Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Remember what you know about life. We’ve seen that we learn the capacity for solitude by being “alone with” another. And I’ve found that if we distract ourselves with technology during these crucial moments, even the most passionate proponents of always-on connection admit to doubt. So, when parents email during a child’s bath time or text during a beach walk, the parents may persist in their behavior but they admit they are not happy. They sense they have crossed some line. One father tells me that he takes his phone along when he and his ten-year-old son have a game of catch. The father says, “I can tell it’s not as good as when I played catch with my dad.” Early in my research I meet a mother who has gotten into the habit of texting while she breast-feeds. She tells me simply, “This is a habit I might want to break.” It is a deeply human impulse to step back from these moments that endanger shared solitude.

  Shared solitude grounds us. It can bring us back to ourselves and others. For Thoreau, walking was a kind of shared solitude, a way to “shake off the village” and find himself, sometimes in the company of others. In her writing about how people struggle to find their potential, Arianna Huffington notes the special resonance of Thoreau’s phrase, for these days we have a new kind of village to shake off. It is most likely to be our digital village, with its demands for performance and speed and self-disclosure.

  Huffington reminds us that if we find ourselves distracted, we should not judge ourselves too harshly. Even Thoreau became distracted. He got upset that when walking in the woods, he would sometimes find himself caught up in a work problem. He said, “But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. . . . What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

  We know the answer to that question. Even if Thoreau’s mind did sometimes travel to work or village, he accomplished a great deal on those walks. As in any meditative practice, the mind may wander, but then it comes back to the present, to the breath, to the moment. Even if he became distracted, Thoreau was making room for that. These days, we take so many walks in which we don’t look at what is around us—not at the scenery, not at our companions. We are heads-down in our phones. But like Thoreau, we can come back to what is important. We can use our technology, all of our technology, with greater intention. We can practice getting closer to ourselves and other people. Practice may not make perfect. But this is a realm where perfect is not required. And practice always affirms our values, our true north.

  Don’t avoid difficult conversations. We’ve seen that beyond our personal and work lives, we are having trouble talking to one another in the public square. In particular, we are having trouble with new questions about privacy and self-ownership.

  I’ve said that these matters are examples of objects-not-to-think-with. They are characterized by a lack of simple connections between actions and consequences. There is a danger, but it is hard to define the exact damage you fear. Moreover, it is hard to know if the damage has already been done. These questions vex us and we are tempted to turn our attention elsewhere. Remember Lana, who was happy she didn’t have anything controversial to say so she wouldn’t have to confront that online life gave her no place to say it. She didn’t want to have the conversation.

  To encourage these conversations, it helps to avoid generalities. We claim not to be interested in online privacy until we are asked about specifics—phone searches without warrants, or data collection by the National Security Agency. Then it turns out we are very interested indeed.

  One reason we avoid conversations about online privacy is that we feel on shaky moral ground. If you complain that Google is keeping your data forever and this doesn’t seem right, you are told that when you opened your Google account, you agreed to terms that gave Google the right to do just this. And to read the content of your mail. And to build a digital double. And to sell its contents. Since you didn’t actually read the terms of agreement, you begin the conversation disempowered. It seems that by agreeing to be a consumer you gave away rights that you might want to claim as a citizen.

  But then, if we feel that our digital doubles incorrectly represent us or block us from the information we want, we don’t know how to object. Should we be talking with the companies that track and commodify us? Should our conversation be with the government, who might be in a position to regulate some of this activity? Yet the government, too, is claiming its right to our data. We are shut down by not knowing an appropriate interlocutor, just as we are shut down by not knowing exactly what they “have” on us, or how to define our rights.

  But just because these conversations are difficult doesn’t mean they are impossible. They are necessary and they have begun. One conversation is about how to develop a realistic notion of privacy today. It clearly can’t be what it was before. But that doesn’t mean that citizens can live in a world without privacy rights, which is where conversations end up when they begin with the overwhelmed stance, “This is too hard to think about.”

  One proposal from the legal community would shift the discussion from the language of privacy rights to the language of control over one’s own data. In this approach, the companies that collect our data would have responsibilities to protect it—the way doctors and lawyers are bound to protect the information we share with them. In both cases, the person who provides the data retains control of how they are used.

  And another conversation has grown up around transparency: How much do we have a right to know about the algorithms that reflect our data back to us? Being a smartphone user puts you in a new political class that has to learn to assert its rights.

  An idea builds slowly. Those who take our data have one set of interests. We who give up our data have another. We have been led to believe that giving up our personal data is a fair trade for free services and helpful suggestions; this questionable notion of the fair trade has slowed down our ability to think critically.

