Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Among college students, some rebel—not many—and make strenuous efforts to stay off their phones when they are with friends. Some say they don’t like dividing their attention, but take it as a given of “life today.” Others talk about a “natural evolution”—we will get better at multitasked conversation. We will become better at picking up where conversations left off. Others think that the evolution will be in social expectations. We will come to experience people in the room and “people on the phone” as equally present. The trick, hard now, but perhaps not so hard in ten years, is not to devalue yourself when the friend beside you turns to the “people on the phone.”

  Carl, twenty-three, a graduate student in computer science, sees physical and electronic presence as socially on par. And when you see these as equal, you aren’t critical of your friend if he or she turns away from you to pay attention to someone on the phone. Turning to the person on the phone is like turning to another friend present in the room.

  Carl’s position seems pragmatic, but I see little evidence that it makes emotional sense. I remember the first time—sometime in the late 1990s—that a graduate student pointed out to me how hurt he felt when his friends took cell phone calls when he was with them. He told me it made him feel like a tape recorder that someone was putting “on pause.” A friend turning away from him to attend to a “friend in the phone” made him feel like a machine. These days, we have learned to crave interruption—we like the buzz of the new—but emotionally, not much has changed. When Haley tried to console an unhappy friend who started to text other people in the middle of their conversation, she says she felt invisible, like smoke that had disappeared.

  The story Haley tells is this: She was out for dinner with her best friend, Natalie, when Natalie received an upsetting text from an ex-boyfriend. Haley tried to console Natalie, but her friend was more interested in what other friends were saying who were leaving messages on the network. Here is how Haley describes Natalie’s turn to the “people in the phone”:

  I am not great at consoling people at all but I was hugging her and trying so hard. I decided that it was my chance to console her. She had been there for me. It had been an uneven break. I decided to go all out. I was trying all of these different methods. And five minutes into me trying to console her she sent out five texts to people describing the situation and then started reading their feedback while I was talking to her. We were walking down the street and she was just texting her “consolation network.” So then I changed my approach and started asking her what people were saying over text. And I tried to engage with her on that strange and oblique access point. But it was so weird to not be the primary person even though I was the only real person there.

  Terrible. She was texting people that were hundreds of miles away instead of talking to me.

  Why do we turn away from the people before us to go to the people on our phones? Haley gave one answer. In person, we have to wait seven minutes in order to see where a conversation is going. But if it is acceptable to answer a text during a conversation with a friend, we have an excuse to not even try to put in those seven minutes. And then, once we are on the phone, we can get more of what we have become accustomed to: the validation that texts can provide, along with the fact that they come in great numbers.

  Haley talked about Natalie’s consolation network and her consolation texts. Think of those online consolations as the first minutes of a conversation, the first things you might say to an unhappy friend. You provide support. You say you are sorry and how much you care for them. When you allow yourself to be consoled by a friend in person, you take the chance that things might go beyond this. There is more of a chance for the conversation to open out onto more delicate areas. If, as Natalie, you are talking about a relationship that has ended, you could find yourself talking details: how each party in the relationship might have contributed to its demise. How the other person might be feeling.

  If you confine yourself to consolation texts, you don’t really have to take that chance. You are in a position to get solace and safety in numbers. If you don’t like where things are going in any exchange, it is relatively easy to end it. But sticking with the consolation texts means you lose out on what the conversations of friendship can provide—not only solace, but a deeper understanding of yourself. And of your friend.

  Of course, just as some conversations disappear, new ones appear. Just as you can make a friend feel invisible by going to your phone, you can make that same friend feel more important by not going to your phone. So, the existence of mobile phones has invented a new kind of privileged conversation. These are conversations with friends that are elevated when both participants know they are getting text messages and both choose to ignore their phones. After she recounts her dispiriting experience with Natalie, Haley describes this heady experience: “So you know that you are both getting texts but you are ignoring them and thereby elevating the importance of the conversation that you are having. You show each other that you’re into it because you are both blowing up with texts. . . . Ignoring a text for me means a lot to me.”

  Arjun, a college senior, gave me another way to view why people turn away from a friend and to a phone. For him, the phone not only serves up comforting friends; it is a new kind of friend in itself. The phone itself is a source of solace.

  Intellectually, I know that it’s the people on the phone who keep me company. So when I go to check my messages, I am technically going to check for which people reached out to me. But let’s say I see there are no new messages. Then I just start to check things—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the familiar places to me. Now, it’s just the phone that is a comfort. The phone that is the friend.

