Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Jasper says that all this power makes him feel independent, but his description of finding a party with “five buttons” foreshadows what Kati, a college junior only six years later, will experience as a general anxiety about too many choices, any choices.

  In spring 2014 Kati is interested in politics, the Italian Renaissance, and training for the Boston Marathon. When she goes to parties, she reports that there is a lot of texting. Here is what she tells me: At any party, her friends are texting friends at other parties to figure out “whether we are at the right party.” Kati says, “Maybe we can find a better party. Maybe there are better people at a party just down the block.” Kati is describing how smartphones and social media have infused friendship with the Fear of Missing Out—now a feeling so well known that most people just call it by its acronym, FOMO. In its narrow definition, the acronym stands for tensions that follow from knowing so much about the lives of others because of social media. You develop self-doubt from knowing that so many of your friends are having enviable fun. As the term caught on, it came to capture the widespread anxiety about what to do and where to go now that so many options are apparent to you.

  The sociologist David Riesman spoke of an other-directed life, where you measure your worth by what friends and neighbors think of you and by whether you have what they have. He contrasted other-directedness with an inner-directed point of view, where your choices are measured against a personal standard. These days, as social media let us all track our friends’ homes, jobs, lovers, children, spouses, divorces, and vacations, we are tempted to measure ourselves—every day—against what other people are doing. From middle school on, I have found evidence of Riesman’s “other-direction.”

  And that is what Kati and her friends are living. Wherever she and her friends are, they strategize about where they could be. With so much choice, says Kati, it becomes harder to choose, because “you’re afraid you won’t make the right choice.” And nothing seems like the right choice. Nothing Kati and her friends decide seems to measure up to their fantasy of what they might have done. With this state of mind, being at any party can turn into a research project to make sure it is the right party:

  Instead of talking to who we are with, we are on our phones, checking out other parties, asking what’s happening at other parties, trying to figure out if we should be there. You end up not talking to your friends because you’re on your phone, getting information about whether you should be someplace else altogether.

  I ask Kati if, while this frantic foraging is happening, she and her friends feel warmly toward each other, part of a group. “Oh, definitely. We feel that we’re there together. We came to the party together. But we end up not talking about anything other than the best places we could go. So you end up not even talking to your friends. We’re focused on what our phones are saying about what our other options are. It’s not much of a conversation.”

  Five Buttons, Then and Now

  When texting was new and pressing five buttons was a novelty, Jasper felt independent and a master of his choices. Six years later, Kati sounds exhausted. By 2014, the fear of missing out has become a fear of missing anything.

  In 2008, Jasper is not there yet. He is high-spirited about how online choice gives him independence, but even he warns his friends about the downside of infinite choice: They are all paying less attention to where they are and the people they are with. “People forget . . . that sitting here right now might be the best thing that you can get. That might be the best you have.”

  Jasper’s comment is followed by a long silence in the group of young men. Finally, Oliver breaks the silence: “What if you’re always looking for something better and then you die? You’ve searched all the way until you’re dead. And you’ve never said, ‘Maybe I’ve found it.’” The group gets quiet again.

  And since all the members of the group admit that they are now having a hard time focusing their attention because their minds are always on their phones, it’s not surprising that they begin to talk about how to keep their attention on each other. They decide that there should be a rule: A good friend should keep you off your phone when you are together.

  But as they talk about what it is actually like when they go out together, it becomes clear that even in 2008, this “mission statement for friends” has already become aspirational. It’s how they think friends should behave; it’s not what they do. Staying off their phones is so hard that one of the boys, Aidan, has taken on the role of “monitor.” The group tells Aidan that they want him to keep them in line, to call them out. If they take out their phones, he should shame them. They talk about how they don’t want to be “that guy” who is hanging out, going to the beach with his friends, but also on his phone. “That guy” is not cool.

  But they feel closer to that guy than they would like to be. One by one they admit that they need Aidan as a monitor because when they are together, they almost always want to go to their phones.

  Jasper reminds the group of something they seem to have conveniently forgotten: When he first got his phone, he wanted to resist the pressure to make it the center of his life. After six months, he noticed that he was texting all day, right until he went to bed, and so he put his phone in a drawer and got off Facebook. It lasted seven weeks. As he tells it, he was “forced back online” by his friends: “People were just really annoyed that they couldn’t keep in contact with me. They hated it. They needed constant contact.”

  The group is subdued as Jasper tells this story. They don’t contradict him. They know they forced him back onto Facebook. Jasper was angry with them at first, but now he simply says of life with phones and social media: “This is where we are. Once you get used to it, heaven forbid someone takes it away.”

