Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  It places us in a particular world: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). Also on this topic, see Rob Horning, “No Life Stories.” The degree to which the net polarizes is an important and researchable topic. As this book goes to press, a new study has been published, done by Facebook investigators and published in Science, that suggests that the polarization effects of the Facebook News Feed are less significant than expected. Almost 29 percent of the news stories displayed by Facebook’s News Feed presents views that conflict with the user’s own ideology. Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,” Science, May 2, 2015. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa1160. The discussion of this study centers on the fragility of this hopeful finding: The algorithm for what shows up in the News Feed is after all determined by Facebook and can be changed by Facebook. (Most recently, Facebook has given users greater control over what appears in their timeline—again, an intriguing corporate decision in the direction of transparency but one that can be reversed.) The new study about the diversity of what we see in a Facebook News Feed is in dialogue with other studies, such as the 2014 Pew study that suggested that online we read what we agree with and post what we think our followers will want to hear, the idea of a “spiral of silence.” Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the Spiral of Silence,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence.

  just not to you: Jonathan Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” New Republic, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

  “The most successful tyranny”: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008 [1987]), 249.

  actively constructs its version of you: Sara M. Watson, “Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization,” The Atlantic, June 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/data-doppelgangers-and-the-uncanny-valley-of-personalization/372780.

  We have become what the social philosopher Gilles Deleuze called “dividuals,” to denote entities comprised of multiple parcels of data that can be bought, sold, and traded in the new marketplace. The dividual is an aggregate of recorded preferences, histories, and tastes. If we are disoriented and unsure in our new situation, Deleuze would say this is natural. We have never been dividuals before. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, http://jstor.org/stable778828.

  “evolves out of its wooden brain”: Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992 [1867]).

  “a line has been crossed”: Watson, “Data Doppelgängers.”

  reached its conclusion about her: Watson comes to understand that the study is targeting all women in her age group. Ibid.

  And how can she challenge: In this, Watson is like respondents in a 2014 Pew study of privacy and the Internet. They didn’t think they had enough privacy, but they didn’t know what to do about it. Eighty percent of those who use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the information they share on the sites. Two-thirds of them think the government should do more to regulate those advertisers. Mary Madden, “Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, November 12, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/12/public-privacy-perceptions/.

  “knows us better than we know ourselves”: Watson, “Data Doppelgängers.”

  “rather go to a movie”: Zuckerberg said this during an interview with Charlie Rose, noted by Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur.” He is cited in Neil M. Richards, “The Perils of Social Reading,” Georgetown Law Journal 101, no. 689 (2013): 691, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2031307.

  “and even thinking”: ibid.

  blogging as a regular part of her academic program: Molly Sauter, “Curiosity, Being Yourself, and Being Bad at Things,” Odd Letters: The Online Home of Molly Sauter (blog), December 5, 2013, http://oddletters.com/2013/12/05/curiosity-being-yourself-and-being-bad-at-things.

  friends might disagree with them: Hampton, Rainie, Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence.’”

  “Crowdsourcing” your reading preferences: Richards, “The Perils of Social Reading.”

  easy not to think about something: On a cognitive level, problems that are not clearly defined are nearly impossible for people to care about as moral problems. Researchers have studied how this is true of climate change—a problem that is “complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused.” Ezra M. Markowitz and Azim F. Shariff, “Climate Change and Moral Judgment,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 243–47, doi:10.1038/nclimate1378. See also Matthew C. Nisbet, “Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 51, no. 2 (2009): 12–23, doi:10.3200/ENVT.51.2.12-23.

  a blizzard of acronyms: On teenagers’ strategies for preserving their privacy from parents and others in their communities, see danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

  experts tell us that this is not true: In one classic example from 1997, Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Latanya Sweeney reidentified the medical record of William Weld—then-governor of Massachusetts—using only data on gender, date of birth, and home zip code. “No Silver Bullet: De-Identification Still Doesn’t Work” (unpublished), http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-identification.pdf. Other, more recent studies have shown that many personal characteristics—including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious views, and political views—can be predicted by nothing more than Facebook “likes”: Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110, cited in 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.

