Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

Time in simulation gets children ready for more time in simulation. Time with people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation.

We can both redesign technology and change how we bring it into our lives.

Conversations in these traditions have a lot in common. When they work best, people don’t just speak but listen, both to others and to themselves. They allow themselves to be vulnerable. They are fully present and open to where things might go.

“Our texts are fine. It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”

Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of our online connections, we want immediate answers. In order to get them, we ask simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to a life of constant interruption.

Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.

We lose our words. Intelligence once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit. And yet we readily call machines intelligent now. Affective is another word that once meant a lot more than what any machine can deliver. Yet we have become used to describing machines that portray emotional states or can sense our emotional states as exemplars of “affective computing.” These new meanings become our new normal, and we forget other meanings. We have to struggle to recapture lost language, lost meanings, and perhaps, in time, lost experiences.

Every new technology offers an opportunity to ask if it serves our human purposes. From there begins the work of making technology better serve these purposes. It took generations to get nutrition labels on food; it took generations to get speed limits on roads and seat belts and air bags into cars. But food and transportation technology are safer because all of these are now in place. In the case of communications technology, we have just begun.

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.

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.

To join in conversation is to imagine another mind, to empathize, and to enjoy gesture, humor, and irony in the medium of talk.

Young people have grown up in a world of search, and information is the end point of search. They have been taught that information is the key to making things better—in fact, to making everything better. Family conversation teaches another message. Talking to your parents doesn’t just offer up information. You experience the commitment of a lifelong relationship. A parent may have no immediate “solution” for you but may simply say, “No matter what, I will always love you.” And “I’m staying around for another conversation; we’ll keep talking this out.” Even if a family is broken and a parent lives at a distance from a child, this last message is what a child wants to hear, no matter what the circumstances.

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

He thinks their conversations change when she is recording. And he doesn’t like the idea that if he says something off-putting, it won’t be enough to simply see the reaction in Andi’s face and say he is sorry. His wife will have the record forever. Perhaps she will never be able to forgive because she will never be able to forget.

Atsushi Senju, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies this mechanism through adulthood, showing that the parts of the brain that allow us to process another person’s feelings and intentions are activated by eye contact. Emoticons on texts and emails, Senju found, don’t have the same effect. He says, “A richer mode of communication is possible right after making eye contact. It amplifies your ability to compute all the signals so you are able to read the other person’s brain.”

Empathy is not merely about giving someone information or helping them find a support group. It’s about convincing another person that you are there for the duration. Empathy means staying long enough for someone to believe that you want to know how they feel, not that you want to tell them what you would do in their circumstance. Empathy requires time and emotional discipline.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied the “real” conversations of friendship. Some friendships, he says, are built around conversations that provide validation. He calls these “reinforcement friendships”: They accomplish “what everyone likes . . . reciprocal attention paid to one another’s ideas and idiosyncrasies.” These are perhaps Haley’s “hoarded” friends, who will text her if she texts them first. These are perhaps her Facebook friends: If you “like” what is on their wall, they will “like” what is on yours. Csikszentmihalyi says that what these friendships do best is support a self that needs to use other people as a mirror, a self that has not found itself. But Thoreau spoke of more (“My friend is one . . . who takes me for what I am”), and Csikszentmihalyi writes about the possibility of more. There are friends who question each other’s dreams and desires, who encourage each other to try out the new. “A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.”

Online, we do not become different selves. Our online identities are facets of ourselves that usually are harder for us to express in the physical realm. This is why the online world can be a place for personal growth. People work on desired qualities in the virtual and gradually bring them into their lives “off the screen.” Adam is in the process of recognizing that, in person, he is closer to the online Adam than he sometimes thinks.

Having access to information is always wonderful, but without having at least some information retained in my brain, I am not able to build on those ideas or connect them together to form new ones.

“we don’t always know what we need to know, and searches that are constrained to information we need at a given moment may not generate information that may be critically useful later.” 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.

We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other’s breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

Designing for conversation can be as simple as planning a pre-work breakfast or it can involve elaborate environmental engineering. Google has been a leader in this kind of engineering. It asked Ben Waber to determine whether there is an optimal amount of time for employees to stand in a cafeteria line to maximize conversation. Waber found out that there is: It’s three to four minutes—short enough so that people don’t feel that they are wasting time, but long enough to meet new people. Similarly, Waber determined the optimal size for a cafeteria table so that strangers wouldn’t feel shy about sitting down to join an ongoing conversation. It’s a large table, for ten to twelve people.

Catastrophes have the ring of an act of God. They happen to us and we can’t see them coming. 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. When you name something a catastrophe, there is nothing much to say. If you confront a situation that you see as shaped by human actions, there is plenty to say. You are in a position to demand accountability. You need to understand causes. You are considering action. You need to have a conversation. Many. It is easier to face an emergency than to have those difficult conversations. When we go into crisis mode, we give ourselves permission to defer the kinds of conversations that politics requires. And right now, our politics requires conversations, too long deferred, about being a self and a citizen in the world of big data.

The anti-noise campaigners didn’t want to turn back industrialization. They didn’t want silent cities, but cities that took the human need for rest, talk, and tranquillity into consideration. 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.

What do we forget when we talk to machines? We forget what is special about being human. We forget what it means to have authentic conversation. Machines are programmed to have conversations “as if” they understood what the conversation is about. So when we talk to them, we, too, are reduced and confined to the “as if.”

as Alan Turing put it, computer conversation is “an imitation game.” We declare computers intelligent if they can fool us into thinking they are people. But that doesn’t mean they are.

The moment is right. We had a love affair with a technology that seemed magical. But like great magic, it worked by commanding our attention and not letting us see anything but what the magician wanted us to see. Now we are ready to reclaim our attention—for solitude, for friendship, for society.