Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

student friendships have moved from an emotional to an instrumental register.

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Friendships seem based on what students think someone else can do for them. She calls these “Who has my back?” friendships.

In these kinds of connections, she says, “[Friendship] serves you and then you move on.” A friendship based on “Who has my back?” is the shadow of friendship, just as tim...

Research tells us that social media decrease self-control just as they cause a momentary spike in self-confidence.

trusting in their attachments has decreased and the percentage who feel insecure in their attachments has increased.

George Eliot referred to what the mother gives a child with her gaze as “the meeting eyes of love.”

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Siegel sums up what a moment of eye contact accomplishes: “Repeated tens of thousands of times in the child’s life, these small moments of mutual rapport [serve to] transmit the best part of our humanity—our capacity for love—from one generation to the next.”

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.”

We pay a price when we live our lives at a remove.

Since Socrates lamented the movement from speech to writing,

our communities have atrophied,

we have moved from living in actual communities to making efforts to feel as though we are living in them.

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moved “from a relationship to a feeling.”

We have moved from being in a community to having a s...

“The best stuff,” she says, “is friends making mistakes together. . . . If you’re talking you can mess up and it turns into something really funny.

“You have to cope with the reality: they are busy with everything but you.”

constrained choice often leads to a more satisfied life. In

you are not haunted by the universe of possible choices.

Enter the world where one can fantasize infinite and knowable choices.

Epistemological problem

if individuals achieve a sense of community, it is because they have actively cultivated and maintained these connections over a lifetime. It is something they have committed to.

Stay at stewart is the great resignation a result of poor, shallow relationships ? what og institutions ? !

“Nexting” has become part of our emotional ecology.

Emotional ecology Useful phrase

The rules of projecting nonchalance

Chris Rock also said that on first dates, we don’t send ourselves but we send our “representatives”;

my first step was to crazily transcribe our text messages onto paper.

advice was always a mistake. It made her feel that he was not listening to her but trying to fix things.

Tessa “in his phone,” “in his pocket.”

The feelings of control are just that: feelings.

Attentional Disarray

When they are not tempted by their phones, they feel more in control of their attention.

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we have a device in our hands, we want to multitask. But in this, we pursue an illusion. When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving quickly from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add to the mix.

Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse.

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He does admit that once he’s texting, the possibilities for concentrating are pretty much gone: “You can’t focus on the thing you are doing when you are sending the text . . . or waiting to receive a text . . . there is so much going on with other things you might want to receive on your phone.”

In classrooms, the distracted are a distraction: Studies show that when students are in class multitasking on laptops, everyone around them learns less.

the novelist Zadie Smith thanks Freedom and SelfControl, programs that shut off connectivity on her Mac.

They are facts of life and part of our creative lives. The goal is to use them with greater intention.

“unitasking.”

But my sister also said that even when she and her friends were just trying to study for a test, “they would go and print everything that they had on their iPads,” because studying was made a lot more difficult because of all the other distractions on the iPad, all the other apps they could download.

We can present classrooms as places where you can encounter a moment of boredom and “walk” toward its challenges.

children who grow up in an all-multitasking environment may not have a choice. A life of multitasking limits your options so that you cannot simply “pick up” deep attention. What is most enriching is having fluency in both deep and hyper attention. This is attentional pluralism and it should be our educational goal.

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the brain is plastic—it is constantly in flux over a lifetime—so it “rewires” itself depending on how attention is allocated.

Hayles argues for a conscious pedagogical accommodation to the new sensibility.

Schmidt shrugs and says that in the end, technology will lead us in the right direction.

Wolf’s focus on the plasticity of the brain gives her a different perspective. For if the brain is plastic, this means that at any age, i...

This teacher is saying that her students don’t have the materials in mind to consider the whole and so they have trouble arguing a point of view.

Knowledge gap welder !

The web is their “information prosthetic”

she has her phone, she has facts at her fingertips but no timeline or narrative to slide them into.

students confident they will always have their phones if they need to look something up, and who will perhaps someday regret their lack of “context.” For now, teachers in middle and high school are left trying to make a case for why students should be asked to remember people, places, chronology—the story. And why they should slow down.

In the meanwhile they collapse contexts !

“don’t understand the idea of a process.”

Ideas should appear with the immediacy of search results: “They don’t appreciate how an argument develops and sometimes needs to take side paths and turns.”

the teachers don’t think that what they call “the cult of PowerPoint” has served their students well.

Trostle 🤮