Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  amounted to a love letter to conversation: Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, “Daniel Kahneman—Biographical,” in Les Prix Nobel (The Nobel Prizes), 2002, Tore Fraängsmyr, ed. (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 2003). Full text available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html.

  one of the founding documents: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974): 1124–31.

  not virtual contact, but live contact: Adam F. Falk, “In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444327204577615592746799900.

  students don’t show up for office hours: MIT, “MacVicar Day 2014,” MIT TechTV (video), March 14, 2014, http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/duevideos/videos/28190-macvicar-day-2014.

  Students avoid faculty: The complaint about students abandoning office hours goes beyond MIT. And faculty can’t think of how to turn this around other than by making coming to office hours mandatory for a final grade.

  the presence of one strong figure: Laura Vivienne and Jean Rhodes, “Someone Who ‘Gets’ Me: Adolescents’ Perceptions of Relational Engagement with Key Adults” (manuscript under review, 2014).

  WORK

  Alan Johnson Miller and Associates: As previously noted, all of the names of companies and institutions in this chapter have been changed. And all of the names of people as well.

  clear link between sociability and employee productivity: The casual conversations Lister is talking about are part of the “water cooler effect,” a combination of social bonding and information sharing that depends on being physically together in a workplace. Ben Waber’s work with sociometric badges—measuring productivity and where people were in social space—shows the power of that water cooler: Employee interaction improves productivity. See, for example, 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. See also Benjamin N. Waber, People Analytics (New Jersey: FT Press, 2013).

  is also associated with reduced stress: ibid.

  The “conversation effect”: Lynn Wu, Benjamin N. Waber, Sinan Aral, et al., “Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (2008), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1130251.

  “those conversations are worth it”: “Presence vs. Productivity: How Managers View Telecommuting,” narrated by Neil Conan, Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, February 27, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/02/27/173069965/presence-vs-productivity-how-managers-view-telecommuting.

  asked employees to work from home whenever possible: ReadyLearn is trying to streamline its organization by replacing employees who work in more expensive salary markets with employees who work in less expensive salary markets. So almost all teams are global teams and require Skype communication.

  take another phone call: Gretchen Gavett, “What People Are Really Doing When They’re on a Conference Call,” Harvard Business Review, August 19, 2014, http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/what-people-are-really-doing-when-theyre-on-a-conference-call/?utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet&utm_campaign=Socialflow.

  puts us into a state similar to vigilance: Giles M. Phillips, “Mobile Users Are More Vigilant than Situated Users,” in Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCI 2014, LNCS 8512, Masaaki Kurousu, ed. (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014): 166–77.

  the most rudimentary arguments: 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.

  distracts everyone around the machine: 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.

  with the attention that their problems deserve: Rattan’s experience is not unusual. In a survey of 1,215 workers worldwide, 66 percent say they aren’t able to focus on one thing at a time and 70 percent say they don’t have regular time at work for creative or strategic thought. But the 20 percent who were able to focus on one task at a time were 50 percent more engaged in their work. The authors cite the rise of digital technology as the greatest influence on loss of thinking time because when information and requests come in, “we feel compelled to read and respond to [them] at all hours of the day and night.” The authors of the study, Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath of the Energy Project, wrote about their findings in “Why You Hate Work,” New York Times, May 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html. For a fuller report of their work, in partnership with the Harvard Business Review, see Tony Schwartz, Christine Porath, “The Power of Meeting Your Employees’ Needs,” Harvard Business Review, June 30, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-power-of-meeting-your-employees-needs.

  a “Tabless Thursday”: James Hamblin, Katherine Wells, and Paul Rosenfeld, “Single-Tasking Is the New Multitasking,” The Atlantic (video), June 19, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/373027/singletasking-is-the-new-multitasking.

  those who have experienced the change: In one tradition of studying communications of the voice and body (focusing on when people are discussing likes and dislikes, feelings and attitudes), the psychologist Albert Mehrabian has come up with a “7 percent, 38 percent, 55 percent rule.” When we are together in the same room, 7 percent of how we feel is conveyed by words, 38 percent is conveyed through our tone of voice, and 55 percent through our body language. Albert Mehrabian, Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981).

