Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

The top performers “overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”

His experience illustrates disconnection anxiety. Now that connection is always on offer, people don’t know what to do with time alone, even time they asked for.

Knowing we have someplace “else” to go in a moment of boredom leaves us less experienced at exploring our inner lives and therefore more likely to want the stimulation of what is on our phones. 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.

But now 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.

But childhood boredom is a driver. It sparks imagination. It builds up inner emotional resources.

For gamblers in the machine zone, money doesn’t matter. Neither does winning or losing. What matters is remaining at the machine and in the zone. Technology critic Alexis Madrigal thinks of the “Facebook zone” as a softer version of the numbed state of Schüll’s gamblers. When you’re on social media, you don’t leave, but you are not sure if you are making a conscious decision to stay.

“Sudden illumination,” says Poincaré, is only “a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work,” work usually done alone. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.

The psychologist Jonathan Schooler demonstrated that “mind wandering” is a stepping-stone to creativity. “The mind is inherently restless,” says Schooler. “It’s always looking to attend to the most interesting thing in its environment.”

Our devices compel us because we respond to every search and every new piece of information (and every new text) as though it had the urgency of a threat in the wild.

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.

Apps can give you a number; only people can provide a narrative. Technology can expose mechanism; people have to find meaning.

Although Melissa uses Facebook as a substitute for her journal (she says, “It’s easier”), she is less honest on the digital page. She says that when she wrote in her journal, she felt as if she was writing for herself. When she switched to Facebook, she went into “performance” mode. She shares her thoughts, but she also thinks about how they will “play.”

And these days, using the web for self-reflection poses the very real question of how truthful to be. For we know that it is not a private space, not a journal or a diary locked away. It is a new thing: a public space that we may nevertheless experience as the most private place in the world.

“You flip between your music, your news, your entertainment, your people. You control it. You own it. That’s my zone.” Here, the definition of self-reflection has narrowed: It means control over your connections. We’ve seen this before, solitude defined as time with a managed crowd.

Over time, there is a subtle shift. In some sense, “you” become the number of steps you walked this week compared to last. “You” become a lowered resting heart rate over the span of two months. You move to a view of self as the sum, bit by bit, of its measurable elements. Self-tracking does not logically imply a machine view of self, or the reduction of self-worth to a number, but it gets people in the habit of thinking of themselves as made up of measurable units and achievements. It makes it natural to ask, “What is my score?”

But as we become more sophisticated about the kinds of data that self-monitoring devices return to us, that first impulse need not be our last impulse. We can construct narratives around our numbers. Indeed, in Trish we see the impulse to do that. (“It makes me wonder why it thinks that.”) And in meetings of those who declare themselves to be part of the “quantified self movement,” people do bring in data from sensors and programs and attempt to construct stories around them.

In this spirit, a recently divorced woman in her thirties posted a blog of self-reflection and called it “The Quantified Breakup.” In the days and months after her divorce, she tracked the number of texts she wrote and calls she made (and to whom), songs she listened to (classified happy or sad), places she went, unnecessary purchases and their costs. She tracked her sleeping and waking hours, when and for how long she exercised, ate out, and went to the movies. When did she cry in public and post on social media? Reading this material is arresting. Yet as I read her blog, it seems like raw data for another story about what the purchases and the tears and the songs mean. Does this experience bring her back to other times when she has felt alone? To other losses?

When we have a number, it tends to take on special importance even as it leaves to us all the heavy lifting of narrative construction. Yet it constrains that construction because the story we tell has to justify the number.

When Morris considers her work over the years, she says that what strikes her about the feedback devices she has made is that “they are most powerful as a starting point, not an ending point,” and that “every one of them started a conversation.” In terms of making a difference to health and family dynamics, it was the conversation that brought about change.

important as she once was. I’m in a group where Linda discusses her relationship with 750 Words. The question comes up as to whether Linda’s approach is making her a better person. Sure, she is gaming the system, but maybe the system is gaming her—in a good way. Is this therapy? Is writing a positive version of your day every day a bad thing?

Linda believes that if she consciously talks more about other people, she may in fact become less self-absorbed. So what starts as an exercise in self-reflection ends up, at least for Linda, as behavioral therapy.

But without a person with whom to discuss the meaning behind the number, without a methodology for looking at her current feelings in relation to her history, she was flying blind.

A first strategy is not to take words literally but to have patience with them. Wait and see where words lead you if you let them take you anywhere.

In the safety of talk therapy you learn that you tell yourself small, unconscious lies—to large effect. And you learn to stop, reflect, and correct.

Once she had “evidence” in hand, doing nothing became intolerable. 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.

If you act out, you create change and perhaps crisis. All of the new noise you make can drown out the feelings you were originally trying to understand.

