Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Adam looks for other examples that show how editing made him a better self. He pulls up a text he sent Tessa after a fight. Adam says that after this quarrel he was frightened, afraid of what would happen next. But in his text he lessened the tension by sending a photo of his feet, beneath which he wrote, “Try to control your sexual passion in seeing me in Crocs and socks.” In person, Adam says that his anxiety would have led him to try to corner Tessa into forgiving him. His panic would have made things worse. Online, he used humor to signal confidence in their enduring connection. So what the text communicated is not the “real” Adam; it’s the Adam he wants to be.

  Adam is troubled by the gap between his in-person self and the self he can summon in online exchanges. But the Adam I have before me is a reflective, caring man. Online, we do not become different selves. Our online identities are facets of ourselves that usually are harder for us to express in the physical realm. This is why the online world can be a place for personal growth. People work on desired qualities in the virtual and gradually bring them into their lives “off the screen.” Adam is in the process of recognizing that, in person, he is closer to the online Adam than he sometimes thinks.

  In retrospect, Adam is aware that the intensity and frequency of their digital communications encouraged Tessa’s fantasy that their relationship could take “total empathy” as its goal. This made their relationship sure to fail. But Adam admits that during the relationship, he did not discourage Tessa’s fantasy. He tried to live it out. He sums up how online life made his effort easier: “That Gchat box, it’s delicious.”

  There is always a fine line that separates romantic love from a complicity in which the boundaries between partners become blurred. Romantically, each becomes “lost” in the other. This kind of love can sound like a sought-after state. But when it happens, communication is blocked because each partner can only hear what he or she needs to hear to keep the fantasy alive. Continual texting does not cause this kind of relationship to develop, but it makes it easier to fall into. Adam talks about having Tessa “in his phone,” “in his pocket.”

  So, in the end, Adam thinks his relationship with Tessa was made possible and then undone by texting. It supported an unrealistic fantasy of “total empathic understanding.” And even though Adam made a continual effort to present himself as he wanted to be, he shared so much and over such a long period that he revealed himself. And that self wasn’t who Tessa wanted.

  People feel that digital media put them in a comfort zone where they can share “just the right amount” of themselves. This is the Goldilocks effect. Texting and email make people feel in control, but when they talk in detail about their online exchanges, the stories are usually about misunderstandings and crossed signals. The feelings of control are just that: feelings.

  In theory, digital media can keep you at the “just right” distance, but in practice, at least in romantic relationships, they rarely do that job. When two people are continually connected, over time, it is almost impossible to maintain any “just right” distance. So the Goldilocks effect is really the Goldilocks fallacy. And when Adam makes what he considers a “mistake,” it is on the record. Online, he reminds me, “once things are in black and white, every mistake is there to see and review and there is no forgetting.”

  What We Really Need to Know

  Beyond the Goldilocks fallacy about emotional distance, there is another misunderstanding about what online communication offers. This is the data fallacy. This is the feeling that online exchanges give us so much data that we now know all that we need to know about our partners. Certainly enough to get it “just right.” Adam was reassured by the amount of information he had about Tessa, but too often, he had Tessa’s words but no way to sense her body language, facial expression, or the cadence of her speech. So he often missed what he really needed to know, what her presence would have provided.

  One such lapse occurred in a Gchat exchange that took place toward the end of their relationship. Adam presents it to me as a “good conversation” even though it upset Tessa. As he describes it, it seems clear that he couldn’t see how the more he wrote, the worse things were becoming. Why is this? Although he and Tessa were at cross purposes on Gchat, Adam felt reassured by the volume and animation of their repartee. There was so much going on! The absence of intimacy was disguised by frenetic rounds of connection.

  The context: Adam is staying in Tessa’s apartment while she is on a business trip. They had an argument and now, the following day, they use Gchat to reconcile. When Adam shows me the transcript of their conversation, he points out how comforting it was to him that his “voice” overlapped with Tessa’s.

  Most reassuring of all is when Tessa explicitly draws him close:

  TESSA: It must be weird being in my apartment without me, and wearing my tank tops.

  ADAM: I didn’t see your name on them. I have purchased a gift for you at the clothing store on Copp Street. Very hip.

  TESSA: Personalized shirts went out of style just as I got *some* bit of breast that would have sexily shown my moniker. A gift! Which store? Copp’s Closet? . . .

  ADAM: Did you mean to bold the word “some”?

  TESSA: Yes.

  ADAM: I want to kiss you.

  TESSA: Me too.

  ADAM: So kiss you.

  TESSA: I did.

  ADAM: Hot. . . . Yes weird to be in your place without you. I love it though. It truly reflects your spirit, taste. I am awed and obsessed by your books. Mind.

  Adam explains that in this last line he is trying to equate Tessa’s books and mind because she worries that she is “not as smart as the people writing the books she owns.” But at his words, Tessa becomes defensive: “Mind and books are sadly not equated.” Adam reassures her: “Allegedly. I want to type/talk forever love.” This time, at his attempt to reassure, Tessa moves to cut the conversation off. She replies: “I’ll let you go.”

