Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience.

Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive.

Their imaginations bring them comfort. If children always have something outside of themselves to respond to, they don’t build up this resource.

New studies correlate the growing number of cell phones and the rise of playground accidents because at the park, parents and caretakers are paying attention to phones.

Oh dear

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

Whereas screen activity tends to rev kids up, the concrete worlds of modeling clay, finger paints, and building blocks slow them down. The physicality of these materials—the sticky thickness of clay, the hard solidity of blocks—offers a very real resistance that gives children time to think, to use their imaginations, to make up their own worlds.

children thrive when they are given time and stillness.

Children develop the capacity for solitude in the presence of an attentive other

Consider the silences that fall when you take a young boy on a quiet walk in nature. The child comes to feel increasingly aware of what it is to be alone in nature, supported by being “with” someone who is introducing him to this experience.

Attachment enables solitude.

For Arendt, “All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”

Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: “Language . . . has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

If we don’t know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

! Fire Facts

For Kafka, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.”

For Thomas Mann, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.”

For Picasso, “Without great solitude, no serious w...

One thing characterized the programmers in the high-performing organizations: They had more privacy.

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.”

Right now, students struggle to sit quietly and concentrate. They have very little patience.

But now, even academically ambitious students rebel when they see a reading list that includes more than one long book.

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The English teachers were right, literally. First one identifies with the characters in a complex novel and then the effect generalizes.

childhood boredom is a driver.

Negotiating boredom is a signal developmental achievement.

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“They got upset when they couldn’t do it well. They asked for help. So, what happened is that I went over to help. But then, as soon as I stepped away, they lost interest. Some turned to their phones.”

the students could not sit still long enough to listen to each other.

The school is asking students to work from the very devices that distract them.

don’t experience growth but entrapment and repetition.

a new definition of solitude as crowd management.

“Sudden illumination,” says Poincaré, is only “a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work,” work usually done alone.

Our devices compel us because we respond to every search and every new piece of information (and every new text) as though it had the urgency of a threat in the wild

Only Short short bursts of attention ; no building

When young children go to their bedrooms at night, they should go without their phones or tablets.

children need “stillness” to find their identity.

You don’t have to move to a cabin in the woods to get these benefits, but even a short amount of solitude lets people hear their own thoughts. It opens up the space for self-reflection.

texting to pass the time is my way of life.

Ah !

to understand ourselves better and we nurture our capacity for relationship. Different traditions—philosophical, religious, spiritual, and psychological—have made claims on these high-stakes conversations.

our lives are “peopled” by those who have mattered most to us. They live within us for better and worse.

If jealousy and danger threaten, you don’t paper it over. If love is offered, you can see it.

the capacity for disciplined self-reflection.

Facebook wasn’t designed to stall self-reflection. But it often does.

I have found that when people use the aspirational self as an object for self-reflection, it can make them feel curiously envious—of themselves.

computational objects,

She asks, “Aren’t numbers just an element in a narrative process

As a psychologist, I was trained in a technology of talk,

pay special attention to how the legacy of past relationships persist in the present.

You come to recognize moments when you accuse your therapist of inattention but are actually addressing someone in your past who ignored you.

If you see your husband as a profligate spender, it is worth taking the time to ask if you worry that you spend too much money yourself.

action before self-understanding is rarely a good way to improve one’s situation.

Conversations have a particularity that matters.

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

family conversations are a training ground for empathy.