Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

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.”