Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

Hassoun craves control more than sociability. She will email a “Sorry” instead of delivering a face-to-face apology; at work, as in her personal life, when she faces a difficult conversation, she makes every effort to sidestep it with an email. The difficult, even if necessary, conversations take time she says she doesn’t have. And they demand emotional exposure. Hassoun sees emotional exposure as stress she doesn’t have to subject herself to.

Ben Waber’s studies demonstrate that workers across different fields are more productive when they talk more.

For Castell, the dead meetings were symptoms. He had allowed technology to shape a culture that taught its members that conversation didn’t matter.

Over time, her sense of what made her valuable as an employee (devotion as shown by availability) came to be at odds with what she personally needed to do her best work.

And indeed, some of the most admired managers at HeartTech are the ones who send emails out in bursts, not throughout the day, but at times that will be convenient for their employees. They model a relationship with the network that leaves time and space.

One software developer has suggested that his industry redefine what it means for an app to be successful. It shouldn’t be how much time a consumer has spent with it but whether it was time well spent.

We are all the products of the conversations we have not had at home, the conversations we have sidestepped with family, friends, and intimates.

Champion conversation in the day-to-day. The moment needs mentors with humility, acknowledging that just as parents model the behavior (texting during dinner) they then criticize in their children, managers often model the behavior they criticize in their employees. Managers drop out of meetings to do email or play games. They take out their phones during lunch and coffee breaks with the professionals they supervise. I think of my own professional environment—if faculty members do email during faculty meetings, and we do, the fact that students text during class seems less shocking; we are all part of the same culture.

Sometimes making conversation an explicit value means recognizing when our best interests conflict with our desire to stay on our phones. When Castell couldn’t control his own texting at company meetings, he declared those meetings device-free and made himself live by his own rules. Encouraging conversation gives you permission to encourage solitude. Give yourself and others permission to think—sometimes alone—and provide time and space to do so.

told everyone I was sick. That I had the flu and was contagious. I stayed at home for four days. I just worked. The analysis turned out great. But I couldn’t ever have done this job at my job.

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.

I have said that if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. If we don’t teach our employees to be alone, they will only know how to be isolated. And frantic.

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

If you grew up in the world of “I share, therefore I am,” you may not have confidence that you have a thought unless you are sharing it.

What led to the problem? Who are the stakeholders? What is the situation on the ground? For on the ground there is never a simple fix, only friction, complexity, and history.

Now we know that our life online creates a digital double because we took actions (we don’t know which) that are acted on by algorithms (we don’t know how). Our life has been “mined” for clues to our desires. But when our screens suggest our desires back to us, they often seem like broken mirrors.

And indeed, on the appointed day, few people stepped out into the physical world to put up their signs. Elizabeth sums up what she learned from this experience: “You go on a website, you send in your money—that satisfies your requirement for being in the conversation. You show solidarity with a movement by going online, and then, that’s it.”

To make this point, Gladwell tells the story of the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in that opened a new chapter in the civil rights movement. It was something that a group of friends had discussed for nearly a month. The first young black man who asked to be served a cup of coffee at the lunch counter “was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.” They had the strongest of ties. They needed these to organize against violent opposition, to change tactics, and to stay the course.

The story about life as emergencies is about how people, especially young people, develop a fretful self. If you see life as a stream of emergencies, this frames your life narrative. Indeed, Twitter itself followed one of its co-founders’ early enthusiasm for police scanners. You learn that framing things as emergencies gets attention, including attention from your friends. In a world where even middle schoolers say they can’t handle the number of messages they receive, telling a friend “It’s an emergency” bumps you to the top of the list.

You know you are thinking in terms of catastrophe if your attention is riveted on the short term.

You turn something that has a politics and a pattern into something that needs an immediate response but not necessarily an analysis. A catastrophe doesn’t seem to require legislation. It needs balm and prayers.

My grandmother’s reverence for the American mailbox and library was her deepest expression of patriotism. And mindspace was central to that patriotism.

We make our technologies and they make and shape us. I learned to be an American citizen at the mailboxes in an apartment lobby in Brooklyn. And my understanding of the mindspace that democracy requires was shaped by how things worked at the public library. I did not know where to take my daughter, now twenty-four, as she grew up with the Internet.

The goal for those who make the apps is to link surveillance with the feeling that we are cared for. If our apps take “care” of us, we are not focused on what they take from us.

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. The system presents us with what it believes we will buy or read or vote for. It places us in a particular world that constrains our sense of what is out there and what is possible.

The philosopher Allan Bloom has suggested the cost: “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.”

But how do they work and what are they going to do with all that they know about you? I don’t know and I don’t like where this is going. But I’m not going to think about this until something really bad happens concretely.

We’re accustomed to media manipulation—advertising has always tried to do this. But having unprecedented kinds of information about us—from what medications we take to what time we go to bed—allows for unprecedented interventions and intrusions. What is at stake is a sense of a self in control of itself. And a citizenry that can think for itself.

Remember the power of your phone. It’s not an accessory. It’s a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are. Don’t automatically walk into every situation with a device in hand: When going to our phones is an option, we find it hard to turn back to each other, even when efficiency or politeness would suggest we do just that. The mere presence of a phone signals that your attention is divided, even if you don’t intend it to be. It will limit the conversation in many ways: how you’ll listen, what will be discussed, the degree of connection you’ll feel. 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.

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

Digital communication can lead us to an edited life. We should not forget that an unedited life is also worth living.

People require eye contact for emotional stability and social fluency. A lack of eye contact is associated with depression, isolation, and the development of antisocial traits such as exhibiting callousness. And the more we develop these psychological problems, the more we shy away from eye contact. Our slogan can be: 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.

A child alone with a problem has an emergency. A child in conversation with a grown-up is facing a moment in life and learning how to cope with it.

When we reclaim conversation and the places to have them, we are led to reconsider the importance of long-term thinking. Life is not a problem looking for a quick fix. Life is a conversation and you need places to have it. The virtual provides us with more spaces for these conversations and these are enriching. But what makes the physical so precious is that it supports continuity in a different way; it doesn’t come and go, and it binds people to it. You can’t just log off or drop out. You learn to live things through.

There have been clubs and coffeehouses and salons. The sociologist Jürgen Habermas associates the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse with the rise of a “public sphere.” That was a place where people of all classes could talk about politics without fear of arrest. “What a lesson,” the Abbé Prévost said in 1728, “to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffeehouses . . . are the seats of English liberty.”

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Children need to learn what complex human feelings and human ambivalence look like. And they need other people to respond to their own expressions of that complexity. These are the most precious things that people give to children in conversation as they grow up. No robot has these things to teach.

The feeling that “no one is listening to me” plays a large part in our relationships with technology. That’s why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed—so many automatic listeners. And that feeling that “no one is listening to me” makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us. We are willing to take their performances of caring and conversation at “interface value.”

And to say that it is just the thing for older people who are at that point where they are often trying to make sense of their lives is demeaning. They, of all people, should be given occasions to talk about their real lives, filled with real losses and real loves, to someone who knows what those things are.

Now we have to ask if we become more human when we give our most human jobs away. It is a moment to reconsider that delegation. It is not a moment to reject technology but to find ourselves. This is our nick of time and our line to toe: to acknowledge the unintended consequences of technologies to which we are vulnerable, to respect the resilience that has always been ours. We have time to make the corrections. And to remember who we are—creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships. Of conversations artless, risky, and face-to-face.