Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  “a sentimental education”: Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth?”

  every six and a half minutes: This statistic is from a widely reported study of mobile phone usage commissioned by Nokia in 2013. For example, see “Mobile Users Can’t Leave Their Phone Alone for Six Minutes and Check It up to 150 Times a Day,” Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276752/Mobile-users-leave-phone-minutes-check-150-times-day.html.

  There are now baby bouncers: This is known as the iPad Apptivity Seat, made by Fisher-Price. Here is how it is described on Amazon: “It’s a grow-with-me seat for baby that’s soothing, entertaining, and has a touch of technology, too.” It should be noted that the seat did draw pushback from the public. http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/action/tell-fisher-price-no-ipad-bouncy-seats-infants.

  within five minutes of waking up: Marketers rely on this fact—these numbers come from a report co-released by Ipsos MediaCT and Wikia (a web hosting and wiki farm site): “Generation Z: The Limitless Generation Study of 1,200 Teen Wikia Users by Wikia and Ipsos MediaCT,” PR NewsWire, March 19, 2013, http://www.wikia.com/Generation_Z:_A_Look_at_the_Technology_and_Media_Habits_of_Today’s_Teens.

  send one hundred texts a day: Amanda Lenhardt, “Teens, Smartphones, and Texting,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting.

  sleep with their phones: Amanda Lenhardt, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, et al., “Teens and Mobile Phones,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, April 20, 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/04/20/teens-and-mobile-phones.

  do not “unplug,” ever: “Generation Z: The Limitless Generation Study of 1200 Teen Wikia Users by Wikia and Ipsos MediaCT,” PR NewsWire.

  six or seven simultaneous streams: This finding is from research conducted by the LEGO company. It was brought to my attention by Sasha Strauss’s presentation at the Milken Institute’s conference in May 2014. “Capturing the ‘Cool Factor’ in Consumer Tech,” Currency of Ideas, May 2014, http://currency-of-ideas.tumblr.com/post/84355392003/capturing-the-cool-factor-in-consumer-tech.

  likely to be using four at a time: The top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four media at one time whenever they are using media. Clifford Nass, “The Myth of Multitasking,” narrated by Ira Flatow, Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, May 10, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking.

  degrades our performance: Ophir, Nass, and Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” New research suggests that a small percentage of the population—1 to 2 percent—are able to multitask. For the other 98 to 99 percent of the world, every new task degrades performance, and there is a further irony: The more you multitask, the worse you get at multitasking. Maria Konnikova, “Multitask Masters,” The New Yorker, May 7, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05/multitask-masters.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20(173).

  it makes us less productive: Zheng Wang and John M. Tchernev, “The ‘Myth’ of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications,” Journal of Communication 62 (2012): 493–513, doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01641.x.

  depression, social anxiety: Becker, Alzahabi, and Hopwood, “Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety.”

  problems with self-esteem: Pea, Nass, Meheula, et al. “Media Use: Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old-Girls.”

  “the seeking drive”: Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp coined this term. Jaak Panskepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151. For a generalist’s concerned view about the neuroscience of technology use, see Emily Yoffe, “Seeking How the Brain Hardwires Us to Love Google, Twitter, and Texting. And Why That’s Dangerous,” Slate, August 12, 2009, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/08/seeking.html.

  design for vulnerability: I owe this evocative phrase to a conversation with Emily Carlin.

  “a deliberate action”: Giles M. Phillips, “Are Mobile Users More Vigilant?,” Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Web Science (2014): 289–90, doi:10.1145/2615569.2615642.

  health and emotional well-being: There are signs that within the technology industry, a new generation of designers is converging on this theme. See, for example, Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook’s “like” button, and Tristan Harris, currently working at Google, arguing for design that does not seize and capture our attention but helps us live our fullest lives. This is design that would measure the success of an app, as Harris puts it, not by time spent but by “time well spent.” See Rosenstein in May 2014, http://techcrunch.com/video/do-great-things-keynote-by-justin-rosenstein-of-asana/518220046/ and Harris in December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5r Rh9AZf4. Harris hopes that “time well spent” could become a new branding standard, much as the label “organic” is something that consumers look for. Personal communication with author, April 6, 2015.

  words that mean: Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2015, http://www.oed.com). http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40748?rskey=URvqon&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.

  may not even know: For a review of how universities are trying to put conversation on the curriculum, see “The University: The Social Emotional Well-Being of College Students,” Aspen Ideas Festival, July 1, 2014, http://www.aspenideas.org/session/social-emotional-well-being-college-students.

