Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Within six months of the film’s release, it had almost 40 million online views. To me, its popularity suggests reason for cautious optimism. People recognize themselves in its disturbing scenario and are perhaps ready to rethink their relationship with their phones. See I Forgot My Phone, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8.

  even a silent phone: Andrew Przybyliski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2012): 1–10, doi:10.1177/0265407512453 827; Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,” Environment and Behavior (2014): 124, doi:10.1177/0013916514539755.

  the precautionary principle: This phrase is on a mural about cancer prevention in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it was how those who contributed to the mural synthesized the precautionary principle. Genevieve Howe, “Cambridge Mural Cries Out Against the Cancer Epidemic,” Peacework Magazine (March 1999), http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0399/039904.htm.

  to explore the self: For my early work on children and digital culture, see Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005 [1984]), and Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

  in his cabin: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1854]), 140.

  But after just six minutes: Timothy D. Wilson, David A. Reinhard, Erin C. Westgate, et al., “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345, no. 6192 (2014): 75–77, doi:10.1126/science.1250830.

  their ability to identify the feelings of others: For example, in one study children who had spent five days without devices were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly more than a control group. The authors write: “The results suggest that digital screen time, even when used for social interaction, could reduce time spent developing skills in reading nonverbal cues of human emotion.” Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, Jordan Morris, et al., “Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotional Cues,” Computers in Human Behavior 39 (2014): 387–92, doi:0.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036.

  somehow more lonely: For example, a 2006 study showed that the number of Americans who feel they have no one to discuss important matters with tripled from 1985 to 2004. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 353–75, doi:10.1177/000312240607100301. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001) describes the deterioration of American communal life. A May 2012 article by Steven Marchie in The Atlantic that considered social media and social isolation sparked a debate on “the Internet paradox.” More connecting can make us feel more alone. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930.

  children are less empathic: See Sara Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 2 (May 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

  this will degrade the performance: Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, “Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,” Computers and Education 62 (March 2013): 24–31, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003.

  “a national conversation”: In the Bible, the word conversation meant one’s relation to a community as a citizen. In the mid-fourteenth century, it still derives from words about “living together, having dealings with others,” and also “manner of conducting oneself in the world.” Dictionary.com, Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, historian, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conversation.

  To take the measure of these: Many hundreds of conversations about conversation make up the primary source material for this book. I begin with the “one-chair” conversations of solitude and self-reflection and then the “two-chair” conversations of friendship and intimacy (conversations with family, friends, and lovers). I then move out to the “three-chair” worlds of our social connections: the conversations we have about education, work, and politics. Unless otherwise noted, all the interviews I cite were conducted between 2010 and 2015. Unless I quote from the public record or a public meeting, I disguise the identities of the people I interviewed and the institutions (schools, universities, corporations) I visited.

  To consider “one- and two-chair” conversations, I talked with over 150 young people from their teens to early thirties, some interviewed in groups, some individually, and some in family settings. I held most of the group conversations in an office or conference room. But some were “cabin chats” with children at summer camp, usually gatherings of ten campers in their bunks before lights-out. Additionally, twenty-seven adults shared their most memorable conversations with me. And I also interviewed sixty-four middle school and high school educators—teachers, counselors, psychologists, and school administrators. In a few places, for a sense of recent history, I look back at the voices of young people I interviewed in 2008–2010. There, I worked with over three hundred interviews that document the not-so-distant days when texting and social media were new.

  My chapters on “three-chair conversations” focus on higher education and work. For the education chapter, I interviewed college and university professors, administrators, and students. Here, the number of people I interviewed is hard to add up because I drew on conversations over decades of working in a university.

  For my chapter on work, I spoke with a range of professionals including lawyers, doctors, architects, consultants, and members of the financial services community. In a software company I call HeartTech, a design firm I call Stoddard, and a consulting company I call ReadyLearn, I was able to run focus groups as well as have individual interviews with a wide range of employees, from engineers and programmers to financial executives, architects, and administrative assistants. For the chapter on work I spoke with 202 individuals.

  When I talk about the conversations of the public square, my emphasis is the emerging political sensibilities of those who grew up with smartphones, and I return primarily to my data on adolescents and young adults.

