Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  “I shall be fed”: Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W.Norton, 1950).

  a device-free summer camp: My visit took place in the summer of 2013. All of the adolescents I spoke with at camp were fourteen and fifteen. I interviewed them in six groups of around ten each. Of course, these “bunk chat” interviews took place in a special setting, a place where campers check in their phones at the beginning of a month-long session. So these campers were self-selected as teens willing to do without their phones for at least that long.

  wait for the responses to come in: “Louis C.K. Hates Cell Phones,” YouTube video, Conan O’Brien, posted by Team CoCo, September 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c.

  new conversations about the self: See, for example, Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2011). And John Hamilton, “The World Wide Web,” Kim Leary, “Cyberplaces,” and Marsha Levy-Warren, “Computer Games,” in The Inner History of Devices, Sherry Turkle, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).

  Communities of practice form: Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  Instead of talking: Here, in the family, an issue comes up that mirrors questions of privacy on a larger scale, something to which I’ll return. See “The Public Square.”

  FRIENDSHIP

  eyes on your phone: Macmillan Dictionary, BuzzWord section, “Phubbing,” http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/phubbing.html.

  including face-to-face communication: By 2012, a Pew Research Center report found that “63 percent of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of daily communication, including phone calling by cell phone (39 percent do that with others every day), face-to-face socializing outside of school (35 percent), social network site messaging (29 percent), instant messaging (22 percent), talking on landlines (19 percent) and emailing (6 percent).” Amanda Lenhart, “Teens, Smartphones & Texting,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting. By 2015, 88 percent of teens had access to cell phones or smartphones and 90 percent of those teens texted daily. Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015,” Pew Research Center’s Internet, Science, and Technology Project, April 9, 2015, http://pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015.

  self-destructing text messages: In this case, the receiver can choose to save a message, but the sender will be notified if they do.

  Fear of Missing Out: Studies have shown that when users passively follow the photos and postings of other people, as opposed to actively writing their own posts and uploading their own photos, they tend to experience more envy and feelings of loneliness. For example, see Edson C. Tandoc, Patrick Ferrucci, and Margaret Duffy, “Facebook Use, Envy, and Depression Among College Students: Is Facebooking Depressing?” Computers in Human Behavior 43 (2015): 139–46, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.053. For a general overview of research on Facebook and unhappiness, see Maria Konnikova, “Why Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.

  Riesman’s “other-direction”: David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, Revised Edition: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001 [1950]).

  shaped by their phones: In 2012, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly one in four American teens had a smartphone (as opposed to a cell phone)—by 2013, this had risen to half of all American teens. In 2015, Pew found that 88 percent of American teens have access to a cell phone of some kind, with 73 percent having smartphones. For 2012 numbers, see Amanda Lenhart, “Cell Phone Ownership,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/cell-phone-ownership. For 2013 numbers, see Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan, et al., “Teens and Technology 2014,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, March 13, 2013. For 2015 numbers, see Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media, and Technology Overview 2015.”

  Susan Sontag wrote: Sontag writes that her own formulation is an update of Mallarmé’s nineteenth-century assertion that “Today, everything exists to end in a book.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001 [1973]).

  everything from glasses: Google Glass is one example of wearable technology that will display messages directly in a wearer’s visual field. For more information on one of the tap bracelets, see http://www.usemagnet.com.

  we keep conversations light: 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. See also Shalinni 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: 10.1177/00139165 1453975.

  can still sting: A recent study shows that people’s perceptions of their relationships are not adversely affected by mobile phone use as long as both people are on the same page about the norms governing that use. It doesn’t matter if people think that larger societal rules about mobile phones are being followed. What matters is if they share an understanding about the rules they will follow together. Jeffrey Hall, Nancy Baym, and Kate Miltner, “Put Down That Phone and Talk to Me: Understanding the Roles of Mobile Phone Norm Adherence and Similarity in Relationships,” Mobile Media & Communication 2, no. 2 (May 1, 2014): 134–53, doi:10.1177/2050157913517684. But the study leaves a question unanswered. Even if you give a friend “permission” to use a phone and drop out of an ongoing conversation, even if you say that it doesn’t upset you, your relationship may be changing in ways that a self-report survey cannot capture. For example, “Can You Connect with Me Now?” and “The iPhone Effect” report on studies that show that the mere presence of a phone on a social landscape affects what people talk about. These studies suggest that you may not feel angry with a friend for interrupting a conversation to make a call, but that doesn’t mean the nature of your conversation hasn’t changed.

