for the whole night, that I have to stop doing this. . . . And then I think ‘Oh, shit!’” But Haley says that she shrugs off her mother’s texts—she’s gotten used to them.

  But only a week ago, Haley stayed out all night without being in touch. There had been a technical problem with her phone (“I texted my parents but it didn’t send”). This time her mother didn’t send any texts. She came down to breakfast the following morning to talk to her daughter face-to-face. Haley says that she could see that her mother had been up all night and that she had been crying. Haley says, “This is the first time she got mad at me in person.”

  Somehow, the years of alarmed texts from her mother had become something like seasonal rituals, part of going home. For Haley, only when the argument went live did it become real. Haley says, “It is streamlined . . . clean to take care of things over text . . . [but] it did not
spark the thoughts I had when my mom got mad at me in person.”

  I saw her face. My mom was almost crying. That can’t be conveyed via text. She could be bawling. . . . If she sent a text, I wouldn’t know. So in terms of sparking real reflection, there is something that is conveyed in emotions and facial expressions. . . . The way it made me feel didn’t come from her words.

  Recall Colin’s question: What could be the “value proposition” of face-to-face conflict in a family? Haley’s story suggests an answer. Texting about conflict cooled things down to the point where she lost track of her mother.

  Since the early 1990s, as I have explored people’s emotional investments in their online lives, I have suggested to psychotherapists that when they meet with patients, they use their patients’ lives on the screen to spark conversations. Our profiles, avatars, websites—these are all places where, as we represent ourselves, we have an opportunity to rethink our identity. Using therapy to talk about our online lives can open up new conversations about the self. For many years, when I expressed this idea, I met with considerable resistance. And now, with far less resistance. Now, therapists are more likely to appreciate the extent to which online lives are evocative objects, tools for thinking about the self. They are dream spaces for the digital age.

  Indeed, these days, therapists often don’t have to ask patients to show them what they are doing online. Patients take the initiative themselves. As one family therapist told me: “When patients want to tell me what is going on in their lives, they read from their phones. A patient reads me texts from his children, his wife, his boss. This is usual. They want me to analyze what these texts ‘really mean.’” So these days, in addition to encouraging patients to share their lives on the screen, therapists often find it necessary to ask patients to put away their phones in order to be fully present in therapy.

  But we know why patients want their therapists to see their screens: That is where there is a record of the exchanges that make us most anxious or elated or confused.

  My Problems with Punctuation

  I have my own family confusions when my daughter, at around sixteen, asks me if I am angry with her.

  It turns out that my text messages have no or insufficient punctuation. Without exclamation marks and extra question marks and emoticons, what I think of as practical and loving messages sound brusque.

  In texting, punctuation is everything. Every period, every comma, every exclamation point in a text counts. Communities of practice form. It’s not so different from learning the rules of body language when you go to a foreign culture. If you don’t know the rules and you make the wrong assumptions, meaningful connection can stop. When it comes to texting, a lack of fluency with the rules can divide generations and families.

  Why does my daughter think I am angry with her when I text? She explains: “Mom, your texts are always, like, ‘Great.’ And I know it’s not great. What’s happening? What are you really thinking?” There is no convincing her. When I texted her “Great,” it was because that really was what I meant. If she were there with me in person, that is what I would have said. But “Great” as a text message is cold. At the very least, it needs a lot of exclamation points.

  My first—and it turns out, clumsy—move was to include terms of endearment in my texting. To little avail. She said that a text from me (“May I speak with you tonight, sweetheart?”) came off “like a death in the family.” I learn from my research that “Call??? When good for you????” would have been better. I add emojis to my iPhone. Emojis are little pictures of cats, hearts, buildings, lightning bolts, many hundreds of little things, and I feel ridiculous when I use them. I use them anyway. I ask my daughter if they are helping. She makes it clear that she knows I am trying.

  If we are making any progress, it is not because my texting is improving but because she understands that I don’t know how to text. This means she less frequently allows herself to “hear” what my texts would communicate if you applied what she considers “standard texting rules.” In other words, I alarm my daughter less frequently.

