Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

These kids aren’t cruel. But they are not emotionally developed. Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way eight-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children. They say to other students: “You can’t play with us.” They are not developing that way of relating where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other.

computers offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship and then, as the programs got really good, the illusion of friendship without the demands of intimacy.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. When we are secure in ourselves we are able to listen to other people and really hear what they have to say. And then in conversation with other people we become better at inner dialogue.

It is when we see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices that we become most human to each other.

it is often when we hesitate, or stutter, or fall silent, that we reveal ourselves most to each other. And to ourselves.

What people say to each other when they are together is shaped by what their phones have taught them, and indeed by the simple fact that they have their phones with them. The presence of always-on and always-on-you technology—the brute fact of gadgets in the palm or on the table—changes the conversations we have when we talk in person.

studies show that open screens degrade the performance of everyone who can see them—their owners and everyone sitting around them.

We haven’t stopped talking, but we opt out, often unconsciously, of the kind of conversation that requires full attention. Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.

American adults check their phones every six and a half minutes. We start early: There are now baby bouncers (and potty seats) that are manufactured with a slot to hold a digital device. A quarter of American teenagers are connected to a device within five minutes of waking up. Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day. Eighty percent sleep with their phones. Forty-four percent do not “unplug,” ever, not even in religious services or when playing a sport or exercising.

College students who are using any form of media are likely to be using four at a time. If students are on Facebook, they are also on Netflix, a music blog, and their class reading.

Frequent multitasking is associated with depression, social anxiety, and trouble reading human emotions.

people who chronically multitask train their brains to crave multitasking. Those who multitask most frequently don’t get better at it; they just want more of it. This means that conversation, the kind that demands focus, becomes more and more difficult.

Solitude does not necessarily mean being alone. It is a state of conscious retreat, a gathering of the self. The capacity for solitude makes relationships with others more authentic. Because you know who you are, you can see others for who they are, not for who you need them to be. So solitude enables richer conversation. But our current way of life undermines our capacity for solitude.

free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive.

Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations.

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.

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.

If we care about solitude, we have to communicate this to our children. They are not going to pick it up on their own. And more than telling our children that we value solitude, we have to show them that we think it is important by finding some for ourselves.

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.”

we know that literary fiction significantly improves empathic capacity, as measured by the ability to infer emotional states from people’s facial expressions. The English teachers were right, literally. First one identifies with the characters in a complex novel and then the effect generalizes.

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.

Reclaiming conversation begins with reclaiming our capacity for solitude. When we reach for a phone to push reverie away, we should get into the habit of asking why.

One of the rewards of solitude is an increased capacity for self-reflection—the conversations we have with ourselves in the hope of greater insight about who we are and want to be. Professionally, what is our vocation? Personally, what gives us purpose and meaning? Can we forgive our transgressions and those of others? In self-reflection, we come to understand ourselves better and we nurture our capacity for relationship.

From infancy, the foundations for emotional stability and social fluency are developed when children make eye contact and interact with active, engaged faces. Infants deprived of eye contact and facing a parent’s “still face” become agitated, then withdrawn, then depressed. These days, neuroscientists speculate that when parents caring for children turn to their phones, they may “effectively simulate a still-face paradigm”—in their homes or out in a restaurant—with all of the attendant damage. It is not surprising if children deprived of words, eye contact, and expressive faces become stiff and unresponsive with others.

Today, adults who grew up reading serious literature can force themselves to focus on long texts and reactivate the neural circuits for deep reading that they may have lost after spending more time online than with books. But children need to develop these circuits in the first place. Wolf suggests that to get children back to reading, the first, crucial step is to read to children and with them.

our phones are seductive. When our phones are around, we are vulnerable to ignoring the people we love. Given this, it doesn’t make sense to bring a phone to dinner with your children. Accept your vulnerability. Remove the temptation.

Everyone thinks that everyone else is occupied and preoccupied. The most realistic way to disrupt this circle is to have parents step up to their responsibilities as mentors. They can’t do this if they are texting or doing email while their children are trying to get their attention.

distracted parents are nothing new, but sharing parents with laptops and mobile phones is different than sharing parents with an open book or a television or a newspaper. Texting and email take people away to worlds of more intense and concentrated focus and engagement.

When we have our phones in our hands, we are invited to stay in the world of our phones. Our phones give the false sense of demanding little and giving a lot.

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.

We let phones disrupt the conversations of friendship in several ways: By having our phones out, we keep conversations light and we are less connected to each other in the conversations we do have.

A life of multitasking limits your options so that you cannot simply “pick up” deep attention. What is most enriching is having fluency in both deep and hyper attention. This is attentional pluralism and it should be our educational goal. You can choose multitasking. You can also focus on one thing at a time. And you know when you should.

The world’s largest conference call provider, used by 85 percent of Fortune 100 firms, studied what people are doing during meetings: 65 percent do other work, 63 percent send email, 55 percent eat or make food, 47 percent go to the bathroom, and 6 percent take another phone call.

The multitasking life puts us into a state similar to vigilance, one of continual alert. In that condition, we can follow only the most rudimentary arguments. So multitasking encourages brevity and simplicity, even when more is called for. And the harm that multitasking does is contagious. We’ve seen that someone multitasking on a laptop distracts everyone around the machine, not just the person using it.

“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.’”

managers need to make conversation the norm. Showing up to a face-to-face mentoring session should not feel that it requires an act of courage. It should feel like business as usual.

the end, we will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy. —JOHN SAWHILL, CONSERVATIONIST

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.

Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.

Unitasking is key to productivity and creativity. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

Right now we work on the premise that putting in a robot to do a job is always better than nothing. The premise is flawed. If you have a problem with care and companionship and you try to solve it with a robot, you may not try to solve it with your friends, your family, and your community. The as-if self of a robot calling forth the as-if self of a person performing for it—this is not helpful for children as they grow up. It is not helpful for adults as they try to live authentically.