  We have built machines that speak: I have been studying our conversations with intelligent machines for over three decades. Hundreds of subjects, child and adult, have been involved in this work. For a review of earlier studies, see my Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  THE FLIGHT FROM CONVERSATION

  “My guess—and I think”: The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New Digital Age,’” February 26, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGzB7uveh0.

  “Don’t all these little tweets”: The Colbert Report, January 17, 2011.

  Studies show that the mere presence of a phone: Andrew Przybyliski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2012): 1–10, doi:10.1177/0265407512453827.

  each feels less connected to the other: Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,” Environment and Behavior (2014): 124, doi:10.1177/0013916514539755. This study takes the theme of “Can You Connect with Me Now?,” a laboratory experiment, and investigates it in a natural setting with similar results.

  a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications: Psychologist Sara Konrath colla
ted evidence from seventy-two studies that suggested that empathy levels among U.S. college students are 40 percent lower than they were twenty years ago. She notes that in the past ten years there has been an especially sharp drop. She and her team speculate that this may be due to the increase in mediated communication—“with so much time spent interacting with others online rather than in reality, interpersonal dynamics such as empathy might certainly be altered.” See Sara Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 2 (May 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

  when children hear less adult talk: D. A. Christakis, J. Gilkerson, J. A. Richards, et al., “Audible Television and Decreased Adult Words, Infant Vocalizations, and Conversational Turns: A Population-Based Study,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 163, no. 6 (June 2009): 554–58, doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.61.

  In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection: In this study, not surprisingly, video chat was second and audio chat third in providing feelings of connection. L. E. Sherman, M. Michikyan, and Patricia Greenfield, “The Effects of Text, Audio, Video, and In-Person Communication on Bonding Between Friends,” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 7, no. 2, article 1 (2013), doi:10.5817/CP2013-2-3.

  we become most human to each other: The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that the presence of a face calls forth the human ethical compact. See Alterity and Transcendence, Michael B. Smith, trans. (London: Athlone, 1999).

  will only know how to be lonely: This idea is treated in the work of psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott; see especially “The Capacity to Be Alone,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39, no. 5 (September–October 1958): 416–20.

  our culture of continual performance: Brené Brown’s TED presentation on the power of vulnerability is one of the most viewed TED talks. Delivered in June 2010, by February 2015 it had been watched on the TED site over 20 million times. http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en.

  depression and social anxiety: Mark W. Becker, Reem Alzahabi, and Christopher J. Hopwood, “Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 16, no. 2 (November 5, 2012): 132–35, doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0291.

  difficulty reading human emotions: Media psychologist Clifford Nass at Stanford was working on social media and empathy before his death in 2013. See Elizabeth Cohen, reporting on Clifford Nass’s resesarch: “Does Life Online Give You ‘Popcorn Brain’?,” CNN, June 23, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/06/23/tech.popcorn.brain.ep/index.html. When multitaskers are shown pictures of faces, they have a hard time identifying what the people in the pictures are feeling. When you read stories to multitaskers, they have difficulty identifying the emotions of the people in the stories and saying what they would do to make the people in the stories feel better. See Clifford Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth?,” Pacific Standard, April 23, 2012, http://www.psmag.com/culture/is-facebook-stunting-your-childs-growth-40577. See also Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” PNAS (Early Edition) 106, no. 37 (2009): 1–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106.

  greater self-esteem and an improved ability to deal with others: Roy Pea, Clifford Nass, Lyn Meheula, et al., “Media Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls,” Developmental Psychology 48, no. 2 (2012): 327–36, doi:10.1037/a0027030.

  the presence of a phone on the landscape: The study in which even a phone turned off on a table “changes the topic” is Przybyliski and Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now?” As noted, a second study took the theme of “Can You Connect with Me Now?,” a laboratory experiment, and investigated it in a natural setting with similar results. It was in this second study that the phone on the landscape led to lesser feelings of empathic connection between people in the conversation. Misra, Cheng, Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect.”

  Are we depriving them of skills: We know that children from different socioeconomic backgrounds develop different language abilities. Those from less advantaged backgrounds know fewer words and have slower language-processing speeds. They start out behind in their ability to express themselves. If parents from all walks of life don’t feel that conversation is important, all children will begin life with a language deficit and a deficit in the interpersonal skills that we learn through language. See Anne Fernald, Virginia A. Marchman, and Adriana Weisleder, “SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at Eighteen Months,” Developmental Science 16, no. 2 (2013): 234–48.