  Once, my inability to parse my daughter’s rules of texting truly frustrated me. I had uncertain results in a round of medical testing and was scheduled for a critical diagnostic test. I debated whether to tell my daughter in advance that the test was taking place. If nothing was wrong, why worry her before there was anything to worry about? In this case, talking with friends convinced me that if things did not go well, my daughter might be upset to learn that I had struggled with a serious problem without telling her. She was not a child. She was a twenty-one-year-old woman. She might not be happy that I had avoided a conversation.

  There is no reliable way to reach my daughter without texting her, so I texted: “Darling, call me when you can.” Within seconds, she texted back: “What’s wrong?” I texted back: “Nothing is wrong. I just want to make a date to get together.” She pressed: “What about?” My next text: “I’d rather talk in person, sweetheart.” And again from her: “What about? What’s wrong?” Now we were on the phone. “Becca, why are you so concerned? I just want to have coffee.” At the time, my daughter was in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I live in Boston. We often had coffee.

  She knew why she was concerned. “It’s your text. There is no punctuation. The whole way you are texting is weird. It says that something is the matter.” There was no going back. The conversation I wanted to have in person would happen on the telephone. I told her about my test. I told her that I thought she should know about it. She got it all out of me. And over time, I came to understand the hypothetical text message that might have gotten me to the coffee date I wanted. It would have had to be nonchalant, with another message or punctuation carrying the message that nothing much was at stake. I should have said something like, “Hey . . . am swinging by the Square tomorrow :) on my way to a meeting later!!!!! . . . do you have time for an early breakfast??? Henrietta’s Table? Not dorm food???”

  Something truthful emerges. The “right” punctuation might have gotten me to a face-to-face meeting by creating a pretense. My inability to follow the codes simply got us to the truth. In the end that was fine. But I didn’t want to have that conversation over the telephone. Across the generations, there is a lot of learning to do.

  Find My Friends

  When Margot—the enthusiast of “fighting by text”—becomes frustrated that her son, Toby, the high school senior, won’t commit to telling her where he and his friends are going (something she feels she has a right to know), she decides not to keep asking. Instead of working out his responsibility to her in a conversation, she goes to a technical workaround.

  She asks Toby to install the application Find My Friends. With the application turned on, he will show up on a map on her iPhone as a dot.

  Find My Friends began as Margot’s way of dealing with an uncommunicative son, but now her entire family uses it. In Margot’s family, there is a new compact. If your phone is on, your family knows where you are. You don’t need to check in.

  This new compact makes certain conversations easy to sidestep. For example, you can avoid the conversation that Haley’s mother finally insisted on when she tearfully confronted her surprised daughter and made clear that there will be no more staying out all night without checking in to say she is safe. With Find My Friends, Margot can check the location of any family member. But is it progress to be able to avoid that parent-child conversation—in this case a conversation that would have been with Toby? The conversation would have been about good judgment and understanding the concern of those who love you. It would also have been about what we owe each other.

  Even awkward, unpleasant conversations can do a lot of work. A face-to-face conversation about Toby’s whereabouts could teach how to set boundaries and how to stand up for yourself without diminishing the feelings of the person you address. It could also teach about legal things: Margot is responsible for her underage son. It
could teach about separation: Toby may want to assert himself—to have secrets. That may not be a bad thing. Even if he can’t get precisely what he wants, it might do his parents good to know that he wants more privacy. Maybe they can find some other way to give it to him.

  Margot is getting what she wants without conversation. But she is giving up a lot. In her family, location dots are calming. There is now no need—and no obvious opportunity—to have difficult conversations about responsibility and trust. Instead of talking, you agree to surveillance.

  Future Talk

  There is no reason to idealize family conversations of the past. They could be stilted. They could be dominated by parents who proclaimed opinions or who demanded idealized accounts of the day from obedient children.

  But you don’t need to idealize the past to cast a steady eye on the present. Digital culture offers us new possibilities for talk and new possibilities for silence.

  We are vulnerable to our new technologies in ways we did not anticipate.

  We sense that new social rules allow us to check our phones almost all the time, but we also sense that on some human level these rules don’t feel right. One woman tells me of a long hospitalization. Her husband can be with her almost all the time because Wi-Fi at the hospital enables him to work from her bedside. But she also says that during her long weeks of hospitalization, she and her husband have barely spoken because he hardly looks up from his laptop and smartphone.