  “if they don’t get satisfaction”: This way of thinking about friendship treats it as an “app.” This sensibility is discussed by Howard Gardner, a professor of developmental psychology and education at Harvard, and Katie Davis, a professor at the University of Washington Information School, in The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Gardner and Davis distinguish between “app-dependent” and “app-enabled.” We are app-dependent when our sense of what is possible is constrained by an app and when we approach only problems for which there is an app solution. We are app-enabled when we use apps as time-savers so we can focus on what is important to us, or as starting points for new directions. Gardner and Davis are concerned that young people may be tending more toward app dependence.

  spike in self-confidence: Keith Wilcox and Andrew T. Stephen, “Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control,” Journal of Consumer Research 40 (November 27, 2012), doi:10.1086/668794.

  insecure in their attachments: Sara H. Konrath, William J. Chopik, Courtney K. Hsing, et al., “Changes in Adult Attachment Styles in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personal Social Psychology Review (2014): 1–23, doi:10.1177/1088868314530516.

  an ever more sophisticated archive: There have been extensive experiments in technologies for life capture. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Steve Mann of the MIT Media Lab wore wearable devices to record the experience of everyday life. Mann’s intent was both to make a statement about surveillance—by doing surveillance on his own env
ironment—and to experiment with computation and remembrance. On his experience, see Steve Mann, with Hal Niedzviecki, Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (New York: Random House, 2001). Thad Starner, also of the cyborg group at the Media Lab, worked on the Remembrance Agent, a tool that would sit on your computer desktop (or now your mobile device) and not only record what you were doing but also make suggestions about what you might be interested in looking at next. See Bradley J. Rhodes and Thad Starner, “Remembrance Agent: A Continuously Running Personal Information Retrieval System,” Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM ’96), 487–95, www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/remembrance.html). These ideas were taken up by Gordon Bell, who, along with Jim Gemmell, developed a system, MyLifeBits, whose aspiration was—by providing the user with a wearable camera and microphones—to record a life as it unfolded. See Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “A Digital Life,” Scientific American 296, no. 3 (March 2007): 58–65, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-digital-life. Bell and Gemmell published a book-length discussion of this project, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (New York: Dutton, 2009). Google Glass is a more recent incarnation of this long-standing technological dream.

  take on the visual perspective of others: Google has canceled the Glass project for now, but while it distributed the product to its beta testers, known as Glass “explorers,” I heard many variations on the idea that Glass would serve as an empathy prosthetic or empathy supplement or empathy trainer. One Glass explorer, a man of twenty-six, talks about providing Glass to those who have done acts of violence against minorities so that they could see the racial violence from the point of view of the victims. He knows that there are programs, such as Facing History and Ourselves, that get people talking about violence, genocide, victims, and perpetrators and about putting yourself in the place of the other. But he thinks that technology will be more effective than “that kind of thing.” Why? “Seeing is more powerful than listening. People get bored with words nowadays. They want to see things. They don’t want a long story.” As he sees it, in place of the long talks of the past that we relied on to develop empathy and a moral code, we will take this shortcut: an empathy machine. Is a first-person view of violence what our racially and economically divided society is missing? Or is it simply what we can give ourselves with technology? I am moved by the hopefulness of Glass explorers: Their technology is wondrous and they want it to be useful for serious human problems. But having a technology does not mean that it is useful for every human job. For some human jobs, we may have the appropriate technology already: people in conversation.

  turn it into a way of life: Enthusiasm among Glass users is high for using this technology to support those on the autism spectrum, certainly as a support for those with Asperger’s. With Glass, one can replay interactions and conversations again and again that were not fully understood the first time.

  it needs eye contact: 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.

  what a moment of eye contact accomplishes: Daniel Siegel, cited in Mark Matousek, “The Meeting Eyes of Love: How Empathy Is Born in Us,” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethical-wisdom/201104/the-meeting-eyes-love-how-empathy-is-born-in-us.

