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- Author: Sherry Turkle
- Full Title: Reclaiming Conversation
- Category: #books
- And one teacher observes: “The [students] sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. As these teachers see it, the old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.
- Time in simulation gets children ready for more time in simulation. Time with people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation.
- In the classroom, conversations carry more than the details of a subject; teachers are there to help students learn how to ask questions and be dissatisfied with easy answers. More than this, conversations with a good teacher communicate that learning isn’t all about the answers. It’s about what the answers mean. Conversations help students build narratives—whether about gun control or the Civil War—that will allow them to learn and remember in a way that has meaning for them. Without these narratives, you can learn a new fact but not know what to do with it, how to make sense of it.
- Because these are the stories we tell each other to explain why our technologies are proof of progress. We like to hear these positive stories because they do not discourage us in our pursuit of the new—our new comforts, our new distractions, our new forms of commerce. And we like to hear them because if these are the only stories that matter, then we don’t have to attend to other feelings that persist—that we are somehow more lonely than before, that our children are less empathic than they should be for their age, and that it seems nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation at a family dinner.
- When I ask, “What’s wrong with conversation?” answers are forthcoming. A young man in his senior year of high school makes things clear: “What’s wrong with conversation? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation! It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.”
- The anxiety about spontaneity and the desire to manage our time means that certain conversations tend to fall away. Most endangered: the kind in which you listen intently to another person and expect that he or she is listening to you; where a discussion can go off on a tangent and circle back; where something unexpected can be discovered about a person or an idea. And there are other losses: In person, we have access to the messages carried in the face, the voice, and the body. Online, we settle for simpler fare: We get our efficiency and our chance to edit, but we learn to ask questions that a return email can answer.
- Much of this seems like common sense. And it is. But I have said that something else is in play: Technology enchants. It makes us forget what we know about life. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.
- Our mobile devices seem to grant three wishes, as though gifts from a benevolent genie: first, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone. And the granting of these three wishes implies another reward: that we will never have to be bored.
- But these days, people often tell me that silence is a “lull” from which they want to escape. When there is silence, “It’s good to have your phone. There are always things to do on your phone.” But before we had our phones, we might have found these silences “full” rather than boring. Now we retreat from them before we’ll ever know.
- By now, several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and caretakers to be only half there. Many parents text at breakfast and dinner, and parents and babysitters ignore children when they take them to playgrounds and parks.
- In all of these cases, we use technology to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It’s another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It’s part of the move from conversation to mere connection.
- I interview college students who text continuously in each other’s presence yet tell me they cherish the moments when their friends put down their phones. For them, what counts as a special moment is when you are with a friend who gets a text but chooses to ignore it, silencing his or her phone instead. For one woman, a college sophomore, “It’s very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person.” For a senior man, “If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.”
- She said she felt “compelled” to check her messages. Why? All she could offer was that she needed to know who was reaching out to her, who was interested in her.
- As all of this is going on, I remember saying to my daughter when she was three, “Use your words.” At first I wonder at my association. I appreciate the pertinence (and the wit!) of the students’ shared images, but to me, going to the images is also a way for these young people to slip away from our group conversation just as it becomes challenging. When things get complicated, it’s easier to send a picture than to struggle with a hard idea.
- But in conversations that could potentially take unexpected directions, people don’t always try to get things “right.” They learn to be surprised by the things they say. And to enjoy that experience. The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.” Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that “appetite comes from eating” and observes that it is equally the case that “ideas come from speaking.” The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery. Notably, von Kleist is not interested in broadcasting or the kind of posting that social media would provide. The thrill of “risky talk” comes from being in the presence of and in close connection to your listener.
- In the new communications culture, interruption is not experienced as interruption but as another connection. Only half joking, people in their teens and twenties tell me that the most commonly heard phrase at dinner with their friends is “Wait, what?” Everyone is always missing a beat, the time it takes to find an image or send a text.
- And we have to reconsider the value of the “boring bits” from which we flee. In work, love, and friendship, relationships of mutuality depend on listening to what might be boring to you but is of interest to someone else. In conversation, a “lull” may be on its way to becoming something else. If a moment in a conversation is slow, there is no way to know when things will pick up except to stay with the conversation. People take time to think and then they think of something new.
- It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don’t need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy. And this is why solitude marks the beginning of conversation’s virtuous circle. If you are comfortable with yourself, you can put yourself in someone else’s place.
