Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

What is democracy without privacy? Is there free thought without privacy?

the secrecy of my book list was something we didn’t talk about until later. She clearly saw it as a more subtle civics lesson: how to explain to a child that

no one should ever be able to hold what I read against me.

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My grandmother’s reverence for the American mailbox and library was her deepest expression of patriotism. And mindspace was central to that patriotism.

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Jonathan Zittrain has called the manipulation of votes by social media “digital gerrymandering.”

What is at stake is a sense of a self in control of itself. And a citizenry that can think for itself.

In the end, we will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy. —JOHN SAWHILL, CONSERVATIONIST

Thoreau said that when the conversation in his cabin became loud and expansive, he pushed his chairs to its far corners.

I am not surprised that a study of children who put their devices away for five days at camp shows that they begin to recover their empathic capacity.

Clifford Nass compared the parts of the brain that process emotion to muscles—they atrophy if not exercised but can be strengthened through face-to-face conversation. Time without our phones is restorative. It provides time to practice.

Remember the power of your phone. It’s not an accessory. It’s a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are.

We end up dumbing down our communications and this makes it harder to approach complex problems.

as a parent or teacher or employer you receive an email request, respond by saying that you need time to think about it.

it is time to reconsider our sense of the appropriate in every domain.

Extremely useful phrase !

It can be an ordinary thing for a mother of a four-year-old to say: “In our family we need time without any electronics to be alone, quietly.

Unless we design our lives and technology to work around it, we resign ourselves to diminished performance.

Our challenge is to deliver those difficult conversations, the ones that include others and the ones with ourselves.

Even Thoreau became distracted. He got upset that when walking in the woods, he would sometimes find himself caught up in a work problem.

“But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.

The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. . . . What business have I in the woods, if I am...

Even if he became distracted, Thoreau was making room for that.

Don’t avoid difficult conversations. We’ve seen that beyond our personal and work lives, we are having trouble talking to one another in the public square.

! Home visits

Since you didn’t actually read the terms of agreement, you begin the conversation disempowered.

It seems that by agreeing to be a consumer you gave away rights that you might want to claim as a citizen.

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not knowing exactly what they “have” on us, or how to define our rights.

idea builds slowly.

the politicization of noise inspired a new generation of urban planners and architects to build differently, situating schools and hospitals in quieter zones,

Fascinating!

By analogy, in our current circumstance, we don’t want to discard social media, but we may want to rewrite our social contract with it.

politicize our need for solitude,

mindspace.

We’ve seen classes where a teacher is present but students’ faces are lowered to phones.

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a political culture in which contention rather than conversation is the rule.

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problems need not be catastrophes;

parents are too distracted to discuss the small ups and downs of childhood.

Parental inattention can mean that, to a child, everything feels urgent.

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A child alone with a problem has an emergency. A child in conversation with a grown-up is facing a moment in life and learning how to cope with it. When we reclaim conversation and the places to have them, we are led to reconsider the importance of long-term thinking. Life is not a problem looking for a quick fix. Life is a conversation and you need places to have it.

learn to live things through.

The sociologist Jürgen Habermas associates the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse with the rise of a “public sphere.” That was a place where people of all classes could talk about politics without fear of arrest. “What a lesson,” the Abbé Prévost said in 1728, “to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffeehouses . . . are the seats of English liberty.”

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We forget what it means to have authentic conversation. Machines are programmed to have conversations “as if” they understood what the conversation is about.

Bad faith dialogic triangulation: Inauthentic !

When we speak to them of our human problems of love and loss, or the pleasures of tomato soup and dancing barefoot on a rainy day, they can deliver only performances of empathy and connection.

AI can know what emotionally activates you because it may infer this from physiological markers. But it won’t understand what any of these things mean to you.

Boyfriend in that HBO show bout the tech guru and his escaped girlfriend

The Rogerian argument (or Rogerian rhetoric) is a form of argumentative reasoning that aims to establish a middle ground between parties with opposing viewpoints or goals. https://owl.purdue.edu › owl › roge... Rogerian Argument - Purdue OWL

The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas writes that the presence of a face initiates the human ethical compact. The face communicates, “Thou shalt not kill me.”

LOL home visits !

emotional compact

There is room for new hurt.

They need relationships that will teach them real mutuality, caring, and empathy.

We want more from technology and less from each other.

We declare computers intelligent if they can fool us into thinking they are people. But that doesn’t mean they are.

I work at one of the world’s great scientific and engineering institutions.

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Children need to learn what complex human feelings and human ambivalence look like. And they need other people to respond to their own expressions of that complexity.

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