Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

We deny ourselves the benefits of solitude because we see the time it requires as a resource to exploit. Instead of using time alone to think (or not think), we think of filling it with digital connection.

This is exactly why we can't think for ourselves.

It is not surprising that privacy allows for greater creativity. When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to think critically about our own thoughts, a process psychologists call meta-cognition. Everyone has this potential. The important thing is to nurture it. The danger is that in a life of constant connection, we lose the capacity to do so.

The teachers who complain that parents see free time as their children’s enemy are pointing to something real. Children can’t develop the capacity for solitude if they don’t have the experience of being “bored” and then turning within rather than to a screen.

Infants deprived of eye contact and facing a parent’s “still face” become agitated, then withdrawn, then depressed.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.

and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn. And anxious about talk.

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.

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.

For Williams, the empathic relationship does not begin with “I know how

you feel.” It begins with the realization that you don’t know how another feels. In that ignorance, you begin with an offer of conversation: “Tell me how you feel.” Empathy, for Williams, is an offer of accompaniment and commitment. And making the offer changes you. When you have a growing awareness of how much you don’t know about someone else, you begin to understand how much you don’t know about yourself. You learn, says Williams, “a more demanding kind of attention. You learn patience and a new skill and habit of perspective.”

But in this, we pursue an illusion. When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving quickly from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add to the mix. Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse. We’ve seen that not only do multitaskers have trouble deciding how to organize their time, but over time, they “forget” how to read human emotions.

But if we don’t “see” our devices, we are less likely to register the effect they are having on us. We begin to think that the way we think when we have our devices in hand is the “natural” way to think.

Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less.

Address the anxiety of disconnection. We work better together when we can also work alone. And we work best alone when we are undistracted. But studies show that on average, an office worker is distracted (electronically) every three minutes and that it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to get back on track. It’s hard to break this cycle because when we get used to interruptions, we learn to interrupt ourselves as well. It’s what has become most comfortable. The Fortune 500 vice-president became anxious at a quiet desk. It’s more familiar to be in a state of agitated calm: distracted and unproductive.

Sociability increases productivity and creativity. But so does the ability to have privacy when you need it.

When terrorism is presented as a calamity, and it is, it is presented as separate from the history that created it, so that it comes to be more like a natural disaster, a state of evil, rather than something that can be addressed by politics or through a reconsideration of its historical roots. When terror is treated as a natural disaster, all we can do about it is kill terrorists.

By analogy, in our current circumstance, we don’t want to discard social media, but we may want to rewrite our social contract with it. If it operated more transparently, we might not feel so lost in our dialogue with it and about it. One way to begin this dialogue is to politicize our need for solitude, privacy, and mindspace.

And we’ve created a political culture in which contention rather than conversation is the rule. We show little interest in listening to good ideas if they come from political opponents. Indeed, we see politicians awkwardly rejecting their own good ideas if they are now put forth by members of an opposing party.