  It will take politicizing this conversation to get this conversation going. If it doesn’t use a political language, a language of interests and conflicts, the conversation stalls—it moves to the language of cost-benefit analysis. Would you be willing to trade your privacy for the convenience of free email and word-processing programs? But the Constitution does not let us trade away certain freedoms. We don’t get to “decide” if we want to give away freedom of speech.

  And the conversation stalls if it moves too quickly to technical details. For example, I try to talk about the effect of knowing we are being tracked with a software engineer in his mid-sixties who has a special interest in public policy. I ask him, “Does tracking inhibit people’s willingness to speak their minds online?” His response is dismissive: “Don’t they [the public] know that these algorithms are stupid? They are so bad . . . they don’t mean anything.” This was meant as comfort to me. But it provided none. From his point of view, the discussion of individuals’ rights to their personal data can be deferred because the algorithms that regularly invade individual privacy aren’t “good enough.” “Good enough” for what?

  Try to avoid all-or-nothing thinking. The digital world is based on binary choice. Our thinking about it can’t be. This is true whether we are talking about computers in classrooms, distance learning, or the use of teleconferencing in large organizations. But in all these arenas, when computational possibilities are introduced, camps form and the middle ground disappears.

  The complexity of our circumstances calls for a flexibility of approach. But it is hard to summon. To return to the question of the Internet and privacy, one common reaction to how vulnerable we feel is to retreat to a position where any resistance is futile. When Internet companies are saving what you say, search, and share, you are offering up so much information that it begins to seem petty to object to any particular encroachment. It becomes like living in a city filled with security cameras and o
bjecting to a particular camera on a particular street corner. So instead of talking about what should be our rights, we adapt to rules we actually object to.

  Or, instead of talking about what our rights should be, we react with rigidity. When no one can think of a way to have complete online privacy, people start to say that no change will work unless it brings total openness. Technology critic Evgeny Morozov makes a pitch for a less binary view by considering the history of another by-product of technological progress: noise. An anti-noise movement in the early twentieth century insisted that noise was not just an individual problem but also a political one. And then the anti-noise campaigners compromised to achieve realistic goals that made a difference. Morozov says, “Not all of their reforms paid off, but the politicization of noise inspired a new generation of urban planners and architects to build differently, situating schools and hospitals in quieter zones, and using parks and gardens as buffers against traffic.”

  Just as industrialization “wanted” noise, the information society “wants” uncontrolled access to data. This doesn’t mean they get to have everything they want.

  The anti-noise campaigners didn’t want to turn back industrialization. They didn’t want silent cities, but cities that took the human need for rest, talk, and tranquillity into consideration. By analogy, in our current circumstance, we don’t want to discard social media, but we may want to rewrite our social contract with it. If it operated more transparently, we might not feel so lost in our dialogue with it and about it. One way to begin this dialogue is to politicize our need for solitude, privacy, and mindspace.

  Places

  So, there are guideposts and ways to begin. But distractions too often override conversations. We’ve seen family dinner tables where children literally beg for the attention of parents who love them. We’ve seen classes where a teacher is present but students’ faces are lowered to phones. And we’ve created a political culture in which contention rather than conversation is the rule. We show little interest in listening to good ideas if they come from political opponents. Indeed, we see politicians awkwardly rejecting their own good ideas if they are now put forth by members of an opposing party.

  In this environment, it makes sense to recall what is hopeful: We can reclaim places for conversation, and we still know where to find each other. Parents can find children at the dinner table; teachers can find students in class and office hours. Colleagues at work can find each other in hallways, in mini-kitchens, and in meetings. In politics, we have institutions for debate and action. Looking at these, we’ve seen disruptions in the field: meetings that aren’t meetings and classes that are waiting to be digitized. And of course, where this book began: family dinners that are silent because each member is taken away on a device.

  But the importance of focusing on the places where conversation can happen, and reclaiming them—as opposed to just saying, “Put down your phone”—is that the places themselves propose a sustained conversation, week after week, year after year. Legislatures in democracies—these have been built over centuries. When they go through rough patches, we count on the idea that their existence means that there will be other days and other chances, because, in a democracy, certain conversations are a responsibility. The family dinner at your house is something created and built over time. As you build it, you teach your children that problems need not be catastrophes; they can be talked through today and again tomorrow. It is a place to develop a sense of proportion. It may seem innocuous when parents are too distracted to discuss the small ups and downs of childhood. But there is a cost. Parental attention helps children learn what is and is not an emergency and what children can handle on their own. Parental inattention can mean that, to a child, everything feels urgent.

