Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

There is only one thing that you should do if you are on heroin: Get off the heroin. Your life is at stake. But laptops and smartphones are not things to remove. They are facts of life and part of our creative lives. The goal is to use them with greater intention.

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. But attentional pluralism is hard to achieve. Hyper attention feels good. And without practice, we can lose the ability to summon deep attention.

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.

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. Wolf’s experience suggests a pedagogy that supports unitasking and deep reading. But if we value these, we have to actively choose them.

But they continue to skip what this teacher calls “basic content,” thinking that this is something the web will fill them in on—someday. The web is their “information prosthetic” and they see no cost to having one.

Maureen knows no poetry; more than this, in school, she says, she was never asked to memorize anything, “no dates or places in history.” When she needed a fact, she looked it up online. This leaves Maureen feeling empty without her phone. But when she has her phone, she has facts at her fingertips but no timeline or narrative to slide them into. For her, another fact about the United States in 1863 simply floats free in its own universe, somewhere out there in the cloud; it is not added to a story about the Civil War that Maureen already knows.

And even if every one of their students will always have the web by their side, these educators insist that on-demand information does not make an education. You need to have a strong background of facts and concepts on board before you know you need them. We think with what we know; we use what we know to ask new questions.

Eighty-nine percent of medical residents regard one of these E-memory tools, UpToDate, as their first choice for answering clinical questions. But will this “just-in-time” and “just enough” information teach young doctors to organize their own ideas and draw their own conclusions?

Searches return what we ask for—that’s what they are made to do. When we depend on E-memory we lose that wide, unfiltered array of information that creates the conditions needed for creativity, for serendipity.

Steiker explains why her position has changed, radically. She saw that students taking notes with computers suffered from more than inattention. They were losing the ability to take notes at all. She puts it this way: “Students taking notes on computers seemed compelled to type out the full record of what was said in class. They were trying to establish transcripts of the class.” To put it too simply: Students were putting themselves in the role of court stenographers. For Steiker, this was a problem in itself. She wants note taking to help students integrate the themes of her class. For her, note taking trains students to organize a subject in a personal way. It cultivates an art of listening and thinking that will be important to the future lawyer.

If your notes are meant to capture the themes of the class, you remember your own participation and you make it part of the story. If you are trying to write a transcript of a class, class participation takes you away from your job.”

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. As I thought about conversation in education, I often had MOOCs on my mind.

An irony emerges. Research on MOOCs, the pedagogical form that was hailed because it offers so much to measure, shows that they work best when they are combined with the least measurable element of a traditional classroom: presence.

The director of a Columbia University study that compared online and face-to-face learning sums up its findings: “The most important thing that helps students succeed in an online course is interpersonal interaction and support.”

“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.”

They saw the classroom as a place where you learned to love the “as-is” of nature as much as you love the “as-if” of the virtual.

What makes the greatest impression in a college education is learning how to think like someone else, appreciating an intellectual personality, and thinking about what it might mean to have one of your own. When we hear someone speak, we imagine things about them that we wish for ourselves.

The lecture has other virtues. It disciplines a teacher to integrate content and its critique. It teaches students that no information should be partitioned from an opportunity to discuss and challenge it “live.”

Why would we want to put at the center of our educational agenda a kind of learning in which we don’t teach the skill of raising hands and entering a conversation? If doing this makes our students nervous, our job as educators should be to help them get over

The value of attending a live lecture in college is a bit like the value of doing fieldwork. In fieldwork, there can be dry spells, but you learn to read people in real time. You share a bit of road with those around you and you come to understand how a group thinks. And you learn the rewards of patience: You have followed arguments as they unfold. If you are lucky, you learn that life repays close, focused attention.

“You do get embarrassed, but you get over it and get used to hearing yourself say things aloud. You say to yourself, ‘Did I say that? I can’t believe I think that, but I do think that. I’ve thought about this; I just never thought I could get myself to say it.’” This is teaching by conversation: It is a delicate thing, a walk toward boredom and embarrassment.

These days, teaching by conversation is talked about as crucial (after all, the stated goal of putting content online in the flipped classroom is to have more dynamic in-class conversations).

But once the questions are turned into a flat stream of questions and comments without faces . . . you end up not caring about them. You care about a question when you know whose question it is. A question that doesn’t come from a person—it’s only half a question.”

We want technology put in the service of our educational purposes. But this can happen only if we are clear about them. If not, we may be tolerant of classroom technologies that distract teachers and students from focusing on each other.

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.

In a face-to-face meeting, you can see people’s attention wander off to their phones. On Gchat, the inattention of your peers is invisible to you. Once you make the assumption that when people work, they will want to text and shop as well, it helps to collaborate on a medium that hides what Jason calls their “true absences.” Gchat lets the simulation of focused attention seem like attention enough.

But so many of our best ideas are born this way, in conversations that take a turn. I want my students to have this experience.

But my experience is that you really don’t know when you are going to have an important conversation. You have to show up for many conversations that feel inefficient or boring to be there for the conversation that changes your mind.

We spent hours each day, just talking. When Amos’s first son, Oren, then fifteen months old, was told that his father was at work, he volunteered the comment “Aba talk Danny.” We were not only working, of course—we talked of everything under the sun, and got to know each other’s mind almost as well as our own. We could (and often did) finish each other’s sentences and complete the joke that the other had wanted to tell, but somehow we also kept surprising each other.

Here we see conversation as not only an intellectual engine but the means by which colleagues were able to cross boundaries that are usually only dissolved by love. Conversation led to intellectual communion. When I explain my current project, people often say, “You’re so right to study conversation. For communication, it has the broadest bandwidth—it’s the best way to exchange information.” Kahneman and Tversky teach us that while this may be true, it is far from the whole story. Conversation is a kind of intimacy. You don’t just get more information. You get different information. The bandwidth argument leaves out this essential.