  “continuous partial attention”: This term was coined by technology expert Linda Stone. See “Continuous Partial Attention,” http://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention.

  the most powerful path to human connection: Mark R. Dadds, Jennifer L. Allen, Bonamy R. Oliver, et al., “Love, Eye Contact, and the Developmental Origins of Empathy Versus Psychopathy,” British Journal of Psychiatry 200 (2012): 191–96, doi:0.1192/bjp.bp.110.085720.

  “gradual completion of thoughts while speaking”: There are many translations of this essay and this sentiment. See, for example, Heinrich von Kleist, On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, David Constantine, ed. and trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 405.

  love and politics: In fact, as an example of how conversation brings us to our best ideas, Kleist uses Mirabeau’s declaration of the rights of a nation at the start of the French Revolution. Mirabeau stumbles toward eloquence because he has an interlocutor. You can sense that he thrills his audience and himself.

  In the new communications culture: That there is a cognitive and emotional side to our desire for interruption was pointed out by Nicholas Carr. He said: “We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.” Carr, following Cory Doctorow, called the experience of being at a computer being “plugged into an ecosystem of interruption technologies.” See The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 133–34, 91.

  “Scandal! Caught playing iPhone”: Alex Kantrowitz, “John McCain Unapologetic After Playing iPhone Poker During Syria Hearing,” Forbes, September 3, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkantrowitz/2013/09/03/john-mccain-unapologetic-after-playing-iphone-poker-during-syria-hearing/.

  open screens degrade the performance: Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, “Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,” Computers & Education 62 (March 2013): 24–31, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003.

  the experience of boredom is directly linked to creativity: Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?,” Creativity Research Journal 26, no. 2 (2014): 165–73. For an overview on this point, see Scott Adams, “The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903454504576486412642177904.html.

  What our brains want is new input: For more on the neural reward systems involved in information-seeking behavior: Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?,” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998): 306–69. The public conversation of how the brain itself is changed by online life has been shaped by the work of Nicholas Carr in The Shallows. The argument is that the more one lives a life online, the more one is incapable of quiet reverie (and by extension, deep reading and full-attention conversation).

  emotional life of teenage girls: Nass studied the online life of young women, aged eight to twelve—a critical time in the building of identity and a stable sense of self. One
result of that work was this coauthored paper: Pea, Nass, Meheula, et al., “Media Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls.”

  you are not focusing on your own feelings either: Simon Baron-Cohen, an empathy researcher, made this point: “Empathy often goes hand-in-hand with self-awareness. The people who are good at empathy are not only good at picking up on other people’s feelings, but they—they’re also good at reflecting on their own behavior.” See “Does Empathy Explain Cruelty?,” Science Friday, September 30, 2011, http://www.sciencefriday.com/guests/simon-baron-cohen.html#page/full-width-list/1. For Baron-Cohen’s argument on the decline in empathy as a cause of personal and social cruelty, see The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

  capacities for self-reflection: Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth?” For a review of people’s tendency to recall negative events more strongly than positive ones: Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Catrin Finkenauer, “Bad Is Stronger than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5, no. 4 (2001): 323–70, doi:10.1037//1089-2680.5.4.323. The work of Antonio Damasio and colleagues suggests that certain emotions—for example, admiration and compassion—actually take longer to process at a neural level than responses to physical pain. See Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio, et al., “Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion,” PNAS 10, no. 19 (2009): 8021–26. In environments of mediated communication, this matters because interactions happen too quickly to elicit empathic responses. This study’s lead researcher, Immordino-Yang, a former junior-high teacher, summed up this finding in an interview: “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.” A team led by Antonio Damasio also uncovered a link between compassion and the default mode network, the same region that is activated when people are alone with their thoughts. Admiration for virtue as well as compassion for social or psychological pain are processed in the default mode. Both are slower-processed responses, the kind that we are speeding ourselves out of in a life of good news. See Rick Nauert, “Twitter Tweets, Texting May Lack Compassion,” Psych Central, April 14, 2009, http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/04/14/twitter-tweets-texting-may-lack-compassion/5317.html).