Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled.

So it is not surprising that in the past twenty years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past ten years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.

I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to build tech that doesn’t continue to push this empathy gap.

The results were clear: In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection and online messaging led to the least.

But sharing an image you find on the web is a particular kind of participation.

You don’t turn to your own experience, but pull instead from external sources. You express yourself but can maintain a certain distance.

In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don’t know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are. We take what we need from them in bits and

Studies show that people don’t like posting things that their followers won’t agree with—everyone wants to be liked. So technology can sustain ever more rigid partisanship that makes it hard to talk, enabling us to live in information bubbles that don’t let in dissenting voices.

But who will we become in this world we call friction-free where machines (and without our doing any talking at all!) will know what we want, sometimes even before we do? They will know all about our online lives, so they’ll know our taste in music, art, politics, clothes, books, and food. They’ll know who we like and where we travel.

In this case, if technology gives us the feeling that we can communicate with total control, life’s contingencies become a problem. Just because technology can help us solve a “problem” doesn’t mean it was a problem in the first place.

They go to vacation spots deemed “device-free” (that don’t allow phones, tablets, or laptops). This means that America has curious new digital divides.

But does a decrease in teenage empathy suggest the need for an empathy app? Or does it suggest that we make more time to talk to teenagers? Sometimes it seems easier to invent a new technology than to start a conversation.

share a thought or feeling in order to think it, feel it. This is the sensibility of “I share, therefore I am.” Or otherwise put: “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

With this sensibility we risk building a false self, based on performances we think others will enjoy. In Thoreau’s terms, we live too “thickly,” responding to the world around rather than first learning to know ourselves.

A fourteen-year-old girl sums up her feelings about spending an hour on Facebook: “Even if it is just seeing the ‘likes’ on things I posted, I feel that I’ve accomplished something.” What has she accomplished? Time on Facebook makes a predictable outcome (if you post a likable photograph you will get “likes”) feel like an achievement. Online, we become accustomed to the idea of nearly guaranteed results, something that the ups and downs of solitude can’t promise. And, of course, time with people can’t promise it either.

If you are tutored by simulation, you may become fearful of not being in control even when control is not the point.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a specialist in adolescent development, wrote that children thrive when they are given time and stillness. The shiny objects of today’s childhood demand time and interrupt stillness.

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.”

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.

When you’re on social media, you don’t leave, but you are not sure if you are making a conscious decision to stay.

And the more of your downtime you spend cycling through apps, the less time you have to be alone with yourself.

Anya explains that she and her roommate didn’t want to sit quietly with their thoughts. And in a related development, conversation felt like too much work. “We just wanted to be quiet and look at our phones and keep our minds preoccupied.”

In 1945, the inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush dreamed of a device he called a Memex (an idea often considered a precursor to the web) that would take care of logical processes in order to leave more time for the slow unfolding of human creativity. Ironically, as we move closer to the world Bush imagined, the opposite may have happened. Machines present us with information at a volume and velocity that we try, unsuccessfully, to keep up with.

If children grow up expecting that the most interesting thing in their environment is going to be on their phones, we have to teach them to give their inner worlds a chance. Indeed, in a quiet moment, all of us, child and adult, have to fight the impulse to turn first to our devices.

To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.

In our world of “I share, therefore I am” we are not primed to give solitude a chance.

This tradition of self-reflection stresses history, the meaning of language, and the power of the unconscious. It teaches that our lives are “peopled” by those who have mattered most to us. They live within us for better and worse. We learn to recognize their influence in our strengths and vulnerabilities. If your parents were aggressive, you may be on the defensive whether or not it is warranted. If your parents were withdrawn, you may feel orphaned even if surrounded by loved ones.

It is striking that some of our most-used applications—such as Facebook—seem set up to inspire narration. After all, on Facebook, the basic protocol is to record and illustrate the events of one’s life. Of course, we’ve seen that the story is not so simple. Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation.

“I get lost in reading other people’s messages or profiles or talking to them. And it’s always stuff that is so pointless and it’s just a waste of time, and I hate wasting time, but I get lost in it. I’ll look at the clock and it’ll say 7:14, and I’ll look back and it’ll seem like a minute later and it’ll be 8:30 p.m.”

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.

In the 1980s, I wrote of the movement from the psychoanalytic to the computer culture as a shift from meaning to mechanism—from depth to surface. At that time, as computation gained ground as the dominant metaphor for describing the mind, there was a shift from thinking about the self as constituted by human language and history to seeing it as something that could be modeled in machine code. Today’s “quantified” or “algorithmic” self is certainly part of that larger story but adds something new. Instead of taking the computer as the model for a person, the quantified self goes directly to people and asks each of us to treat ourselves as though we were computational objects, subject to a printout of our ever more knowable states.

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.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has called psychoanalysis “solitude for two.” 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?”

What is art therapy and is it relevant to the app?

The psychoanalytic and computer culture will find their necessary points of synergy.

When digital media encourage us to edit ourselves until we have said the “right thing,” we can lose sight of the important thing: Relationships deepen not because we necessarily say anything in particular but because we are invested enough to show up for another conversation.

But social media is set up to teach different lessons. Instead of promoting the value of authenticity, it encourages performance. Instead of teaching the rewards of vulnerability, it suggests that you put on your best face. And instead of learning how to listen, you learn what goes into an effective broadcast. Leslie is not becoming better at “reading” other people; she is simply more adept at getting them to “like” her.

“People forget . . . that sitting here right now might be the best thing that you can get. That might be the best you have.”

“What if you’re always looking for something better and then you die? You’ve searched all the way until you’re dead. And you’ve never said, ‘Maybe I’ve found it.’”

Maureen and Randall talk about the value of getting together with friends in person. But they describe friendships in which they hold back from giving full attention to the people they are with. They both describe a hard time tolerating what Maureen calls “the boring bits” when friends get together. Or letting conversations go beyond sharing information. And, of course, they feel pressure to have information to share.

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as “whole person conversation”—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t look away or text another friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about conversations being “boring,” such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness. And how hard we find it to “read” the face and voice, changes in body language, and changes in tone.

Is this communion, but at a manageable distance?