goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24612127-reclaiming-conversation
author
Sherry Turkle
date
2015

About this book

Sherry Turkle argues that the always-on, device-mediated life is eroding our capacity for face-to-face conversation — and with it, empathy, creativity, and genuine intimacy. Drawing on years of interviews across families, schools, and workplaces, she shows how the flight from conversation to connection has left people lonelier, less self-aware, and less capable of the kind of sustained, vulnerable talk that builds real relationships. The book is organised around Thoreau’s three chairs. Thoreau wrote that in his Walden cabin he kept only three chairs, used depending on the company he needed: one for solitude (sitting alone, thinking), two for friendship (intimate conversation with one other person), and three for society (larger social engagement). Turkle uses this as a map for what phones are eroding at each level — first our inner life, then our closest relationships, then our public life. She adds a fourth chair of her own: the philosophical space opened when we talk to machines, the frontier Thoreau could not have anticipated.

Key concepts

Highlights

Introduction: The Flight from Conversation

We say we turn to our phones when we’re “bored.” And we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment. We are forever elsewhere. At class or at church or business meetings, we pay attention to what interests us and then when it doesn’t, we look to our devices to find something that does. There is now a word in the dictionary called “phubbing.” It means maintaining eye contact while texting. My students tell me they do it all the time and that it’s not that hard.

(p. 8)

We have learned that even a silent phone inhibits conversations that matter. The very sight of a phone on the landscape leaves us feeling less connected to each other, less invested in each other.

(p. 9)

“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.

(p. 10)

I begin my case by turning to someone many people think of—mistakenly—as a hermit who tried to get away from talk. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to learn to live more “deliberately”—away from the crush of random chatter. But the cabin furniture he chose to secure that ambition suggests no simple “retreat.” He said that in his cabin there were “three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”

(p. 13)

The disruptions begin with solitude, Thoreau’s first chair. Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes.

(p. 14)

Many of the things we all struggle with in love and work can be helped by conversation. Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled. We are diminished, in retreat. But to generations that grew up using their phones to text and message, these studies may be describing losses they don’t feel. They didn’t grow up with a lot of face-to-face talk.

(p. 17)

Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

(p. 22)

call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right.

(p. 23)

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.

(p. 24)

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.

(p. 35)

We could say we are “addicted to multitasking,” but this is not the most helpful way to frame the problem. Our phones are part of our media ecology. We have to find a way to make our lives better with our phones. I prefer to think in terms of technological affordances—what technology makes possible (and often attractive and easy)—and human vulnerabilities. If you are addicted, you have to get off your drug. If you are vulnerable, you can work to be less vulnerable.

(p. 41)

And, more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It is shaping a new way of being. I call it “I share, therefore I am.” We share our thoughts and feelings in order to feel whole.

(p. 44)

Part I: One Chair — Solitude

These days, we may mistake time on the net for solitude. It isn’t. In fact, solitude is challenged by our habit of turning to our screens rather than inward. And it is challenged by our culture of continual sharing. 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.”

(p. 56)

Screens serve up all kinds of educational, emotional, artistic, and erotic experiences, but they don’t encourage solitude and they don’t teach the richness of face-to-face conversation.

(p. 57)

Whereas screen activity tends to rev kids up, the concrete worlds of modeling clay, finger paints, and building blocks slow them down. The physicality of these materials—the sticky thickness of clay, the hard solidity of blocks—offers a very real resistance that gives children time to think, to use their imaginations, to make up their own worlds. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a specialist in adolescent development, wrote that children thrive when they are given time and stillness. The shiny objects of today’s childhood demand time and interrupt stillness.

(p. 58)

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.” Loneliness is painful, emotionally and even physically, born from a “want of intimacy” when we need it most, in early childhood. Solitude—the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone—is built from successful human connection at just that time. But if we don’t have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don’t know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

(p. 59)

For Mozart, “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” For Kafka, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.” For Thomas Mann, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.” For Picasso, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

(p. 61)

To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, to defer going “elsewhere” at least some of the time.

(p. 62)

But childhood boredom is a driver. It sparks imagination. It builds up inner emotional resources. For the child psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, a child’s capacity to be bored—closely linked to the child’s capacity to play contentedly alone while in the quiet presence of a parent—is a critical sign of psychological health. Negotiating boredom is a signal developmental achievement.

(p. 64)

It is striking that some of our most-used applications—such as Facebook—seem set up to inspire narration. After all, on Facebook, the basic protocol is to record and illustrate the events of one’s life. Of course, we’ve seen that the story is not so simple. Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation.