  Disruptions

  We let phones disrupt the conversations of friendship in several ways: By having our phones out, we keep conversations light and we are less connected to each other in the conversations we do have. And we rarely talk to friends about how we feel when they turn away from us to their phones. This behavior has become a new normal. But behavior declared “normal” can still sting.

  This is Richard, forty-eight, on what he misses when he visits his college roommate Bob. This happens about twice a year, every time that his work takes him to Washington, D.C.

  I keep remembering what it used to be like before [cell] phones. We used to talk. I don’t know. One thing would lead to another. Sometimes we would get into pretty serious conversations about books we had read, people we knew, our marriages. Now, he has his phone and he just idly will look at it from time to time. If I said, “I have something really important to talk about,” I know Bob would put down the phone.

  But Richard doesn’t say that. He doesn’t challenge his friend. “It seems so basic to him, to hold his phone,” he says. Richard has accepted the new way their visits will work.

  Not everyone is resigned. I interview a group of good friends in their late twenties, most of whom are still working in their first jobs. When I tell them I am writing a book about conversation, their thoughts turn to the conversations they are not having. What follows is something I rarely hear: friends calling out friends because of the time they spend on their phones. I attribute this unusual conversation to their degree of intimacy. So Maria accuses her best friend, Rose, of “hiding behind her phone.” Maria says that Rose and her boyfriend “are the worst two cell phone people I have ever met.” Maria says that when you’re with them, it’s tough to have a conversation.

  You two just text constantly, check your phones constantly, like you are always on it. Sometimes I’ll just go crazy because I can’t stand how long your boyfriend stares at the phone. And sometimes I feel that way when I’m with you—because you’re, like, text, text, text. And I’m, like, “Are you listening to me? I’m trying to talk to you!”

  The tone of sharp disappointment in this conversation helps me understand why friends don’t often ask other friends to put down their phones. Raising
the topic is a minefield.

  On Call

  Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. For the same young people who complain of inattention from their friends “in person,” being a friend means being “on call”—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online. From middle school on, children describe this as a responsibility. They sleep with their phones for many reasons—one of which, they say, is to be available to friends in case of what many refer to as “emergencies.”

  This sense of urgency extends from bad news to good. You always want to know who is reaching out to you. Your phone is your view onto that. When a friend sends a text and says it is urgent, you will stop whatever you are doing and attend to your friend on the phone.

  Here, a fifteen-year-old explains why she worries about forgetting her phone. She sees herself as family to her friends.

  During the school year if I forget my phone anywhere—going out anywhere—it really puts me on edge. Because a lot of my friends trust me for helping them feel better if they are upset. And so I worry when I am going out: What if someone is really upset and they need someone to talk to but I can’t because I don’t have my phone?

  Another fifteen-year-old says she sleeps with her phone because only its constant presence allows her to meet her responsibilities to her friends. But then again, only her phone could create such demands. She explicitly refers to what she owes her friends as being “on call.” And indeed, she describes her responsibilities as close to those of a small dispensary.

  I’ve had to be on call for a friend during the school year. She was out using questionable substances and I messaged her—“Hey what’s up?”—and I could tell by the text she sent back that she was quite obviously out of balance, like, completely. And so I talked to her—I got her to go to bed. The next morning I knew to bring aspirin to school and saltines and a water bottle. And I still—I’m always worried I’ll miss something like that. And that someone might get hurt because of it.

  A fourteen-year-old says she “is never completely relaxed,” even when she sleeps with her phone by her side. Any bad news will show up first on her phone.

  I feel like there’s always something nagging me. There’s always drama or something stressing me out—that I am always worried about. Most of it starts because of phones; the expectation is that when something big happens, you’ll tell, like, your best friends right away. Because you can.

  Even at night, she worries that she might be left out of some big development in her circle of friends. To miss that “would become a big deal.” In large measure, she determines her worth by how much she knows about what is going on with her friends. And by how rapidly she is there to support them. In her circle, it is expected that you respond to a text from a friend within a few minutes.

  And then consider Kristen, a junior majoring in economics who follows the rule of three during meals and then, after meals, continues to keep the conversation light if she is with people who have phones with them. Although I meet her during finals week, she is not under much stress. Her own classes are for the most part graduate economics seminars. She has a close relationship with her professors. After our interview, she will be off to proctor a freshman calculus exam. We talk about texting in classes. She shrugs. “It’s a problem.” Texting is a commitment. When you text, you are promising your friends that you will be there for them. She thinks that when you get a text from a close friend, it should be responded to within “about five minutes.”