  ‘Why are we doing this?’: Business theorist Clay Christensen writes about the importance of disruptive innovation to the long-term health of a firm. To make radical, creative change people need data, but they also need time to think and talk. They can’t be looking too anxiously at short-term results. Short-term thinking leads corporations to allocate resources to things that have already been successful. It doesn’t open space for disruptive innovation.

  In Christensen’s terms, Tripp feels that his company has made it harder for disruptive innovation to happen because it has destroyed the places it was most likely to come from. That was the relationship among people who worked together every day, who talked together every day about problems and how to solve them. Tripp’s company responded to short-term financial results and so is not as likely to get what Christensen calls “market-creating” change, the kind of change that makes the real difference. See, for example, Clayton Christensen, “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” Harvard Business Review, June 2014, http://hbr.org/2014/06/the -capitalists-dilemma/ar/1.

  to increase their productivity and creativity: While one tradition of work measures productivity in relation to interactions of workers on site, other research tracks the numbers of times a scholarly work is cited and links this to the physical proximity of its authors. Collocation is shown to increase the impact of collaboration. See, for example, Kyungjoon Lee, John S. Brownstein, Richard G. Mills, et al., “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?” PLOS ONE 5, no. 12 (2010), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014279.

  more productive when they talk more: Waber, Olguin, Kim, et al., “Productivity Through Coffee Breaks.”

  whether it was time well spent: “Time spent vs. time well spent” is the phrase used by Tristan Harris at Google to talk about his vision of a new consumer/industry alliance to build technology that will better serve humanity. In his December 2014 TEDx presentation in Brussels, Harris compared your phone to a slo
t machine that offered two sad choices: Either you are distracted or you have a fear of missing out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4.

  treating the “iPatient”: Abraham Verghese, “Treat the Patient, Not the CT Scan,” New York Times, February 26, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/opinion/27verghese.html?pagewanted=all, and “Culture Shock—Patient as Icon, Icon as Patient,” New England Journal of Medicine 359, no. 26 (2008): 2748–51, doi:10.1056/NEJMp0807461.

  all of these are being discussed: For example, see Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015).

  doctors can more easily engage with patients: On the invention of the profession of medical scribes, see Katie Hafner, “A Busy Doctor’s Right Hand, Ever Ready to Type,” New York Times, January 12, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/a-busy-doctors-right-hand-ever-ready-to-type.html.

  complete important tasks one by one: For one advocate of slowing things down, see David Levy, “No Time to Think: Reflections on Information Technology and Contemplative Scholarship,” Ethics and Information Technology 9, no. 4 (2007): 237–49, doi:10.1007/s10676-007-9142-6.

  be more intentional about the use of technology: In January 2015, a New York City–based campaign, “Bored and Brilliant,” enlisted thousands to give up aspects of their smartphone use every day. It began from the premise that boredom inspires brilliance and the observation that when you have a smartphone, you don’t allow yourself to be bored. When the organizers assessed the results they found that the greatest impact of the challenge was to increase awareness of how phones shape our sensibilities. http://www.wnyc.org/series/bored-and-brilliant. In other words, the impact of the challenge was intentionality.

  in an open floor plan: For an overview of research on the social, psychological, and economic implications of the open office plan, see Maria Konnikova, “The Open-Office Trap,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2014.

  a “quiet car” for productivity: It is relevant to recall the striking finding about the power of privacy to maximize productivity among programmers. Susan Cain sums it up this way: “Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was acceptably private compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.” Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown, 2012), 84.

  twenty-three minutes to get back on track: These findings from the work of attention researcher Gloria Mark and her research team were reported in Rachel Emma Silverman’s “Workplace Distrations: Here’s Why You Won’t Finish This Article,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2012, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388. It is significant that Mark’s findings include managers, financial analysts, and software developers. Silverman’s article also summarizes the efforts of companies that are trying to enforce policies of forced attention. One company has done away with email altogether. Others set aside special times for creative thinking. In one case, there is a no-email policy; in another, there are special hours when email is not allowed and which are deemed as times for creative thinking. For a bibliography of Mark’s work on “interruption science,” see http://mail.free-knowledge.org/ref erences/authors/gloria_mark.html.