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.”

By the end of a successful treatment, the patient leaves with the voice of the therapist “brought within.” Patients have learned to be their own dialogue partner. One learns to take first reactions and give them a second look. One learns to ask, “Who is really speaking here? Where are my feelings coming from? Before I accuse the world of neglecting me, am I neglecting the world?”

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.

If you ever have a vexing number from a happiness tracker, you will know how to interrogate it. You’ll know that the answer isn’t in the readout but in the conversation it helps you begin and how prepared you are to have it. Our quantitative selves leave data trails that are the beginning of our stories, not the results, not the conclusions.

I have a fantasy that in the future, people will look at the output of their tracking apps with a computer scientist to explain how its algorithms work—and a therapist who will help them put the readout in the context of their individual lives. More realistically, people will develop a dual sensibility: The psychoanalytic and computer culture will find their necessary points of synergy.

To join in conversation is to imagine another mind, to empathize, and to enjoy gesture, humor, and irony in the medium of talk. As with language, the capacity to learn these human subtleties is innate. But their development depends on the environment in which a child is placed.

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. When an adult asks an upset child, “How are you feeling?” the adult can make it clear that anger and frustration are acceptable emotions; they are part of being a person. Upset feelings don’t have to be hidden or denied. What matters is what you do with them.

In the performative world of “I share, therefore I am,” family conversation is a space to be authentic. Family conversation also teaches that some things take time to sort through—quite a bit of time. And that it is possible to find this time because there are people who will take the time.

You can feel trust and a sense of security. To give children these rewards, adults have to show up, put their phones away, look at children, and listen. And then, repeat.

Yes, repeat. In family conversation, much of the work is done as children learn they are in a place they can come back to, tomorrow and tomorrow.

Relationships deepen not because we necessarily say anything in particular but because we are invested enough to show up for another conversation. In family conversations, children learn that what can matter most is not the information shared but the relationships sustained. It is hard to sustain those relationships if you are on your phone.

At such moments we see the new silences of family life. We see children learning that no matter what they do, they will not win adults away from technology. And we see children deprived not only of words but of adults who will look them in the eye.

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.

They carry their phones at all times. They sleep with their phones. Some post to their networks rather than talk to their parents when they need emotional support. They say it’s easier, and besides, they are not confident they can command their parents’ attention for the amounts of time it takes to really sort things out. And some doubt if their parents have the needed resources to help them. They are more confident that the right information will be available online, accessible from strangers or search.

A tearful conversation with your mother and a sad blog post are both a kind of performance, but they ask and offer very different things. Ideally, the conversation with your mother can teach how empathy works. It is an opportunity to watch her attend to how you look and sound. It is an opportunity to notice that when she pays attention to you, her responses will begin to mirror your tone and body language. You can observe that when she says, “I don’t understand,” she leans forward, signaling that she is trying to put herself in your place. Children learn empathy by observing the efforts of others to be empathic toward them.

When someone is being empathic toward you, you learn that someone is listening to you, and that they have made a commitment to see things through.

parents will interrupt conversations to do online searches because they think it will make family conversations richer. From the parents’ point of view, they are not turning away from their children at all. They think they are bringing more data into the conversation. But that is rarely how children see it. Recall the fifteen-year-old who stopped her dad when he went online to “fact-check” a question that had come up at dinner. She said, “Daddy! Stop Googling! I want to talk to you!” She wants her simple presence to be enough. She doesn’t want to be trumped, quizzed, edified, or in competition with the whole online world.

Our phones give the false sense of demanding little and giving a lot.

So, Jon’s frenetic sharing is part of a larger story. 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.

Once we recognize the affordances of a technology—what a technology makes easy or attractive—we are in a position to look at our vulnerability with a clearer eye. If we feel “addicted to our phones,” it is not a personal weakness. We are exhibiting a predictable response to a perfectly executed design. Looking at things through this lens might put us halfway to making new choices, needed changes.

And there is this: Since fighting by text puts the emphasis on your getting the “right” message out, it sets up the expectation that you require the “right” message back. This implies that you think there is a way for people to talk to each other in which each party will say the right thing. Relations within families are messy and untidy. If we clean them up with technology, we don’t necessarily do them justice.

We are vulnerable: Going to technology starts to feel easier, if not better, than going to each other. Simply keeping this in mind may help us make more deliberate choices for our families.

Friends want to be together, but when they get together, the point isn’t necessarily to talk—what counts most is physical closeness. And when friends are physically together, they often layer their conversation so that part of it is online (with the same people who are in the room).

In person, there are so many reasons why you don’t want to talk to that person. Because you think, “Maybe they think I’m ugly” or something like that.