Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

These days, the desire for privacy is considered suspicious and limits your ability to have it.

This is one of the great paradoxes of digital conversation: It feels private despite the fact that you are onstage.

For Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for surveillance by creating a citizenry that is always watching itself.

We don’t so much conform because we fear the consequences of being caught out in deviant behavior; rather, we conform because what is shown to us online is shaped by our past interests.

We are asked to see ourselves as the collection of things we are told we should want, as the collection of things we are told should interest us.

Rich conversations have difficulty competing with even a silent phone. To clear a path for conversation, set aside laptops and tablets. Put away your phone.

Create sacred spaces for conversation.

Think of unitasking as the next big thing.

Talk to people with whom you don’t agree.

Our minds work, and sometimes at their best, when we daydream.

If a tool gets in the way of our looking at each other, we should use it only when necessary. It shouldn’t be the first thing we turn to.

Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence (AI), was “trying to create a computer beautiful enough that a soul would want to live in it.”

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.