(p. 72)

Why the conflict? Melissa needs social support. Her college plans disappoint her; her home life offers no comfort. Life on Facebook (with its tailor-made “I GOT REJECTED” page) is a place to tell her story. But Melissa says that even with all of these positive things, it’s “hard to find balance” when she goes on Facebook, because once she gets there, it’s “consuming” and very hard to put away. More disturbing, Melissa says that she now finds it “almost impossible to do the things I actually think I need to do—to sit by myself, write in my journal, talk to my brother, call my best friend.” Instead she feels “stuck” on Facebook, posting about food, reading profiles, and “stalking” people in her class. “I get lost in reading other people’s messages or profiles or talking to them. And it’s always stuff that is so pointless and it’s just a waste of time, and I hate wasting time, but I get lost in it. I’ll look at the clock and it’ll say 7:14, and I’ll look back and it’ll seem like a minute later and it’ll be 8:30 p.m.” Facebook wasn’t designed to stall self-reflection. But it often does.

(p. 73)

Part II: Two Chairs — Family and Friendship

So my mom is always on her email, always on her phone, she always has it next to her at the dinner table. . . . And if there’s the slightest little buzz or anything, she’ll look at it. She always has some excuse. When we are out to dinner she’ll pretend to put it away—she’ll have it on her lap. She’ll be looking down but it will be so obvious. Me and my dad and my sister will all tell her to get off her phone. If I were to even be on my phone at the table I would get grounded by her—but she has her phone out. . . . At dinner, my mom is doing her own thing on her phone, and it ends up my dad is sitting there, I am sitting there, my sister is sitting there, and no one is talking or anything. It’s a chain reaction. Only one person has to start. Only one person has to stop talking.

(p. 94)

She tells me that “right now,” the place she feels “most important” is on social media. But social media is set up to teach different lessons. Instead of promoting the value of authenticity, it encourages performance. Instead of teaching the rewards of vulnerability, it suggests that you put on your best face. And instead of learning how to listen, you learn what goes into an effective broadcast. Leslie is not becoming better at “reading” other people; she is simply more adept at getting them to “like” her.

(p. 95)

If you don’t use certain parts of the brain, they will fail to develop, or be connected more weakly. By extension, if young children do not use the parts of their brain activated by conversing with an attentive parent, they will fail to develop the appropriate circuitry. I think of this as the “missing chip” hypothesis. The name, of course, is a bit of levity, but my concern is serious: If young children are not engaged in conversation, they will start out a step behind in their development.

(p. 96)

Hillary describes how her mother shuts down conversations. “When I am talking to my mom and she’s emailing someone, she’s like, ‘Wait.’ Or she’s talking to me and she stops her sentence in the middle to finish her email and then keeps talking. And then stops and starts.” Hillary says that the effect of these stops and starts is an erosion of trust. She says, “Trust . . . knowing that someone is not understanding you, not paying attention, makes it easy to lose trust. . . . If someone was on their phone and not really in the conversation, I don’t feel like I can trust them as much.”

(p. 97)

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.

(p. 108)

Today, does everything exist to end online? One thing seems clear: Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared.

(p. 130)

The work of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has taught us that children need eye contact to develop parts of the brain that are involved with attachment. Without eye contact, there is a persistent sense of disconnection and problems with empathy. Siegel sums up what a moment of eye contact accomplishes: “Repeated tens of thousands of times in the child’s life, these small moments of mutual rapport [serve to] transmit the best part of our humanity—our capacity for love—from one generation to the next.” Atsushi Senju, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies this mechanism through adulthood, showing that the parts of the brain that allow us to process another person’s feelings and intentions are activated by eye contact. Emoticons on texts and emails, Senju found, don’t have the same effect. He says, “A richer mode of communication is possible right after making eye contact. It amplifies your ability to compute all the signals so you are able to read the other person’s brain.”

(p. 145)

The essayist William Deresiewicz said that as our communities have atrophied, we have moved from living in actual communities to making efforts to feel as though we are living in them. So, when we talk about communities now, we have moved “from a relationship to a feeling.” We have moved from being in a community to having a sense of community. Have we moved from empathy to a sense of empathy? From friendship to a sense of friendship? We need to pay close attention here. Artificial intelligences are being offered to us as sociable companions. They are being called a new kind of friend. If we are settling for a “sense of friendship” from people, the idea of machine companionship does not seem like much of a fall. But what is at stake is precious, the most precious things that people know how to offer each other.

(p. 147)

The psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the notion of the “paradox of choice.” While we think we would be happiest if we had more choices, constrained choice often leads to a more satisfied life. In the 1950s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon made a distinction between people who try to maximize and those who satisfice, a word he invented. A maximizer is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that every purchase or personal decision (including the decision about a mate) is the best that could be made. The only way maximizers can know this for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task that only becomes more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative is to be a satisficer. You can still have standards, but you are not haunted by the universe of possible choices. You are happy to take what is before you and make the most of it. Satisficers are, in general, happier because their life tasks are simpler. You are not obsessed about finding the best house—you might take a house that is comfortable and available and make it into a home. You don’t think about the best mate. You are attracted to someone and allow yourself to attach.