- People who grew up with social media will often say that they don’t feel like themselves; indeed, they sometimes can’t feel themselves, unless they are posting, messaging, or texting. Sometimes people say that they need to share a thought or feeling in order to think it, feel it. This is the sensibility of “I share, therefore I am.” Or otherwise put: “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
- Time on Facebook makes a predictable outcome (if you post a likable photograph you will get “likes”) feel like an achievement. Online, we become accustomed to the idea of nearly guaranteed results, something that the ups and downs of solitude can’t promise. And, of course, time with people can’t promise it either.
- Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: “Language … has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”
- A vice-president of a Fortune 500 company tells me that he recently had to write an important presentation and asked his secretary to “protect” him from all interruptions for three hours. I wanted my email disabled. I asked her to take my cell phone away from me. I told her to let no calls through except for family emergencies. She did exactly as I wished. But three hours without connection were intolerable. I could barely concentrate on the presentation, I felt so anxious. I know this sounds crazy but I felt panicky. I felt that no one cared about me, loved me.
- But mostly, it is anxiety that leads them back to their phones. They want to feel a part of things. That is the message of our messages: We are on someone’s radar.
- These young people are not used to working on their own on a project. In the past, if you think of employees … who are now in their forties, fifties, sixties … if you gave them a project, they thought it was their job to do it. Alone. Now, people can’t be alone. They need continual contact and support and reinforcement. They want to know they are doing well. Left on their own to do their work, they feel truly bereft. They are always connected to each other online, but as I listen to their supervisors, they also need more support than before. They need a different kind of management.
- An art director at an advertising agency says of her new hires, all from elite colleges: “They are incredibly talented, but they grew up in a world of Facebook ‘thumbs-ups.’ They are accustomed to a lot of encouragement. So, you don’t know if you should indulge that or if the management challenge is to teach them how to be alone and give themselves a ‘thumbs-up.’”
- Back at Holbrooke, an art teacher describes her most recent attempt to get a class of twelve-year-olds to slow down. She asked students to take five minutes to draw an object of their choice. “Several,” she says, “told me that this was the longest they had ever concentrated on one thing, uninterrupted.” And then she says, “They got upset when they couldn’t do it well. They asked for help. So, what happened is that I went over to help. But then, as soon as I stepped away, they lost interest. Some turned to their phones.”
- One college junior tells me that she doesn’t daydream but does something she calls “chilling.” It involves “aimlessly searching the web.” Think of it as daydreaming 2.0. But it doesn’t do the work of daydreaming. In fact, she calls the web her “safety mechanism” against daydreaming. Time wandering the web protects her from the “danger” of having her mind wander.
- I ask Carmen, twenty, if she ever has time to just sit and think. Her answer: “I would never do that.” If she has a quiet moment she goes to Facebook. She says she doesn’t want to think about the past without it. “To think about your past experiences instead of looking at pictures or messages, it takes more effort to do that.”
- As long as I have my phone, I would never just sit alone and think… . When I have a quiet moment, I never just think. My phone is my safety mechanism from having to talk to new people or letting my mind wander. I know that this is very bad … but texting to pass the time is my way of life. —VANESSA, A COLLEGE JUNIOR
- Social media encourage us to play by another set of rules. You share as you reflect; you reflect as you share. And the companies that provide the platforms for all of this get to see and keep it all. Privacy, loosely defined as freedom from being observed, is gone. At what cost?
- But Linda also sees an upside. She says that after two weeks of the program’s “constructive criticism,” the program has begun to “train” her. She now writes what she thinks the program would like to hear. She makes an effort to be upbeat and to talk more about other people in her 750 words. Linda says that according to the program, she’s not as self-important as she once was.
- Over several weeks, the Happiness Tracker has asked for Cara’s level of happiness as well as information about where she is, what she is doing, and who she is with. Its report: Her happiness is declining. There is no clear link to any one factor. When she gets this result, Cara finds herself feeling less happy with her boyfriend. The app did not link him to her declining happiness, but she begins to wonder if he is the cause of her discontent. Uncertain of her feelings, she ends up breaking up with her boyfriend, in partial deference to the app. She says what she got from the tracker was like “a tipping point.” It felt like something external that “proved” she was not on the right path.
