Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

the idea of a protected family space does a lot of work.

relationships have boundaries you can count on.

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Ideally, the family circle is a place where you don’t always have to worry about getting it right.

Relationships deepen not because we necessarily say anything in particular but because we are invested enough to show up for another conversation.

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In family conversations, children learn that what can matter most is not the information shared but the relationships sustained. It is hard to sustain those relationships if you are on your phone.

help them problem-solve around new challenges

to seek adult attention in futile bursts of bad behavior.

the new silences of family life.

Misbehavior characterized as a family silence

From infancy, the foundations for emotional stability and social fluency are developed when children make eye contact and interact with active, engaged faces. Infants deprived of eye contact and facing a parent’s “still face” become agitated, then withdrawn, then depressed.

with her mother’s phone out, there is a “chain reaction.” Family conversations at dinner are fragile things.

Nicholas Carr, who introduced the notion of “the shallows” to help people think about how their brains adapt to life on the web, said: “We become, neurologically, what we think.”

If you don’t use certain parts of the brain, they will fail to develop, or be connected more weakly.

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By extension, if young children do not use the parts of their brain activated by conversing with an attentive parent, they will fail to develop the appropriate circuitry.

the “missing chip” hy...

Wolf suggests that to get children back to reading, the first, crucial step is to read to children and with them.

parents use their children’s absorption with phones as permission to have their own phones out as much as they wish.

Some post to their networks rather than talk to their parents when they need emotional support.

“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.

Home visits

A tearful conversation with your mother and a sad blog post are both a kind of performance, but they ask and offer very different things.

It is an opportunity to watch her attend to how you look and sound.

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Left to her own devices, Melissa is not getting the help she needs.

Hahaha

Conversations aren’t given a chance to develop.”

Relationships between parents and children are not symmetrical. It is natural that children want parental attention but don’t necessarily want to give attention back.

His time with his daughter is sporadic and out of their previous domestic routines. So, Jon explains, there are only so many times that it feels reasonable to take Simone to the museum or the American Girl store or the zoo.

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

One of the most consistent lessons I have learned from studying families: We have to be more compassionate with ourselves. We are vulnerable. Our phones exert a strong holding power and we want to stay with them. But our families need us.

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We become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed.

Time is real

Indeed, for many parents, knowing their children’s unhappiness is not enough to make them put down their phones. There is a flight from responsibility. It can be addressed.

First, parents need a fuller understanding of what is at stake in conversations with children—qualities like the development of trust and self-esteem, and the capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy.

The fact is, we are all vulnerable to the emotional gratifications that our phones offer—and we are neurochemically rewarded when we attend to their constant stimulation.

In our families, we can take responsibility for using technology in the same way as we take responsibility for the food we eat: Despite advertising and marketing and the biochemical power of sugar, we recognize that healthy foods in healthy amounts serve our families’ best interests.

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comfortable with “hot” emotions?

“I kept copying and pasting the same messages over and over until my son began to read them.”

the right emotional tone, caring but cool, is also something she doesn’t think she could consistently achieve in person.

Margot says that this allowed them to do away with many of the “messy and irrational” parts of a fight.

Certainly this tool opens new channels of family communication.

“I choose to absent myself from you in order to talk to you,” suggests many things that may do their own damage. It suggests that in real time, it is too hard for you to put yourself in their place and listen with some equanimity to what they are thinking and feeling. Being able to be enough in control of our feelings to listen to another person is a requirement for empathy. If a parent doesn’t model this—if you go directly to a text or email—a child isn’t going to learn it, or see it as a value.

Home visits

I saw her face. My mom was almost crying. That can’t be conveyed via text. She could be bawling. . . . If she sent a text, I wouldn’t know.

In texting, punctuation is everything. Every period, every comma, every exclamation point in a text counts.

Even awkward, unpleasant conversations can do a lot of work.

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children recognize a commitment to conversation.

“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.’”

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.”

A fourteen-year-old says she “is never completely relaxed,” even when she sleeps with her phone by her side. Any bad news will show up first on her phone. I feel like there’s always something nagging me. There’s always drama or something stressing me out—that I am always worried about. Most of it starts because of phones; the expectation is that when something big happens, you’ll tell, like, your best friends right away. Because you can.

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She thinks that when you get a text from a close friend, it should be responded to within “about five minutes.”

“That’s what friends do, respond to a crisis,” says Kristen. That is why she is often in the bathroom, missing class.

This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.

I have been called in to consult with a faculty worried about students’ lack of empathy.

They have trouble listening. I have to rephrase a question many times before a child will answer a question in class.

They are talking at each other with local comments, minutiae really, short bursts, as though they were speaking texts. They are communicating immediate social needs. They aren’t listening to each other.

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