Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

With this sensibility we risk building a false self, based on performances we think others will enjoy.

psychologists have learned more about how creative ideas come from the reveries of solitude.

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

New ideas are more likely to emerge from people thinking on their own.

Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations.

Checkers with your grandparents is an occasion to talk; checkers with a computer program is an occasion to strategize and perhaps be allowed to win.

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.

Hannah Arendt talks about the solitary person as free to keep himself company.

“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.”

We deny ourselves the benefits of solitude because we see the time it requires as a resource to exploit. Instead of using time alone to think (or not think), we think of filling it with digital connection.

Solitude may be a touchstone for empathy and creativity, but it certainly does not always feel good.

you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of

If we care about solitude, we have to communicate this to our children.

more than telling our children that we value solitude, we have to show them that we think it is important by finding some for ourselves.

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

top performers “overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”

When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to think critically about our own thoughts,

Now that connection is always on offer, people don’t know what to do with time alone, even time they asked for.

Knowing we have someplace “else” to go in a moment of boredom leaves us less experienced at exploring our inner lives and therefore more likely to want the stimulation of what is on our phones.

literary fiction significantly improves empathic capacity, as measured by the ability to infer emotional states from people’s facial expressions.

These young people are not used to working on their own on a project.

They need continual contact and support and reinforcement. They want to know they are doing well.

they also need more support than before.

There can always be more piano lessons or soccer practice. . . . The kids in our school are shuttled from activity to activity; they eat dinner in their cars. . . . If parents think their children have any free time, they say to us and to the child: ‘You’re not doing enough to succeed.’”

“Seeing things takes time. Seeing yourself takes time. Having a friend takes time. And it takes time to do things well. . . . These kids don’t have time.”

the machine zone as a state of mind in which people don’t know where they begin and the machine ends.

In flow, you are asked to do a task that isn’t so easy as to be mindless but isn’t so hard as to be out of your grasp.

experiences in the flow state always lead to new learning and a stronger sense of self.

Madrigal calls the machine zone the “dark side of flow.”

Apps are designed to keep you on apps. And the more of your downtime you spend cycling through apps, the less time you have to be alone with yourself.

Time wandering the web protects her from the “danger” of having her mind wander.

I ask Carmen, twenty, if she ever has time to just sit and think. Her answer: “I would never do that.”

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

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.

It was the dream of early computer scientists to have machines do the fast and routine work so that the slow and crea...

Ironically, as we move closer to the world Bush imagined, the opposite may have happened.

we are often so busy communicating that we don’t have time to think.

The psychologist Jonathan Schooler demonstrated that “mind wandering” is a stepping-stone to creativity.

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.

stimulation by what is new (and social) draws us toward some immediate goal. But daydreaming moves us toward the longer term.

To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.

Leadership, he says, “means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere

even a short amount of solitude lets people hear their own thoughts.

One of the rewards of solitude is an increased capacity for self-reflection—the conversations we have with ourselves in the hope of greater insight about who we are and want to be.

our lives are “peopled” by those who have mattered most to us.

If your parents were aggressive, you may be on the defensive whether or not it is warranted. If your parents were withdrawn, you may feel orphaned even if surrounded by loved ones.

The psychoanalytic tradition makes us aware of our human tendency to see the world through the prism of what our most significant relationships have told us about ourselves.

the psychoanalytic tradition sees self-reflection as a path toward realism.

If I am afraid, is there danger or inhibition? If I feel bold, am I well prepared or reckless? If I want to leave a relationship, have I been treated badly or am I afraid of commitment?