  A child alone with a problem has an emergency. A child in conversation with a grown-up is facing a moment in life and learning how to cope with it.

  When we reclaim conversation and the places to have them, we are led to reconsider the importance of long-term thinking. Life is not a problem looking for a quick fix. Life is a conversation and you need places to have it. The virtual provides us with more spaces for these conversations and these are enriching. But what makes the physical so precious is that it supports continuity in a different way; it doesn’t come and go, and it binds people to it. You can’t just log off or drop out. You learn to live things through.

  Students who resist coming to office hours speak in glowing terms of how, when they finally show up, they find mentors who have persisted in asking them to come in and talk. The phrase that sticks with me is a student quoting his teacher, who kept saying, “You’re going to come tomorrow, right?”

  I’ve said that our crisis in conversation can also be described as a crisis in mentorship. People step away from mentorship and use technology as an excuse. Employers delegate to email an evaluation that could be a mentoring conversation if done face-to-face. Teachers are encouraged to equate what they can offer their students in class with something that can be captured in a series of six-minute videos. Parents don’t ask their children to put down their smartphones at dinner, as if the phones are a generational right; many parents seem prepared to accept robot babysitters if they can prove their safety. In all these cases, I see us turn away from what we know about love and work.

  Public Conversations

  We turn away because we feel helpless. And so many people tell me that they feel alone—that they have to figure things out by themselves, everything from their privacy on Facebook to their sense that their data are being used and they don’t quite know how or why. But we can think through these things together.

  Public conversations give us a way to reclaim private conversations by modeling them, including how to show tolerance and genuine interest in what other people are saying. They can teach how conversation unfolds, not in proclamations or bullet points but in turn taking, negotiation, and other rhythms of respect.

  People have long sensed that this kind of public conversation is crucial to democracy. Historically, there have been markets and town squares and town meetings. There have been clubs and coffeehouses and salons. The sociologist Jürgen Habermas associates the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse with the rise of a “public sphere.” That was a place where people of all classes could talk about politics without fear of arrest. “What a lesson,” the Abbé Prévost said in 1728, “to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffeehouses . . . are the seats of English liberty.”

  Of course there was never any perfect public sphere. The coffeehouse required leisure and some money. It was not a place for women. Nevertheless, the coffeehouses were a place to talk about politics and learn how to talk about it. Joseph Addison, the essayist and politician, writing in 1714 as the voice of the newspaper The Spectator, makes the point that he enjoys coffeehouse debates because they are a place to learn. “Coffee houses have ever since been my chief Places of Resort, where I have made the greatest Improvements; in order to which I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”

  When Addison went to the coffeehouse, he wanted to talk only to people he disagreed with. That is a long way from today’s politically committed students who avoid talking about politics with those who disagree with them, even if they live just down the hall. But, long way or not, the image of Addison inspires: He uses a public conversation to keep him open to changing his mind.

  A public conversation can model freedom of thought. It can model courage and compromise. It can help people think things through.

  When Thoreau thought about our responsibility to occupy the present, he talked about improving his “nick of time.” To capture this thought, Thoreau takes a moment to reflect, even to put a notch on his walking stick:

  In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

  The “nick” raises the question of legacy. We represent a past that needs to be considered precisely, even as we create a new world. Whatever the weather, Thoreau chooses to improve his moment. He summons us to ours.

  A Fourth Chair?

  The End of Forgetting

  What Do We Forget When We Talk to Machines?

  There are some people who have tried to make friends . . . but they’ve fallen through so badly that they give up. So when they hear this idea about robots being made to be companions, well, it’s not going to be like a human and have its own mind to walk away or ever leave you or anything like that.

  —A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL, CONSIDERING THE IDEA OF A MORE SOPHISTICATED SIRI

  Thoreau talks of three chairs and I think about a fourth. Thoreau says that for the most expansive conversations, the deepest ones, he brought his guests out into nature—he calls it his withdrawing room, his “best room.” For me, the fourth chair defines a philosophical space. Thoreau could go into nature, but now, we contemplate both nature and a second nature of our own making, the world of the artificial and virtual. There, we meet machines that present themselves as open for conversation. The fourth chair raises the question: Who do we become when we talk to machines?

  Some talking machines have modest ambitions—such as putting you through the paces of a job interview. But others aspire to far more. Most of these are just now coming on the scene: “caring robots” that will tend to our children and elders if we ourselves don’t have the time, patience, or resources; automated psychotherapy programs that will substitute for humans in conversation. These present us with something new.