(p. 154)

So, the problem with infinite choice is that it makes us unhappy because we can’t bring ourselves to make any choice, and no choice feels definitive.

(p. 155)

But Chris Rock also said that on first dates, we don’t send ourselves but we send our “representatives”; we send our best selves. Over time, our representatives can’t do the job and “we” start to show up. And that is where a relationship either works or doesn’t. In digital connections, the danger is that we can keep sending in our representatives. So, it’s harder to know what is working, if it is working.

(p. 168)

Online, we do not become different selves. Our online identities are facets of ourselves that usually are harder for us to express in the physical realm. This is why the online world can be a place for personal growth. People work on desired qualities in the virtual and gradually bring them into their lives “off the screen.”

(p. 170)

Part III: Three Chairs — Education and Work

We decide to try a device-free class with a short break to check phones. For me, something shifts. Conversations become more relaxed and cohesive. Students finish their thoughts, unrushed. What the students tell me is that they feel relief: When they are not tempted by their phones, they feel more in control of their attention. An irony emerges. For of course, on one level, we all see our phones as instruments for giving us greater control, not less.

(p. 177)

So, dropping out of a classroom conversation can begin with a moment of boredom, because a friend reaches out to you, or because, as one student in my memoir class put it, “You just want to see who wants you.” And once you are in that “circuit of apps,” you want to stay with them.

(p. 179)

But there is another way to respond to students who complain that they need more stimulation than class conversation provides. It is to tell them that a moment of boredom can be an opportunity to go inward to your imagination, an opportunity for new thinking.

(p. 182)

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, had long observed students’ fractured attention spans but did not feel personally implicated until one evening when she sat down to read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, one of her favorite authors. Wolf found it impossible to focus on the book. She panicked and wondered if her life on the web had cost her this ability. When Eric Schmidt noted his difficulty with sustained reading, he remarked, “We’ve got to work on that.” Wolf immediately got to work. She began to study what skimming, scanning, and scrolling do to our ability to read with deep attention—what she calls “deep reading.” Her thesis is that a life lived online makes deep attention harder to summon. This happens because the brain is plastic—it is constantly in flux over a lifetime—so it “rewires” itself depending on how attention is allocated.

(p. 184)

Wolf’s focus on the plasticity of the brain gives her a different perspective. For if the brain is plastic, this means that at any age, it can be set to work on deep attention. Put otherwise, if we decide that deep attention is a value, we can cultivate it. Indeed, that is what Wolf discovered for herself. She had trouble with the Hesse but kept at it. And she says that after two weeks of effort, she was once again able to focus sufficiently to immerse herself in deep reading.

(p. 185)

The educational innovator Seymour Papert once said, “You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.” That insight, generalized, is key to understanding the idea of evocative objects—objects to think with that provoke thinking about other things.

(p. 191)

So, for example, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz waves the flag of “dialogue” to object to his university’s decision to substitute MOOCs for a set of classes on his residential campus. Teaching, for him, isn’t about “information.” In classrooms, “we learn from each other. This is what is lost in the online experience, confined to a computer screen and digitized feedback.”

(p. 194)

Some student objections are more personal. They come from what students know of their own human natures, natures that I don’t believe should be recast as human frailties. They tell me they want company. They are afraid that they already spend too much time alone and online. They say they need structure. A senior in Connecticut says, “I am going to listen to the lecture anyway. I have to. I don’t want to do it all lonely and maybe sad. I’d rather go with my friends. I’m in college!” A junior in New Jersey says, “To motivate myself to sit alone and sit in front of the computer? No matter how motivated I am, to block out an hour, it would be so hard. I like the idea that I have to show up. You’re showing up to something alive.”

(p. 194)

He argued that wearing a mask—what he thinks anonymous polling accomplishes—may free people up to express themselves, but face-to-face encounters encourage civility and a sense of accountability. When people know who you are, you take responsibility for what you say. For Jackson, the classroom is a place to learn how to participate in the conversations that make democracy work.

(p. 200)

Gchat and Google Docs got the job done by classical “productivity” measures. But the value of what you produce, what you “make,” in college is not just the final paper; it’s the process of making it.

(p. 205)

I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the better idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other’s breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

(p. 220)

Mentoring for conversation requires that you address two questions. You will be asked, outright, “Why focus on one thing, as you must in a face-to-face conversation, when you can get greater ‘value’ from spreading around your attention?” The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, “Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?” The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.

(p. 221)

Hammond sees a generational issue in play. “People who are over forty-five or fifty are more comfortable with face-to-face meetings.” And those under that age “have a tendency to use email to avoid dealing with each other.” And also, to use email to apologize. For Hammond, the ability to apologize face-to-face is a basic business skill. Not having it seems to him like “driving a car but not knowing how to go in reverse. This is what it must be for these people who can’t say these words. But email encourages this; on email, you never learn to say ‘I’m sorry.’”