  you will also activate “full tracking”: Patrick Tucker, “If You Do This, the NSA Will Spy on You,” Defense One, July 7, 2014, http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/if-you-do-nsa-will-spy-you/88054/?oref=d-topstory. See also Sean Gallagher, “The NSA Thinks Linux Journal Is an ‘Extremist Forum’?” ArsTechnica, July 3, 2014, http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/the-nsa-thinks-linux-journal-is-an-extremist-forum/.

  manipulation of votes by social media: Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” New Republic, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

  to see if this changed their moods: Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–90, doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111. For comprehensive coverage of this story, see “Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” The Atlantic, June 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648.

  knows a lot more about them: During an April 2015 interview with Edward Snowden, the comedian and TV host John Oliver pursued an “objects to think with” strategy. He told Snowden that Americans have a hard time relating directly to the idea that the government has the ability to listen to their phone calls but care deeply if
the government has the right to look at photographs of their private parts that they post online or send as a JPEG file attached to an email or text. The comedian had come to the interview with a photograph of his genitals that now resided online. Snowden was then asked which surveillance programs would give the government legal cover to look at Oliver’s naked self. “John Oliver Interviews Edward Snowden,” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO, April 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M.

  “The way to deal is to just be good”: Talking about using Google services that will monitor your home, Eric Schmidt’s position was “If you don’t like it, don’t use it.” The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New Digital Age,’” YouTube video, February 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=NYGzB7uveh0. Eric Schmidt made his first remark about controlling individual behavior rather than worrying about controlling privacy to CNBC. The video is available at Ryan Tate, “Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People,” Gawker, December 4, 2009, http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets -are-for-filthypeople. An earlier and much-quoted variant of this sentiment was voiced by Scott McNealy, then-CEO of Sun Microsystems, when he said at a press event for a launch of its Jini technology in 1999, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” The incident was widely reported. See, for example, Sally Sprenger, “Sun on Privacy: Get Over It,” Wired, January 26, 1999. http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538.

  this conversation about technology, privacy, and democracy: I first made this argument in Alone Together. Over time, I believe it has taken on greater urgency. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  THE NICK OF TIME

  “what we refuse to destroy”: John Sawhill, cited in E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), vi.

  pushed his chairs to its far corners: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1854]), 141.

  begin to recover their empathic capacity: 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.

  they atrophy if not exercised: Clifford Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth?,” Pacific Standard, April 23, 2012.

  A first step is to slow down: For one example of writing on this theme, 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.

  a mechanical “Memex” would free us: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101–6, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881.

  to return to the spirit of Bush’s original idea: On this point, Arianna Huffington has encouraged and supported the conversation. See Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (New York: Harmony, 2014).

  to encourage thought, talk, and new ideas: “Go Inside Google Garage, the Collaborative Workspace That Thrives on Crazy, Collaborative Ideas,” Fast Company (video), http://www.fastcompany.com/3017509/work-smart/look-inside-google-garage-the-collaborative-workspace-that-thrives-on-crazy-creat.

  they fear their followers will disagree: The study also showed, surprisingly, that social media users were also less willing than nonusers to discuss their views offline. Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence,’” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence. I have noted that a new study by Facebook scientists, published in Science, challenges the strength of this effect. Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,” Science, May 2, 2015. doi:10.1126/science.aaa1160.

  who do not share their views: Rebecca Ellen Turkle Willard, “The Irrelevant Opposition: Reference Groups in the Formation of Political Attitudes Among Partisan College Students” (undergraduate dissertation, Harvard College, 2014).

  Even a small amount of common ground can nurture a conversation: And to nurture conversation, it would help to break the habit of bringing data sets to the table as a substitute for discussing the substance of issues. More than ever, data can deceive. We have so much data now that we can do correlational studies that support every and any position. Famously, recent correlational studies linked intelligence to a love of curly fries. What this correlation lacked—and this is “Big Data’s” threat to reasoned conversation—is a rationale, a hypothesis, a theory. It showed only that with enough data you can show anything. Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110.

  grew up with phones in hand: Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

  require eye contact for emotional stability and social fluency: For example, Atushi Senju and Mark H. Johnson, “The Eye Contact Effect: Mechanisms and Development,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 3 (January 3, 2009): 127–34, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.11.009, and Laura Pönkänen, Annemari Alhoniemi, Jukka M. Leppänen, et al., “Does It Make a Difference If I Have Eye Contact with You or with Your Picture? An ERP Study,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6, no. 4 (September 1, 2011): 486–94, doi:10.1093/scan/nsq068.