  In this exchange, when Tessa feels insecure in the face of Adam’s overabundance of praise, she ends the conversation and then adds a thought to reassure herself. After cutting Adam off to say good-bye, Tessa tells him that she is going to “sit outside to read for a bit. I really miss reading for a couple of hours, or um, half-hour stretches.” He has made her anxious about her reading. So she makes sure to say that she is going to go read, but qualifies her statement, defensively. It’s been hard to read. Her work makes it difficult. She has to do it in short bits.

  Adam says that this exchange shows him and Tessa “at their best.” He says that they are “sharing,” “supporting each other,” and “aware of each other’s needs.” What Adam doesn’t mention is that the conversation also shows Tessa turning away from him when he touches on a subject that threatens her. And when this happens, Adam doesn’t retreat, but doubles down and says something Tessa probably does not believe: that he equates her mind with the brilliance of her books. If Adam had Tessa before him, in person, would he have seen her pull away, in retreat, her gaze withdrawn?

  Closure and the Archive

  The relationship ends when even the “better Adam”—with his crafted email and texting—cannot be empathic enough to meet Tessa’s standard. In a final telephone call, Tessa tells Adam that she needs more.

  The call leaves Adam feeling bereft and then angry. He writes Tessa an email to tell her that what she is asking for would destroy any relationship. “I said that when she doesn’t get what she wants she’s petulant and childlike. Which is damn true. . . . But I didn’t call her and say, ‘Hey, I want to talk to you about this.’ Why didn’t I level that charge face-to-face?”

  Adam begins to answer his own question. He says that when he wrote his angry email, he could imagine Tessa receiving it instantly but had some protection from her response. When she did respond, by text, she told him he was wrong and laid into him. Adam cannot bear to look at that text. He only says, “She responded with something pr
etty brutal.” He faced those cutting words on the screen but had not been willing to see her in person, perhaps saying such things.

  Adam stays on the subject of why he sent that final email to Tessa. When Tessa broke up with him he was plagued with self-doubt. Perhaps Tessa was right. Perhaps he was insufficiently empathic. “So, when I wanted to express my feelings to her and I thought I might be inadequate if I talked, I just went ahead and expressed my feelings in a way where I knew I would not fail: an email.” But the email failed miserably.All it provoked were more words designed to most hurt the other.

  What have new media done to the communications of love? They have deepened them and given them new immediacy. But online, with an archive of messages on hand, we feel we know more than we really do about our partners. Online, we are more likely to say cruel things. Digital exchanges disinhibit when love might be better served by tact. Adam says that online messaging “allows you to be slightly warmer than in real life.” And then he adds that it also allows you to be “slightly crueler” as well.

  Lovers have left each other insecure since the beginning of love. What I am struck with as I watch Adam juggling his phones and laptop is that when he wants to think about who he is and can be, he looks to his archive, beginning with the rapturous early messages “trapped” on his old phone. Indeed, Adam thinks the idea of a record was part of his relationship with Tessa from the very beginning.

  Even when we were doing this, we knew we had a record. A record of our conversations. I think it is powerful. I reread the conversations all the time. . . . There’s a permanence to it. We loved to talk on the phone, but sometimes . . . I wonder if one of the reasons that at some times we gravitated to this medium of conversation was . . . to be able to remember. . . . I treasure that permanence. . . . When she writes . . . “you are great,” she is saying “I have a need and you met it.” How central that is to have that written evidence, for the rest of my life in my Gmail . . . or to print it out if I want, whenever.

  The archive affirms Adam—he sees the self he wants to be—but of course, he is aware that having the archive also “cuts the other way.” Adam says, “When she says in this medium ‘You are insufficient,’ it’s devastating to read. . . . It wasn’t just something she said at the height of a fight. It was, like, measured. There’s a level of deliberation that’s baked in.”

  Adam thinks electronic communication helped him in this relationship because it allowed him time to craft his writing. But this means that Tessa’s texts and messages were also crafted. This seems fairly straightforward, but Adam admits that this is not something he has thought much about. He has always liked to think of Tessa’s messages as “straight from the heart”—more spontaneous than his own. But now, he says, “My mind is racing. I’m thinking, ‘Oh shit. . . . Maybe I shouldn’t value [the emails] as much as I do. Maybe there is something more deliberate and insincere than I give credit for.’” Adam wonders if he is a prisoner of his archive and is moved to ask, “How do you know someone in a true way?”

  Three Chairs

  Education

  Attentional Disarray

  I need to see who wants me. We are not as strong as technology’s pull.

  —A JUNIOR AT MIT, EXPLAINING WHY SHE CHECKS HER TEXTS DURING CLASS

  From what I hear, really good actors can actually teach really well.