- In the psychoanalytic tradition, what Cara did is called “acting out.” Conflicted about her feelings, she found relief in changing something. She took action that had no certain relationship to the “readout,” but it was action that made her feel temporarily in control. Talk therapy encourages reflection when we are seized by the need to “fix” something—and now! The psychoanalytic tradition suggests that action before self-understanding is rarely a good way to improve one’s situation.
- understand. Nevertheless, it is often what people try first. Central to the method in talk therapy is learning what you think by listening to yourself in conversation. You can’t do this if you are caught up in crises of your own devising. To the adage “Stop and think,” talk therapy adds “Stop and listen to yourself thinking.”
- In talk therapy’s model for active listening you learn to attend not only to the words but also to the music, to the silences, to how people sound as they speak. And you learn to listen to yourself with this kind of attention. You learn to avoid self-censorship and to take yourself seriously. You learn to see patterns in your behavior; you learn to respect history and how it tends to repeat itself unless you are vigilant.
- But nostalgia does not reliably drive behavior. Just as people say it is wrong to break up a relationship by text message but do it anyway, those who wax poetic about the conversations during dinners of the past admit to being on their phones, texting, during family dinners today. So children, from the earliest ages, complain about having to compete with smartphones for their parents’ attention.
- The other night I went out to dinner with my dad. And we were just having this conversation and I didn’t know the answer to something, like the director of a movie we had seen. And he automatically wanted to look it up on his phone. And I was like, “Daddy, stop Googling. I want to talk to you. I don’t care what the right answer is! I just want to talk to you.”
- It is in family conversations that children have the greatest chance of learning that what other people are saying (and how they are saying it) is the key to what they are feeling. And that this matters. So family conversations are a training ground for empathy.
- Radesky did a study of fifty-five adults who were watching over children as they ate meals together in fast-food restaurants. The results: Across the board, the adults paid more attention to their phones than to the children. Some adults interacted with children intermittently; most withdrew completely into their devices. For their part, children became passive and detached or began to seek adult attention in futile bursts of bad behavior.
- Parents wonder if cell phone use leads to Asperger’s syndrome. It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don’t look at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn. And anxious about talk.
- I meet Tod when I visit a device-free summer camp. The ten boys in his bunk describe a vicious circle. Parents give their children phones. Children can’t get their parents’ attention away from their phones, so children take refuge in their own devices. Then, parents use their children’s absorption with phones as permission to have their own phones out as much as they wish.
- Mitch has worked out his own theory of why conversation is disappearing: People are getting out of practice. I think my mom has forgotten how to talk. I kind of feel the reason why so many of us keep using our phones even though it takes away from meaningful conversations is that some people have kind of forgotten how to really have a good conversation because they’ve used their phones for so long that they don’t really know what else to do but text. It gets awkward talking in front of real people—they haven’t done that. I think really they just don’t know what to do.
- But despite the pleasure of positive feedback from her followers, Alli knows that the “hearts” she gets on Instagram and the “likes” she gets on Facebook are not about affection. They are more like a rating system that tells her if her problem is interesting. Online, even the statement of a problem is a performance.
- And talking to a seven-year-old takes patience and knowing how. Instead of settling down and figuring out what to say to his daughter, it is easier for Jon to show love by taking pictures and posting them to the network.
- We become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We’ve seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they’re not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation.
- Indeed, for many parents, knowing their children’s unhappiness is not enough to make them put down their phones. There is a flight from responsibility. It can be addressed.
- other face-to-face?” He can’t think of an answer. His family takes care of conflict by cooling it down online. Colin thinks they are now more “productive” as a family. But what is a family’s product? Should a successful family produce children who are comfortable with “hot” emotions?
- Margot could, of course, take the time to think through what she wants to say to Toby, and then have a face-to-face conversation with him. Margot rejects this option. She says that if she had been face-to-face with her son in that first argument, her emotions would have taken over. And she would not have had the self-discipline to keep saying the same thing over and over. “It would have felt weird.” But it did not seem weird to repeatedly copy and paste the same message in a text box. And Margot is certain that this is what the situation called for.
- In Margot’s view, technology enables family fights to be what they always should have been: cleaner, calmer, and more considered. Therapists have been telling family members to calm down and slow down for years. The point of that advice is to help them better listen to each other, in each other’s presence. Margot thinks that what she calls “fighting by text” is a method in that spirit. You don’t get face-to-face contact, but family members get to hear each other out and have time to reflect on each other’s point of view.