  My interviews with high school students in those early years, 2008–2010, most often began with their optimistic statement that they had texting and social media under control. And then, at some point, they recounted an incident that made it clear that things were not so simple. Often, it would be a story about how, when they went out together, each of them was on the phone with other friends.

  Today that same cohort, now college graduates, is alert to the ways their friendships have been shaped by their phones. Young people know this: If you want to get friendship right, you have to get right with your phone. But this will most probably not involve talking on the phone.

  Phone Phobia

  It was in 2008–2009 that I first became aware of how averse a new generation was to talking on the phone. Jasper and his friends make elaborate plans to avoid it. They receive calls from college sports coaches who want to interview them. These are important calls. But the young men have their parents take the calls, and they, the college hopefuls, send a follow-up email. As soon as young people saw a real alternative to the telephone call, they found ways around it, usually email. Their problem with the telephone call is by now familiar: Recall how Rona said that she disliked the way telephone calls put her “on the spot.” Voice calls unfold in “real time.” I am told that “this is no longer necessary.” Yet this is the pace at which life unfolds.

  Not much has changed since 2008 in how young people talk about voice calls. In 2014, a high school senior sums up his feelings about phone calls: “Sending an email is so much easier because you get to think about everything, you get to write it down. . . . There are just so many variables on the phone or in an in-person conversation.” When he avoids the phone, he gets more than the ability to self-edit. The fact that he can answer emails and texts when he wants gives him the feeling that the world is there for him, when he wants it. And a telephone call makes it hard to do more than one thing at a time. He is bound for an Ivy League university and is worried about the demands of “a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.”

  I’ve followed this generation’s anxiety about voice calls through their college years and well into first jobs. In 2014, a group of junior and senior college women
talk about the rigors of a phone call. One describes it as “the absolute worst. . . . I instantly become this awkward person. On the phone—I have to have little scripts in front of me.” For a second woman, a call is stressful because it needs “a reason . . . so I have to plan what I’m going to say so it doesn’t sound awkward.” A third also needs to prepare with notes: “It all goes too fast on the phone. I can’t imagine the person’s face. I can’t keep up. You have to be listening and responding in real time. . . . You have to be listening to the emotion in a person’s voice.” This is exhausting and, whenever possible, something to avoid.

  A twenty-six-year-old takes a job at a trade publication and is asked to research a group of potential media consultants. Her supervisor makes it clear that their personal qualities are crucial to determining who will be chosen. The new hire completes the project based exclusively on web research. I speak to her supervisor, who had to insist that the project be started anew, this time with voice contact. She says of the young woman, “Talking on the phone had been such an onerous prospect, she didn’t even want to consider it.”

  In another organization, a large non-profit that consults to the health-care industry, staff members are told to check when new hires say they have “talked” to clients. Have they spoken with clients on the phone? Out of college and graduate school, new recruits will use the word “talk” to refer to an email exchange. Very few will use the phone unless specifically instructed to do so.

  Never a Dull Moment: Friends Talk About What Is on Their Phones

  While young people today don’t want to talk on their phones, they can’t stop talking about what is on their phones. Here is Devon, fifteen, assessing lunchtime talk: “With my friends, it’s either no conversation, or conversation about what’s on your phone.” And as phones have more and more on them, their role as the touchstone of conversation grows for all generations.

  Maureen, thirty-two, recently received a master’s degree in social work. She describes a monthly brunch with her friends as getting together, with phone in hand. Maureen spends some of brunch texting friends who are not present, but even if she didn’t need her phone for these connections, she says it is hard to imagine socializing without its support. “The things I talk about now, I feel they come from my phone. I’m aware that if I don’t have my phone to tell me what is going on, I would feel like a person without anything to say.”

  And here is Randall, twenty-four, a real estate broker, on how he and his friends spend their free time: He stresses that it is important that they get together, physically, but when together, at a bar or restaurant, “someone always has their phone out, showing something.” I ask Randall what happens when there is a lull in the conversation. He looks at me, seeming not to understand. Later he explains that in his mind, he has just made it clear that there is never a lull in the conversation. Anything like that would be filled by showing something on your phone or doing something with your phone. But I haven’t understood this yet, so I try again. I say, “Like, if things got quiet among your friends?” Randall says, “Oh, if the conversation was not providing information, I’d check out some YouTube stuff I’m behind on . . . or take a picture of us and post it.”

  Maureen and Randall talk about the value of getting together with friends in person. But they describe friendships in which they hold back from giving full attention to the people they are with. They both describe a hard time tolerating what Maureen calls “the boring bits” when friends get together. Or letting conversations go beyond sharing information. And, of course, they feel pressure to have information to share.