  “to read the other person’s brain”: At Sushi Senji cited in Kate Murphy, “Psst. Look Over Here,” New York Times, May 16, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/sunday-review/the-eyes-have-it.html.

  a 40 percent drop in empathy: This is drawn from the paper in which psychologist Sara Konrath collated evidence from seventy-two studies that suggests 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. 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 1, 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

  the resourcefulness of the young: The most persuasive formulation of this argument comes in Internet scholar danah boyd’s book on social networks and teens. danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

  Since Socrates lamented the movement: Plato, Phadedrus, Christopher Rowe, trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005).

  In a series of 2014 lectures: Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Empathy,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge, MA, April 8–10, 2014.

  “from a relationship to a feeling”: William Deresiewicz, “Faux Friendship,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 6, 2009, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308.

  They accomplish “what everyone likes”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008 [1990]), 186.

  “My friend is one”: Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Bradford Torrey, ed., Journal IV, May 1, 1852–February 27, 1853 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906), 397.

  “any increase in complexity entails”: Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 189.

  ROMANCE

  where you trust and share your life: Sara H. Konrath, William J. Chopik, Courtney K. Hsing, et al., “Changes in Adult Attachment Styles in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personal Social Psychology Review (2014): 1–23, doi:10.1177/1088868314530516.

  “paradox of choice”: Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward, “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice,” Positive Psychology in Practice (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2004). My discussion follows Schwartz’s analysis of choice and its stresses. I found the dynamic he describes reflected in interviews where the conversation was about dating.

  leads to depression and feelings of loneliness: cited in ibid., 108–110.

  something they have committed to: Increasingly, people live in smaller familial and communal circles. As noted, one study comparing data from 1985 and 2004 found that the mean number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters of importance to them dropped by nearly one third. The number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled. The survey found that both family and nonfamily confidants dropped, with the loss greatest in nonfamily connections. See 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, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 353–75, doi: 10.1177/000312240607100301.

  more satisfied with how the chocolates tasted: Sheena Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (December 2000): 995–1006, doi:10.1037//0022-3514.79.6.995.

  to make space for them: Sociologist Jeremy Birnholtz suggests that in their online practices, people sometimes rely on so-called butler lies—a strategy for availability management—to get around the downside of constant communication. For example, if a woman doesn’t want to text with a particular suitor, she might respond to a text by saying, “Can’t talk now. I’m at the movies.” See, for example, Lindsay Reynolds, Madeline E. Smith, Jeremy P. Birnholtz, et al., “Butler Lies from Both Sides: Actions and Perceptions of Unavailability Management in Texting,” in Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2013): 769–78, doi:10.1145/2441776.2441862.

  distracted by their mobile phones: Forty-two percent of cell-owning eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in serious relationships say their partners have been distracted by their mobile phones while they were together (25 percent of all couples say this). Amanda Lenhart and
Maeve Duggan, “Couples, the Internet, and Social Media,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, February 11, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/11/couples-the-internet-and-social-media/. A 2015 British study had one quarter of cell phone users taking calls during sex. http://www.yourtango.com/201165808/shocking-stat-25-percent-people-answer-phone-during-sex. In America, a 2013 Harris poll had 20 percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds answering the phone during sex. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cell-phone-use-during-sex-believe-it/.

  “they’d agreed to type, not talk”: Tao Lin, Taipei (New York: Vintage Contemporaries Original, 2013), 241.

  “fight tracking” apps: Examples include “Marriage Fight Tracker” for the iPhone.

  can be a place for personal growth: These are the themes of my earlier work on identity and the Internet, where for over a decade I studied people who created online avatars. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

  He tried to live it out: On the issue of dependencies facilitated by digital media—and how this affects relationships—see Jeffrey K. Hall and Nancy K. Baym, “Calling and Texting (Too Much): Mobile Maintenance Expectations, (Over)dependence, Entrapment, and Friendship Satisfaction,” New Media & Society 14, no. 2 (March 1, 2012): 316–31, doi:10.1177/1461444811415047.

  EDUCATION

  “From what I hear”: Anant Agarwal, cited in Jeffrey R. Young, “The New Rock-Star Professor,” Slate, November 6, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/ 2013/11/udacity_coursera_should_celebrities_teach_moocs.html.

  we add to the mix: And if we don’t do a worse job, it takes us longer. Carrie B. Fried, “Laptop Use and Its Effects on Student Learning,” Computers and Education 50 (2008): 906–14, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.09.006.

  how to organize their time: Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009), doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106.