  we learn to interrupt ourselves as well: Laura Dabbish, Gloria Mark, and Victor Gonzalez, “Why Do I Keep Interrupting Myself? Environment, Habit and Self-Interruption,” CHI 2011, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM Press): 3127–30, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Research_files/CHI%202011%20Self-interruption.pdf.

  predictable time off: Leslie Perlow, “Predictable Time Off: The Team Solution to Overcoming Constant Work Connection,” Fast Company, May 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1837867/predictable-time-team-solution-overcoming-constant-work-connection. See also Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

  the place where new thinking begins: On solitude and its importance, including in business settings, see Cain, Quiet.

  THE PUBLIC SQUARE

  the ideas we think our followers want to hear: Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence,’” Pew Research Center for Internet, Technology, and Society, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence.

  those in political power ultimately surrender: Anthony Wing Kosner, in a blog post on Forbes.com, writes about this model as a game changer: “12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users,” Forbes (blog), March 9, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/03/09/12-lessons-from-kony-2012-from-social-media-power-users.

  “Go out and rock it”: “KONY 2012,” YouTube video, posted by Invisible Children, March 5, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.

  a direct source of political change: Malcolm Gladwell refers to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin Press, 2008) as the “bible of the social media movement,” though Shirky is not alone in extolling the utopian possibilities of social media for political action. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” New Yorker, October 4, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-3. The Kony video also got its share of negative press, most of it critical of its “slacktivism,” the way it turned activism into the feeling of activism. See, for example, Michael Deibert, “The Problem with ‘Invisible Children: Kony 2012,’” Huffington Post, March 7, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-deibert/joseph-kony-2012-children_b_1327417.html. Some of the critical literature is summarized in Eleanor Goldberg, “Invisible Children, Group Behind ‘Kony 2012,’ Closing Because of Funding Issues,” Huffington Post, December 16, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/16/invisible-children-closing_n_6329990.html.

  nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: Mark Pfeifle, cited in Gladwell, “Small Change.”

  the State Department asked Twitter: Ibid.

  The power of weak ties is awesome: Gladwell does not minimize what you can accomplish with weak ties. Among other things, he notes that studies show that “our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information.” Gladwell, “Small Change.” Here, Gladwell cites Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter’s work on weak ties. See, for example, Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392. But the civil rights movement became effective as it turned bloody and dangerous. Gladwell asks, “What makes people capable of this kind of activism?” To answer this question, one place Gladwell looks is to a study that compared those who stuck with the Freedom Summer movement and those who dropped out. Those who stayed in were likely to have close personal friends who were going to Mississippi. In “Small Change” Gladwell concludes that high-risk activism is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

  “was flanked by his roommate”: Gladwell, “Small Change.”

  Is there free thought without privacy?: The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution makes citizens immune from unreasonable search and seizure of their possessions. The amendment applies to their books and papers. Now that our books and papers are digital, should they be fair game?

  “Where do you want to go today?” Evgeny Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” New York Times, February 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  searches of ordinary Americans are monitored: A write-up of a cache of intercepted conversations given to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden revealed that “nine of ten account holders . . . were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast
for somebody else.” Barton Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani, “In NSA-Intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are,” Washington Post, July 5, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html.

  is out of sync: You are in a new kind of space; the term “hyper-public” has been used in an effort to capture the kind of space it is. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosted “Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World,” in June 2011. The symposium website has background information and video footage from the conference, http://www.hyperpublic.org.

  In May 2015, a federal appeals court found that some of the NSA searches, in particular the bulk collection of data on individuals, is illegal. This area of law is fast-moving, in line, I believe, with my hypothesis that it is time to rethink where we are on these matters. Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman, “NSA Collection of Bulk Call Data Is Ruled Illegal,” New York Times, May 7, 2015.

  Bentham’s image of panopticon surveillance: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977 [1975]).

  the feeling that we are cared for: Rob Horning, “No Life Stories,” New Inquiry, July 10, 2014, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/no-life-stories, a review of Marc Andrejevic’s Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know (London: Routledge, 2013).

  can provide “natural data” to the system: Zeynep Tufecki, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance, and Computational Politics,” First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097.