  spare parts to support our fragile selves: Writing long before constant connectivity was on the radar, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut described fragile people—he called them narcissistic personalities—who are characterized not by a love of self but by a damaged sense of self. They try to shore themselves up by turning other people into what Kohut calls “selfobjects.” In the role of selfobject, another person is experienced as part of oneself, thus in perfect tune with a fragile inner state. New communications technology makes it easier to serve up people as slivers of self, providing a sense that to get what you need from others you have multiple and inexhaustible options. On the psychology that needs these “slivers,” see Paul Orenstein, ed., The Search for Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut (1950–1978), vol. 2 (New York: International Universities Press, 1978).

  meals shared with their families: The dinners protect from delinquency and drug addiction. They predict academic success. For a review of this research, see Barbara H. Fiese and Marlene Schwartz, “Reclaiming the Family Table: Mealtimes and Child Health and Well-Being,” Society for Research in Child Development, Social Policy Report 22, no. 4 (2008), http://srcd.org/sites/default/files/documents/22-4_fiese.pdf.

  interrupt dinner ourselves: The Facebook ad, with its tongue-in-cheek attack on conversation, signals our cultural moment. So does an altogether serious op-ed in the New York Times, “Is Family Dinner Overrated?” The article begins with the well-known litany of positive outcomes associated with dinner. And then it points out the obvious: It isn’t dinner that makes the difference, it’s whether parents “use the time to engage with their children and learn about their day-to-day lives.” The author’s summation: “If you aren’t able to make the family meal happen on a regular basis, don’t beat yourself up: just find another way to connect with your kids.”

  The intent of the op-ed is to remind parents that connecting with their children is essential. If you can’t do it at dinner, do it elsewhere. Between the lines, its message reads: Since we all know dinner is important, but we aren’t really eating it together, perhaps we should start connecting elsewhere. That’s fair. But if you take away dinner, you have to open up another space. For social scientists to make the point that what matters at dinner is the conversation, not the food, does not mean that din
ner doesn’t matter. Dinner matters a great deal because it is traditionally the time that our culture set aside for families to talk to one another. Perhaps it is easier to have a fantasy that there will be “another time” to connect with your kids than to do the work of making the kitchen and dining room a “sacred space” for conversation—the first advice I give parents who ask me how to raise a relational child in a digital world. Ann Meier and Kelly Musick, “Is the Family Dinner Overrated?,” New York Times, June 29, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/is-the-family-dinner-overrated.htm.

  good for the bottom line: Benjamin N. Waber, People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us About the Future (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2015), and Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguin Olguin, Taemie Kim, et al., “Productivity Through Coffee Breaks: Changing Social Networks by Changing Break Structure,” Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Trento, Italy (2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1586375.

  learning more “efficient”: In summer 2011, I attended a retreat for administrators in higher education that was focused on “productivity” in higher education. It was clear that this group saw the problem as how they would respond to demands to “prove” that their system was cost effective. At the center of their deliberations: how online courses would help them quantify student participation and student learning according to standard measures.

  magic of simulated feelings: And in China, Microsoft has released XiaoIce, a sophisticated artificial intelligence designed to chat with you on your phone. A September 5, 2014, blog post gives the flavor of the ambitions of this project: “By simply adding her to a chat, people can have extended conversations with her. But XiaoIce is much more evolved than the chatbots you might remember. XiaoIce is a sophisticated conversationalist with a distinct personality. She can chime into a conversation with context-specific facts about things like celebrities, sports, or finance but she also has empathy and a sense of humor. Using sentiment analysis, she can adapt her phrasing and responses based on positive or negative cues from her human counterparts. She can tell jokes, recite poetry, share ghost stories, relay song lyrics, pronounce winning lottery numbers and much more. Like a friend, she can carry on extended conversations that can reach hundreds of exchanges in length. . . . Since launch, she has had 0.5 billion conversations. People were amazed . . . by her personality and sense of humor. XiaoIce has been ranked as Weibo’s top influencer, and currently has over 850,000 followers on the service.” From the blog post of Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing, “Meet XiaoIce, Cortana’s Little Sister,” September 5, 2014, http://blogs.bing.com/search/2014/09/05/meet-xiaoice-cortanas-little-sister.

  exemplars of “affective computing”: See, for example, the seminal work in this field by Rosalind W. Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).

  function, not a feeling: For more on this, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 106.

  problem in the first place: This issue is the theme of technology critic Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), where he calls this fallacy “solutionism.”

  take a “smartphone-free” night: For an example of how one company insisted that its consultants take “predictable time off” from their phones during the workweek, see the case of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a large international consulting company. Notably, it was important that the program also included time spent talking in your collegial group, your team, to plan work and support the group. See Leslie A. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

  Sabbaths, and sabbaticals: See, for example, digitaldetox.org. There, the rules are: “No digital technology. No phones, Internet or screens. No FOMO (fear of missing out).”