  —ANANT AGARWAL, CEO OF EDX, THE HARVARD/MIT CONSORTIUM ON ONLINE EDUCATION, CONTEMPLATING THE SUBSTITUTION OF ACTORS FOR PROFESSORS IN ONLINE COURSES

  At MIT, I teach a seminar on science, technology, and memoir. Enrollment is capped at twenty students. The atmosphere is intimate. We read memoirs by scientists, engineers, and designers (one student favorite is Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten) and then the students tell their own stories.

  MIT students come from diverse backgrounds. Some have lived hardscrabble lives. During a recent fall semester, their stories were particularly poignant. One had escaped with his family from what was then the Soviet Union. Another had overcome deep poverty; there were many nights when he had no choice but to sleep in his car. And yet, through all of this, these students had found their way to science or engineering or design. Sometimes the inspiration had come from a teacher, parent, or friend. Sometimes it came from fascination with an object—a broken-down car, an old computer, a grandfather clock. The students seemed to understand each other, to find a rhythm. I thought the class was working.

  And then, halfway through the semester, a group of students asks to see me. They want to say that they have been texting during class and feel bad because of the very personal material being discussed. They say that they text in all their classes, but here, well, it somehow seems wrong. We decide that this is something the class should discuss as a group.

  In that discussion, more students admit that they, too, text in class. A small group says they are upset to hear this. They have been talking about the roughest times of their childhoods, about abuse and abandonment. But even they admit that they see checking for texts during class as the norm and have since high school. But why in this class? It’s a small seminar. They are talking about their lives.

  In the conversation that follows, my students portray constant connection as a necessity. These students don’t feel they can be present unless they are also, in a way, absent. For some, three minutes is too long to go without checking their phones. Some say two minutes is their rule. Those who bring tablets to class point out that a “social check” is as simple as touching a Facebook icon on their screen. They want to see who is in touch with them, a comfort in itself.

  We decide to try a device-free class with a short break to check phones. For me, something shifts. Conversations become more relaxed and cohesive. Students finish their thoughts, unrushed. What the students tell me is that they feel relief: When they are not tempted by their phones, they feel more in control of their attention. An irony emerges. For of course, on one level, we all see our phones as instruments for giving us greater control, not less.

  My students became upset because, in this class, their usual split attention (looking at their phones; listening to their classmates) felt wrong. It devalued their classmates’ life stories (and their own) and made them feel that they were crossing some moral line. They could imagine a day when people around you would be upset and you would still be pulled away to your phone.

  A lot is at stake in attention. Where we put it is not only how we decide what we will learn; it is how we show what we value.

  The Myth of Multitasking

  These days, attention is in short supply—in college classrooms, its scarcity poses special problems because, after all, so much money, time, and effort has been spent to bring together these students, this professor, these educational resources. And yet here, like everywhere, if we have a device in our hands, we want to multitask.

  But in this, we pursue an illusion. When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving quickly from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add to the mix. Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse. We’ve seen that not only do multitaskers have trouble deciding how to organize their time, but over time, they “forget” how to read human emotions. Students—for example, my students—think that texting during class does not interrupt their understanding of class conversation, but they are wrong. The myth of multitasking is just that: a myth.

  And yet, multitasking is the norm in classrooms. By 2012, nine in ten college students said that they text in class.

  The widespread adoption of texting was a landmark in the unfolding of the multitasked life. We’ve met the group of high school seniors in Connecticut for whom getting a smartphone over the 2008 holiday break made the spring term that followed it a new kind of experience: When these students are at school, in class and out of class, they text continually. There is so much tex
ting during school hours that their school put a “no texting in class” policy into effect, but the young men ignore it: Some claim to have never heard of it. Andrew says, “Most kids can text without looking, so . . . you’ll just be looking at the teacher, and under the table you’ve got your thumbs going crazy.”

  One of the more studious boys in the group, Oliver, takes pains to insist that his teachers should not take it personally when he texts in class. Teachers put the notes online; he “gets” what is going on in class, so “I’m almost always bored and I want to be somewhere else and I’m almost always texting.” He does admit that once he’s texting, the possibilities for concentrating are pretty much gone: “You can’t focus on the thing you are doing when you are sending the text . . . or waiting to receive a text . . . there is so much going on with other things you might want to receive on your phone.”

  Despite his new problem with focus, even in 2008, Oliver expects that what he has now is what he’ll have in the future. He imagines that from now on, when he feels bored, he will immediately add a new layer of communication. So for him, “boredom is a thing of the past.” Every generation, he says, had its own way of responding to being bored, especially during classes. Other generations passed notes, doodled, or zoned out. His generation can send texts and go to Facebook. He calls his generation “lucky”: “We have the awesome new power to erase boredom.”

  His friend Aidan disagrees. He thinks that this “awesome new power” means they have all lost focus. Maybe Oliver isn’t bored, but has he noticed that none of them are paying attention in class?