  It can bring us back to ourselves and others: This point was made when the author Sebastian Junger tried to find meaning in years of overseas combat with a group of veterans returned home. His choice was to take a long walk with them in order to share solitude in difficult, intimate conversations. They took a walk across America, “a 300-mile, 400-mile conversation about war, and how it affects you and why so many young men miss it when it’s over.” Gisele Regato, “A 300 Mile Walk to Talk About War,” WNYC News, October 23, 2014, http://www.wnyc.org/story/300-mile-walk-talk-about-war.

  walking was a kind of shared solitude: Adam Gopnik writes about walking as a form of Western meditation and shared solitude in “Heaven’s Gaits: What We Do When We Walk,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/maga zine/2014/09/01/heavens-gaits. The article reviews Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, John Howe, trans. (New York: Verso, 2014 [2009]). Gros says, “for solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.”

  Thoreau’s comments on walking as a way to “shake off the village” are from a June 1, 1862, essay, “Walking,” originally published in The Atlantic. They are cited by Arianna Huffington in Thrive, 100. Huffington also cites Nilofer Merchant, a Silicon Valley executive who has walking meetings instead of meetings at her desk. There is no phone to distract. In Merchant’s TED talk on walking, she calls it “walking the talk.” Nilofer Merchant, “Got a Meeting? Take a Walk,” TED mainstage, February 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/nilofer_merchant_got_a_meeting_take_a_walk?lan guage=en. In a New York Times article on walking, quoted by Huffington, Merchant expands: “What I love is that you’re literally facing your problem or situation together when you walk side by side with someone. . . . I love that people can’t be checking email or Twitter during walking meetings. You’re awake to what’s happening around you, your senses are heightened and you walk away with something office meetings rarely give you—a sense of joy.” David Hochman, “Hollywood’s New Stars: Pedestrians,” August 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/fashion/hollywoods-new-stars-pedestrians.html?page wanted=1&_r=2.

  we are very interested indeed: One survey reports that only 35 percent of eigh
teen- to twenty-four-year-olds will say they are interested in privacy matters in regard to mobile communications, with those over forty years old showing only slightly greater interest. See “Can Data Become a New Currency?,” Amdocs Survey, 2013, http://www.amdocs.com/vision/documents/survey-highlights.pdf. But when people were surveyed about a particular surveillance activity—“Do you think the government should be able to monitor everyone’s email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks?”—52 percent of respondents were against the practice. “Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-Terror Tactic,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 10, 2013, http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/06-10-13%20PRC%20WP%20Surveillance%20Release.pdf.

  we don’t know how to object: Sara M. Watson, “Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization,” The Atlantic, June 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/data-doppelgangers-and-the-uncanny-valley-of-personalization/372780.

  information we share with them: Jack Balkin, “Information Fiduciaries in the Digital Age,” Balkinization (blog), Yale Law School, March 5, 2014, http://balkin.blogspot.com/2014/03/information-fiduciaries-in-digital-age.html, cited in Jonathan Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” New Republic, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

  we adapt to rules we actually object to: One study showed a group of Facebook users how the service decides what does and does not show up on their newsfeed. More than half of the participants began the study unaware that their newsfeed was curated at all. They thought that everything their friends said would show up on the feed. They objected to the curation. But a follow-up showed that once people knew about the “objectionable” rules for curation, their idea of redress was to try to get the curation to work in their favor. They tried to second-guess Facebook. There are many ways to game the system: You can use brand names in your posts so that they get noticed. You can try to increase the number of posts from family members that show up in the newsfeed by remembering to always “like” family posts.