  “No one ever pulled out an iPad”: “Steve Jobs didn’t let his children use iPhones and here’s why.” Inquisitr, September, 11, 2014, http://www.inquisitr.com/1468612. Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, also limits his children’s screen time. See Ian Parker, “The Shape of Things to Come,” The New Yorker, February 23, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come.

  encourage empathic habits: Sara Konrath, “Harnessing Mobile Media for Good,” Psychology Today, December 18, 2013, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-empathy-gap/201312/harnessing-mobile-media-good.

  when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable: This simple statement is an example of something that people don’t always want to acknowledge but know “by heart.” As evidence of this, again, see the popularity of Brené Brown’s TED talk on the power of vulnerability, viewed 20 million times, http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en.

  SOLITUDE

  “being a person”: “Louis C.K. Hates Cell Phones,” September 20, 2013, YouTube video, Conan O’Brien, posted by Team CoCo, September 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c.

  don’t want to get a phone for my kids: ibid.

  important for introverts: Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown, 2012).

  “default mode network”: For an overview of the past thirty years of research on the default mode, see Randy L. Buckner, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L. Schacter, “The Brain’s Default Network: Anatomy, Function, and Relevance to Disease,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 1–38, doi:10.1196/annals.1440.011. The authors write that “the default mode network is active when individuals are engaged in internally focused tasks including autobiographical memory retrieval, envisioning the future, and conceiving the perspectives of others.” They also discuss potential connections between disruptions in the default mode network and autism spectrum disorder: For them, disruption in the default mode “might result in a mind that is environmentally focused and absent a conception of other people’s thoughts”: 26.

  culture of continual sharing: A 2012 study reported that the median number of texts (i.e., the midpoint user in a sample) sent on a typical day by teens 12–17 rose from 50 in 2009 to 60 in 2011. For girls 14–18, that number is 100. Amanda Lenhardt, “Teens, Smartphones & Texting,” March 19, 2012, Pew Research Center for Internet, Science, and Technology, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting.

  building a false self: Donald W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1965), 32.

  we live too “thickly”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1854]), 136.

  reveries of solitude: See, for example, Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, et al., “Experience Sampling During fMRI Reveals Default Network and Executive System Contributions to Mind Wandering,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 21 (May 26, 2009): 8719–24, doi:10.1073/pnas.0900234106; see also the overview of “mindwandering” research in John Tierney, “Discovering the Virtues of Mind Wandering,” New York Times (June 28, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/ 29tier.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, and Josie Glausiusz, “Devoted to Distraction,” Psychology Today, March 1, 2009, http://www.psychology today.com/articles/ 200903/devoted-distraction.

  tends to worship sociality: For an overview of our love affair with the gregarious, to the point that we have turned it into a civic virtue, see Susan Cain, Quiet.

  people thinking on their own: In Quiet, Susan Cain tells this compelling story: The original work that extolled brainstorming, getting together to generate ideas, was done by Alex F. Osborn in the 1940s and reported in Your Creative Power (New York: Scribner, 1948). In Keith Sawyer’s Group Geni
us: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007), Sawyer reviews Osborne’s studies: They show that although brainstorming leads to more ideas, it also leads to more bad ideas. People are moved to go along with bad ideas to feel part of a group process.

  rise of playground accidents: CDC statistics indicate that nonfatal injuries to children under five rose by 12 percent from 2007 to 2010. This is a reversal of a decrease in accidents over the previous decade. See Ben Worthen, “The Perils of Texting While Parenting,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444772404577589683644202996.

  time and stillness: Erik Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980 [1952]), and Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950).

  build their own games: See, for example, work in the “constructionist” tradition of children beginning as programmers developed at MIT in the group around Seymour Papert’s Learning and Epistemology Group. The classic statement of this position was in Papert’s Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1980). This tradition of constructivist work continues at MIT in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group and development of the Scratch programming language by Mitchel Resnick at MIT. http://scratch.mit.edu/info/research.