(p. 224)

Part IV: The Path Forward and the Fourth Chair

Remember the power of your phone. It’s not an accessory. It’s a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are. Don’t automatically walk into every situation with a device in hand: When going to our phones is an option, we find it hard to turn back to each other, even when efficiency or politeness would suggest we do just that.

(p. 266)

Protect your creativity. Take your time and take quiet time. Find your own agenda and keep your own pace. Tutored by technology, we become reactive and transactional in our exchanges because this is what technology makes easy. We all struggle with this. But many successful people I’ve talked with say that a key to their achievement is that they don’t even try to empty their email inbox. They set aside specific times to deal with their most important messages but never let an inbox set their agenda.

(p. 267)

Again and again, I’ve seen people retreat to screens because only there do they feel they can “keep up” with the pace of machine life. I think of Vannevar Bush and his dream in 1945 that a mechanical “Memex” would free us for the kind of slow creative thinking that only people know how to do. Instead we too often try to speed up to a pace our machines suggest to us. It’s time to return to the spirit of Bush’s original idea.

(p. 267)

The sociologist Jürgen Habermas associates the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse with the rise of a “public sphere.” That was a place where people of all classes could talk about politics without fear of arrest. “What a lesson,” the Abbé Prévost said in 1728, “to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffeehouses . . . are the seats of English liberty.” Of course there was never any perfect public sphere. The coffeehouse required leisure and some money. It was not a place for women. Nevertheless, the coffeehouses were a place to talk about politics and learn how to talk about it. Joseph Addison, the essayist and politician, writing in 1714 as the voice of the newspaper The Spectator, makes the point that he enjoys coffeehouse debates because they are a place to learn. “Coffee houses have ever since been my chief Places of Resort, where I have made the greatest Improvements; in order to which I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”

(p. 279)

Thoreau talks of three chairs and I think about a fourth. Thoreau says that for the most expansive conversations, the deepest ones, he brought his guests out into nature—he calls it his withdrawing room, his “best room.” For me, the fourth chair defines a philosophical space. Thoreau could go into nature, but now, we contemplate both nature and a second nature of our own making, the world of the artificial and virtual. There, we meet machines that present themselves as open for conversation. The fourth chair raises the question: Who do we become when we talk to machines? Some talking machines have modest ambitions—such as putting you through the paces of a job interview. But others aspire to far more. Most of these are just now coming on the scene: “caring robots” that will tend to our children and elders if we ourselves don’t have the time, patience, or resources; automated psychotherapy programs that will substitute for humans in conversation. These present us with something new. It may not feel new. All day every day, we connect with witty apps, we type our information into dialogue programs, and we get information from personal digital assistants. We are comfortable talking at machines and through machines. Now we are asked to join a new kind of conversation, one that promises “empathic” connections. Machines have none to offer, and yet we persist in the desire for companionship and even communion with the inanimate. Has the simulation of empathy become empathy enough? The simulation of communion, communion enough? The fourth chair defines a space that Thoreau could not have seen. It is our nick of time. What do we forget when we talk to machines—and what can we remember?

(p. 282)

In the 1960s, a computer program called ELIZA, written by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum, adopted the “mirroring” style of a Rogerian psychotherapist. So, if you typed, “Why do I hate my mother?” ELIZA might respond, “I hear you saying that you hate your mother.” This program was effective—at least for a short while—in creating the illusion of intelligent listening. And there is this: We want to talk to machines even when we know they do not deserve our confidences. I call this the “ELIZA effect.” Weizenbaum was shocked that people (for example, his secretary and graduate students) who knew the limits of ELIZA’s ability to know and understand nevertheless wanted to be alone with the program in order to confide in it. ELIZA demonstrated that almost universally, people project human attributes onto programs that present as humanlike, an effect that is magnified when they are with robots called “sociable” machines—machines that do such things as track your motion, make eye contact, and remember your name.

(p. 285)

In our new culture of connection, we are lonely but afraid of intimacy. Fantasies of “conversation” with artificial beings solve a dilemma. They propose the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. They allow us to imagine a friction-free version of friendship. One whose demands are in our control, perhaps literally. I’ve said that part of what makes our new technologies of connection so seductive is that they respond to our fantasies, our wishes, that we will always be heard, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be, and that we will never have to be alone. And, of course, they respond to an implied fourth fantasy: that we will never have to be bored.

(p. 299)

When people give themselves the time for self-reflection, they come to a deeper regard for what they can offer others. The moment is right. We had a love affair with a technology that seemed magical. But like great magic, it worked by commanding our attention and not letting us see anything but what the magician wanted us to see. Now we are ready to reclaim our attention—for solitude, for friendship, for society.

(p. 303)