- But only a week ago, Haley stayed out all night without being in touch. There had been a technical problem with her phone (“I texted my parents but it didn’t send”). This time her mother didn’t send any texts. She came down to breakfast the following morning to talk to her daughter face-to-face. Haley says that she could see that her mother had been up all night and that she had been crying. Haley says, “This is the first time she got mad at me in person.” Somehow, the years of alarmed texts from her mother had become something like seasonal rituals, part of going home. For Haley, only when the argument went live did it become real.
- Recall Colin’s question: What could be the “value proposition” of face-to-face conflict in a family? Haley’s story suggests an answer. Texting about conflict cooled things down to the point where she lost track of her mother.
- Margot is getting what she wants without conversation. But she is giving up a lot. In her family, location dots are calming. There is now no need—and no obvious opportunity—to have difficult conversations about responsibility and trust. Instead of talking, you agree to surveillance.
- There is no reason to idealize family conversations of the past. They could be stilted. They could be dominated by parents who proclaimed opinions or who demanded idealized accounts of the day from obedient children. But you don’t need to idealize the past to cast a steady eye on the present. Digital culture offers us new possibilities for talk and new possibilities for silence.
- When he avoids the phone, he gets more than the ability to self-edit. The fact that he can answer emails and texts when he wants gives him the feeling that the world is there for him, when he wants it. And a telephone call makes it hard to do more than one thing at a time. He is bound for an Ivy League university and is worried about the demands of “a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.”
- A twenty-six-year-old takes a job at a trade publication and is asked to research a group of potential media consultants. Her supervisor makes it clear that their personal qualities are crucial to determining who will be chosen. The new hire completes the project based exclusively on web research. I speak to her supervisor, who had to insist that the project be started anew, this time with voice contact. She says of the young woman, “Talking on the phone had been such an onerous prospect, she didn’t even want to consider it.”
- even if she didn’t need her phone for these connections, she says it is hard to imagine socializing without its support. “The things I talk about now, I feel they come from my phone. I’m aware that if I don’t have my phone to tell me what is going on, I would feel like a person without anything to say.”
- So, Kristen checks her phone periodically during classes. If she gets a text from a friend that in some way signals an emergency, “I leave class and go to the bathroom in order to respond to the text.” I ask Kristen what would count as an emergency, and I learn that, in her world, the bar for emergencies is set fairly low. “My friends need me. I’m the one they see as the stable one. They’ll text for boyfriend things. For when they feel a crisis. I need to get back to them.” And so, a few times a week, this young economist walks out of her advanced seminars to go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, and text her friends. “That’s what friends do, respond to a crisis,” says Kristen. That is why she is often in the bathroom, missing class.
- When friends are together, they fall into inattention and feel comfortable retreating into their own worlds. Apart, they are alert for emergencies. It is striking that this often reflects how they describe the behavior of their parents: When their children are not at home, they become hovering “helicopters”; when their children are in plain sight, parents give themselves permission to turn to their phones. This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.
- But when she has her phone, she has facts at her fingertips but no timeline or narrative to slide them into. For her, another fact about the United States in 1863 simply floats free in its own universe, somewhere out there in the cloud; it is not added to a story about the Civil War that Maureen already knows.
- Yet senior physicians are concerned that young doctors come into medicine expecting that the answers to problems will be found not so much in the examining room but “elsewhere”—in diagnostic tests the physician will see later. Because they believe in the scientific data they will get about the patient, they don’t focus on the patient. The belief in data that will come in later becomes a way to justify an only cursory conversation with the patient now. A sixty-year-old faculty member at a major teaching hospital says of the residents he currently trains: “They want to use tests to rationalize not talking to patients because talking to patients is difficult and usually takes skills young doctors don’t have.”
- For Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for surveillance by creating a citizenry that is always watching itself. With cameras on most corners, you don’t misbehave even if you don’t know if a camera is on any particular corner. It might be. This is the self of self-surveillance.
- In the world as Foucault analyzed it, when you put cameras on street corners, you want people to notice them and build a self that takes surveillance as a given. Knowing that the cameras are there makes you “be good” all by yourself. But in our new data regime, the goal is for everyone to be unaware, or at least to forget in the moment, that surveillance exists. The regime works best if people feel free to “be themselves.” That way they can provide “natural data” to the system.
- The philosopher Allan Bloom has suggested the cost: “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.”
- Even Thoreau became distracted. He got upset that when walking in the woods, he would sometimes find himself caught up in a work problem. He said, “But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses… . What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”