College should be a time to invest in teaching students about the long-term value of open-ended conversations, but in today’s environment, it is hard to argue the value of conversation for learning because it is hard to measure its value with productivity metrics, especially in the short term.

Adam Falk, president of Williams College, has given it a try. He argued that what really matters in a college education is learning “to write effectively, argue persuasively, solve problems creatively,” and “adapt and learn independently.” He and his colleagues investigated where these skills blossom. It turns out that they correlate with the amount of time students spend with professors—not virtual contact, but live contact. Given Falk’s findings, it is painful to hear faculty complain that students don’t show up for office hours.

The year before, everyone was excited to talk about apps that might fix everything. It’s tougher to confront problems for which there is no clear solution. And mentoring is one of them. Students avoid faculty in large part because students are anxious about the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.

Studies of mentoring show that what makes a difference, what can change the life of a student, is the presence of one strong figure who shows an interest, who, the student would say, “gets me.” You need a conversation for that.

But Lister doesn’t think that these scheduled meetings are doing the work of her impromptu chats with Berger. Once you have an agenda, she thinks, you are not as likely to play with ideas. For that, she says, “You need a conversation that is truly open-ended.”

These days, when we think of downtime and reducing stress, we don’t usually think of relaxing with peers but of getting some control over the crowd that the net brings to us. Lister remarks that the new office practices (fewer informal meetings, less time in the cafeteria, more time alone at screens) impact her firm’s sense of community.

“We think of productivity as . . . sitting in front of the computer and banging out emails, scheduling things; and that’s what makes us productive. But it’s not.” What makes you productive is “your interactions with other people—you know, you give them new ideas, you get new ideas from them; and . . . if you even make five people a little bit more productive every day, those conversations are worth it.”

But the most artful design will be subverted if a work culture, at its heart, does not understand the unique value of conversation.

Rabinow says the meeting markers can be “summary slogans.” Or people can create markers by sending around photographs or other images that stand in for ideas. A trail of images—a meme track—can help communicate the high points of a meeting during which people have slipped in and out of attention. Sometimes the meme track can serve as more than simple bread crumbs. Sometimes, they are how people expect to contribute to the conversation.

Do the memes do the job—or do they do a job we can’t do? In any organization, there are some kinds of ideas that only words can convey. There are some kinds of conflicts that only words can parse and resolve. We have to think about preparing our students and employees to participate in these conversations. No matter how rich and even subversive, the meme track can take them only so far.

These are meetings that give the illusion of collaboration with all the drawbacks of distraction.

“Dropbox,” says the publicity director, “creates the fantasy that some of the work of a meeting has already been done.” But it hasn’t been done. The publicity director says that she herself comes to meetings exhausted from trying and failing to read what’s in her Dropbox. It’s come to the point where she resents being asked to brainstorm at meetings. “I can’t brainstorm . . . I’m too exhausted to brainstorm.”

Rattan sees a disconnect. Her new hires, young consultants, are coming out of the best colleges and business schools. They have done amazing things both academically and in their extracurricular lives. But they are struggling with the simplest workplace conventions and conversations. She marvels: “They’ve designed their own apps, but they are socially inept.” They have a hard time showing empathy in the workplace. They don’t seem to understand the perspectives of their colleagues or clients. In today’s workplace, the first training often needs to be training in conversation. But it usually isn’t given its rightful place as a business priority because we tend to assume that employees know how to listen and respond.

Rattan has had her own problems with focus. A few years ago, at forty, she found that her life of always-on connection left her always distracted. She was unhappy and unproductive. She decided to take action. When she got to work, Rattan began to turn off the Wi-Fi and work in an empty office. She segmented her workday into times online and off. This helped her to unitask because she had long blocks of time when email and the web were no longer a temptation. She suggests this strategy to others: Begin by admitting vulnerability and then design new behaviors around it.

Designing for vulnerability means avoiding what undermines your attention. That can mean a “parking lot” for smartphones and tablets before you start a meeting; it can mean a “one task only” rule when you have to write something important. It helps to come to the design process with compassion for yourself and others. For you may have to say the seemingly obvious to young colleagues: You can’t update your Facebook during client meetings. This may be something they do not know.

The notion of unitasking was picked up when the magazine The Atlantic produced a video on the problems associated with multitasking and suggested one remedy: a “Tabless Thursday.” One day a week, you can work only on one thing instead of keeping multiple browser tabs open. It’s a gimmick, certainly, but the basic idea is gaining traction.

They don’t allow themselves to see the things that don’t connect to them as relevant to them. But a play is an organic whole.

The judges, the director of technology, and the theater directors are circling the same issues. New ideas emerge from in-person meetings. Email conversations, no matter how efficient, trend toward the transactional. Emails pose questions and get answers—most of the time, emails boil down to an exchange of information. In acting, in law, in business, the loss of a face-to-face meeting means a loss of complexity and depth. A younger generation may be getting accustomed to this flattening of things. But Hareet believes that those who have experienced the change miss feeling part of an “organic whole. And they miss what the voice and the body communicate.”

Sticking to your screen allows you to experience some measure of control. When people resist moving away from their screens and toward conversation, they are often afraid of giving up this feeling of mastery.

Or, says Hassoun, she can check in with friends in a way that feels safe because it is time-limited. I’ve called this the Goldilocks effect—we want our connections not too close, not too far, just right. If Hassoun checks Facebook and sends a few texts and emails, she can stay in contact with other people but not risk too much time away from her job. What she calls her quick “social checks” make the demands of work manageable.