  There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as “whole person conversation”—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t look away or text another friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about conversations being “boring,” such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness. And how hard we find it to “read” the face and voice, changes in body language, and changes in tone.

  Indeed, Randall says that when things get quiet with a friend, he finds it “hard to focus.” That’s when he is likely to take a photograph and upload it to social media. When he does this, he takes his attention off his friend. But in another way, the photograph is his effort to reach out. Randall is doing what he knows how to do. The conversation has stopped, but the photograph says “We are together.” The photograph speaks when Randall doesn’t have words or is not sure what his friend is trying to communicate. It is Randall’s effort to navigate the conversation’s quiet spaces. When he moves his friend’s image to the screen, he is ready for Facebook and a conversation he can manage.

  Posting often involves choosing among several similar photographs, cropping, or selecting a favorite filter—for example, one that turns the photograph sepia or into something that looks as though it was shot on a 1950s Brownie camera. There are moments, as one plays with all of this, when one has the occasion to attend to a friend in a different way, to notice a change in expression, a change in posture, to sense something new. Is this communion, but at a manageable distance?

  In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online? One thing seems clear: Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared.

  As this happens, our ideas about comfort change. For Randall, they expand from what a friend can offer to what a phone can offer—among other things, “comfortable” places to find your friends.

  Right now: Facebook, texting, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine. In the pipeline: everything from glasses that transmit messages directly onto the visual field of the person you are trying to reach to a bracelet you tap to send a coded message to someone wearing a matching bracelet. What all of these have in common: They are “friendship technologies” to make you less vulnerable to ever feeling alone.

  Security Blankets

  Joelle, a senior at a large state university, talks about her phone as a “security blanket.” It’s easy to feel isolated if you are not with your closest friends; people won’t talk to you. “You can’t expect a lot from your peers. Certainly not conversation.” A phone always gives you a way to look busy.

  So we never have to be truly alone in any situation. You get to a party and text your friend that you are at a party and don’t know anyone. You ask them where they are. But you aren’t necessarily being vulnerable at the party. Because you’re removing yourself and showing that you are choosing to be on your phone. It isn’t that no one wants to talk to you. It’s that you’re choosing not to talk to anyone else because you’re on your phone.

  Vanessa, a college junior, shares a similar story to illustrate how her phone almost always makes her feel less vulnerable. If she arrives at an exam room a few minutes early, or at a party where she doesn’t know anyone, she will take out her phone rather than turn to the person next to her. I ask Vanessa if she is shy. She says she doesn’t think so. It’s more that in her group of friends, striking up a conversation with strangers would go against the norm. And besides, it takes so much work. The phone gives her an easy way to stay in touch with her private social world.

  In these accounts, there are new silences. Classes where you don’t talk to classmates because you pretend to be doing important things on your phone. Conversations you interrupt to “refresh” your phone, text a distant friend, or take a photo. Parties where you sit in a corner and text friends who are not with you.

  What makes these new silences acceptable? Or appealing? We’ve met Haley, the college junior who was upset when her parents used their pho
nes at dinner. She thinks she has part of the answer to why we are willing to put up with phones that cut off conversations. She calls it “the seven-minute rule.”

  Haley thinks that realistically, seven minutes is the amount of time you have to wait to see if something interesting is going to happen in a conversation. It’s the amount of time you have to wait before you should give up and take out your phone. If you want to be in real conversations, you have to be willing to put in those seven minutes. She says that they are not necessarily interesting minutes. In those seven minutes, “you might be bored.”

  You know the seven-minute rule? It’s that lull. That really uncomfortable, shitty thing where you’re, like, “Oh no, should I go? Should I leave? Is this over?” And you don’t know how to end it. And just like the work you have to put in, you have to go through so much unpleasantness before you actually hit something. In real conversation, sitting next to each other. And then it can be really good. But inevitably . . . you’re, like, “Okay . . . What now?” It’s an art.

  As Haley describes her own practice, she makes it clear that she often doesn’t put in her seven minutes. She skips a conversation and sends a text instead. Why? “It feels enclosed and self-contained. Whereas it’s messy in a conversation and it’s scary for that reason.” She speaks for many. We don’t put in our seven minutes and we don’t let the conversation happen. We use our phones to take what we can get. And often, we make what we can get good enough.

  The Friend Beside You and the Friend on the Phone

  In 2008, you had to justify being inattentive to friends you were physically with. Oliver, Jasper, and their crew even asked a friend to “monitor” them in case they fell into bad habits. By 2014, there are no more “monitors.” The mores of friendship include being “there” for a friend by providing physical presence while your friend is on the phone, texting other people.