  So, Kristen checks her phone periodically during classes. If she gets a text from a friend that in some way signals an emergency, “I leave class and go to the bathroom in order to respond to the text.” I ask Kristen what would count as an emergency, and I learn that, in her world, the bar for emergencies is set fairly low. “My friends need me. I’m the one they see as the stable one. They’ll text for boyfriend things. For when they feel a crisis. I need to get back to them.” And so, a few times a week, this young economist walks out of her advanced seminars to go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, and text her friends.

  “That’s what friends do, respond to a crisis,” says Kristen. That is why she is often in the bathroom, missing class.

  When friends are together, they fall into inattention and feel comfortable retreating into their own worlds. Apart, they are alert for emergencies. It is striking that this often reflects how they describe the behavior of their parents: When their children are not at home, they become hovering “helicopters”; when their children are in plain sight, parents give themselves permission to turn to their phones. This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.

  Perhaps on-call friendship, primed for “emergencies,” begins as children’s way to deal with parents who are less available than children want them to be—and indeed, than parents themselves might wish to be.

  Middle School: The Feeling of Empathy

  Recall Holbrooke, the middle school in upstate New York, where I have been called in to consult with a faculty worried about students’ lack of empathy.

  At a meeting, we go around the table and over twenty teachers voice their concerns: Students don’t seem to form anything but superficial friendships. In the past few years, faculty conversations with students have become increasingly strained. And students don’t seem much interested in one another. Teachers eavesdrop on student conversations: “Among themselves, they talk about what is on their phones.” And the teachers worry whether students are learning the rudiments of conversation: listening and turn taking.

  At the first break, teachers say over coffee what they were not ready to admit around the table:

  Students don’t make eye contact.

  They don’t respond to body language.

  They have trouble listening. I have to rephrase a question many times before a child will answer a question in class.

  I’m not convinced they are interested in each other. It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum. But that’s impossible. We are talking about a schoolwide problem.

  Holbrooke is not a school for emotionally or cognitively challenged students. It is a private school with competitive admissions that finds that the academically promising students it admits are not developing as expected. Ava Reade, the school’s dean, puts her concern in the strongest possible terms: “Even as ninth graders, they can’t see things from another person’s point of view.” Many students don’t seem to have the patience to wait and hear what someone else has to say. Three teachers back her up; students have trouble with the empathy that conversation both teaches and requires.

  They are talking at each other with local comments, minutiae really, short bursts, as though they were speaking texts. They are communicating immediate social needs. They aren’t listening to each other.

  The most painful thing to watch is that they don’t know when they have hurt each other’s feelings. They hurt each other, but then you sit down with them and try to get them to see what has happened and they can’t imagine things from the other side.

  My students can build websites, but they can’t talk to teachers. And students don’t want to talk to other students. They don’t want the pressure of conversation.

  Because Holbrooke is a small private school, its teachers are given the time to be both emotional and intellectual mentors to their students. This is why they enjoy teaching at Holbrooke. But now they say they are unable to do their jobs as before. For the first time, they feel they must explicitly teach empathy and even turn-taking in conversation. One says, “Emotional intelligence has to become an explicit part of our curriculum.”

  The teachers have theories about what stands behind the changes they observe. Perhaps their students grew up playing video games instead of reading and didn’t develop their imaginations. Perhaps video games kept them from the playground, where they would have developed their
social skills. Perhaps students are overscheduled. Or perhaps they don’t get enough practice with conversation when they go home. Their parents may be preoccupied with work—on their own phones and computers. The teachers’ talk circles back many times to technology. A history teacher sums up how powerful he feels it to be: “My students are so caught up in their phones that they don’t know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other’s eyes and see what is going on.”

  One Holbrooke teacher is distressed that, at least in her view, student friendships have moved from an emotional to an instrumental register. Friendships seem based on what students think someone else can do for them. She calls these “Who has my back?” friendships. In these kinds of connections, she says, “[Friendship] serves you and then you move on.” A friendship based on “Who has my back?” is the shadow of friendship, just as time alone with a phone is the shadow of solitude. Both provide substitutions that make you think you have what you don’t. Perhaps the substitutions make you forget what you have lost.

  Reade, the dean, comes to the group meeting with the results of a small exercise, a small experiment, really. One of Reade’s jobs is to run advisory groups of about twenty students each. She asked members of her groups to list three things they want in a friend. In the more than sixty responses she received, only three students mentioned trust, caring, kindness, or compassion. Most of the students say they are interested in someone who could make them laugh, who could make them happy. One student writes, “As long as I’m with somebody, I’m happy.” Reade says that she has to conclude that these students don’t understand or value what a “best friend” can be. Best friends are more than amusements or insurance that you won’t be alone. Best friends are people you care about. They are people to whom you reveal yourself. You learn about yourself as you learn about them. But Reade notes that these lessons are hard to learn online.