Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

the presentation carries its own way of thinking, one that values speed and simplicity.

educators insist that on-demand information does not make an education.

You need to have a strong background of facts and concepts on board before you know you need them.

We think with what we know; we use what we know to a...

She wants more “things to t...

Quick, accurate judgments depend on having internalized an extensive library of facts.

Nicholas Carr broadens the concern about search and memory when he says, “To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.”

when the day comes that machines are able to take notes for us, it will not serve our purposes, because note taking is part of how we learn to think.

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A student needs to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about.

all its flaws, the lecture has a lot going for it. It is a place where students come together, on good days and bad, and form a relatively small community. As in any live performance, anything can happen. An audience is present; the room is engaged. It nourishes a certain kind of inspiration. You see a professor several times a week. What makes the greatest impression in a college education is learning how to think like someone else, appreciating an intellectual personality, and thinking about what it might mean to have one of your own. When we hear someone speak, we imagine things about them that we wish for ourselves.

You give pleasure to another through something that gives you pleasure.

If you are lucky, you learn that life repays close, focused attention.

Tyranny of merit and justice

Here we see conversation as not only an intellectual engine but the means by which colleagues were able to cross boundaries that are usually only dissolved by love.

Conversation led to intellectual communion.

See Buber and king’s emphasis on buber

Conversation is a kind of intimacy. You don’t just get more information. You get different information.

! Home visits

there’s more to gain from a visit to a professor than improving your ideas, although this is certainly to be desired. You get to be with someone who is making an effort to understand you. You form an intellectual friendship. You may feel the support of an adult and of your institution.

Home visit

Studies show a clear link between sociability and employee productivity.

Fortunately, those who would lead a culture of conversation in the workplace now have research on their side.

These are meetings that give the illusion of collaboration with all the drawbacks of distraction.

to work for them with the attention that their problems deserve.

Useful phrase !

Designing for vulnerability means avoiding what undermines your attention.

Designing for vulnerabilities is language for an IEP

“Tabless Thursday.” One day a week, you can work only on one thing instead of keeping multiple browser tabs open. It’s a gimmick, certainly, but the basic idea is gaining traction.

“I’m usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem. And I just have to say, ‘Go talk to them.’”

Emails pose questions and get answers—most of the time, emails boil down to an exchange of information. In acting, in law, in business, the loss of a face-to-face meeting means a loss of complexity and depth.

this flattening of things.

Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less.

often afraid of giving up this feeling of mastery.

Why teachers eschew home visits; race dimension

the Goldilocks effect—we want our connections not too close, not too far, just right.

Moving things forward requires a conversation.

The problems, he says, come up when you fall back on email for every purpose, just because it’s there. In his experience, when it comes to negotiation, email will create a string of misunderstandings.

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You can’t collaborate as effectively at home, where you don’t run into someone in the cafeteria.

oh jeez sorry lori

Designing for conversation can be as simple as planning a pre-work breakfast

People aren’t unfriendly. They just don’t have time to talk.

consumers and industry together could reframe the design principles for our world of devices and apps.

Yet medicine is also a place of hope in the story of how a professional culture can reclaim conversation. For one thing, it is a field that is talking about its flight from conversation. The dangers of physicians looking at screens rather than patients, the over-reliance on tests, the need to return to the extended conversations of the traditional medical history—all of these are being discussed

In conversation, people build trust, get information, and build the connections that help them get their work done.

home visits !

Encouraging conversation gives you permission to encourage solitude. Give yourself and others permission to think—sometimes alone—and provide time and space to do so.

Address the anxiety of disconnection. We work better together when we can also work alone.

we work best alone when we are undistracted.

Managers can make it clear that they consider solitude the partner to creativity and collaboration, the place where new thinking begins.

If you grew up in the world of “I share, therefore I am,” you may not have confidence that you have a thought unless you are sharing it.

When will electronic conversation not do?” Answers are forthcoming and with very little hesitation: You need face-to-face conversation to establish trust, to sell something, and to close the deal. One executive says that you need it when you have to get to the “root cause of the problem.” You need to talk face-to-face when someone has lied to you. Sometimes people answer by telling a story of using an email in one of these situations and

Home visits

Catastrophe Culture From the earliest days of mobile culture, it was understood—outside the context of flirting—that if you receive a call or a text, you are expected to respond. It might be an emergency. This was an etiquette that did not defer to considerations of what once would have been considered “politeness.” For the new rules disrupt dinner, sleep, business meetings, and intimate conversations. We’ve seen college students leave classrooms to find quiet spaces in bathroom stalls to respond to text messages from friends. And we’ve seen how, among young people, the idea of immediate access to friends on a phone easily crosses over into a language of emergencies. Children are quick to use the term emergency for everything they hope their phones will protect them from. So many of the young people I spoke with seem to be waiting for an emergency. It could be a personal emergency. But there could be another Katrina, another 9/11. The grid could crash. The story about life as emergencies is about how people, especially young people, develop a fretful self.

! Cell phone

In a world where even middle schoolers say they can’t handle the number of messages they receive, telling a friend “It’s an emergency” bumps you to the top of the list.

A catastrophe doesn’t seem to require legislation. It needs balm and prayers.

When terror is treated as a natural disaster, all we can do about it is kill terrorists.

When you name something a catastrophe, there is nothing much to say.

If you confront a situation that you see as shaped by human actions, t...

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has said, “Privacy is no longer a relevant social norm.”

Gross