Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

meeting etiquette: “You come in, get some coffee, work on your laptop, listen for your name to be called, make your contribution, and then go back to your computer. A good meeting leader will give you a ‘heads-up’ signal about five minutes before she calls on you so that you can close out your email and get ready to speak.”

‘What’s the point of my even doing anything? No one is listening.’ People are speaking ‘for the record.’” When people speak for the record, they usually don’t listen to what comes before or after. Meetings are performances of what meetings used to be.

multitasking encourages brevity and simplicity, even when more is called for.

someone multitasking on a laptop distracts everyone around the machine, not just the person using it.

New ideas emerge from in-person meetings. Email conversations, no matter how efficient, trend toward the transactional.

many people put demands on my time. So many people want me to do things for them. If I read my email, I can hear all of these demands, but at a distance. I feel more in control. On the computer I can get up, or look away, or play some music.”

The difficult, even if necessary, conversations take time she says she doesn’t have. And they demand emotional exposure. Hassoun sees emotional exposure as stress she doesn’t have to subject herself to.

people who do not make time for conversation don’t learn how to have conversations.

Designing for conversation

optimal amount of time for employees to stand in a cafeteria line to maximize conversation. Waber found out that there is: It’s three to four minutes—short

optimal size for a cafeteria table so that strangers wouldn’t feel shy about sitting down to join an ongoing conversation. It’s a large table, for ten to twelve people.

each day begins with a short, device-free stand-up meeting that brings everyone up to date on company news. Anyone can speak; anyone can ask a question of any member of the firm.

On a personal level, conversation is the path back to a capacity for empathy. At work, that capacity paves a path forward to greater productivity. Castell and Hammond see it working in their companies as it worked at Radnor and Stoddard.

HeartTech sees itself as the best in the world and those who work there as superheroes. This means that employees are preoccupied with trying to prove that they are equal to every challenge. The easiest way to demonstrate that you are a master of the universe is to show that, unlike mere mortals, you don’t need to take time away from the network.

The early history of software was written by teams of hackers who had a night culture—they worked on time-sharing computers that had fewer users, and thus ran faster, during the night. Long after the technical imperative to work at night was gone, the cultural imperative stayed.

everyone at this company is trying to prove that they are worthy of being there. Being always available, online, is the simplest way to show this.

employees complain that their managers will send emails at ten at night and give no sign if they expect that email to be answered that evening or if ten o’clock is simply when they got to their email

With no clear signal, those who report to these managers are afraid to assume that a late email doesn’t call for an instant reply.

This kind of confusion keeps people on a treadmill. It cuts down on face-to-face conversations because people are either in scheduled meetings or on their computers trying to keep up.

One programmer says she treasures her time in the office after six in the evening. During the day, she is in back-to-back meetings, so at night she feels more relaxed.

If you think conversation is important for your organization, you can’t just say so or design beautiful kitchens and cafeterias to facilitate it. You have to leave time and space.

As Roberts sees it, the company identified “strong performers” as those who were always online.

Over time, her sense of what made her valuable as an employee (devotion as shown by availability) came to be at odds with what she personally needed to do her best work.

“You need to have your phone with you always. . . . Because if you imagine what happens if you drop below your baseline of stimulation, part of you is saying, ‘I need to go back to the phone.’”

She drafts her late-night emails but then she doesn’t send them. She says, “Write it, get your work done in the hours that are convenient for you, but keep it in your draft folder. At 7:00 a.m., when you think that people may be up and starting to do early-morning emails, then hit send.”

In focus groups of HeartTech employees, I hear that they are, after all, not being paid to be calm. And as one puts it, “We are not being paid to have conversations.”

One software developer has suggested that his industry redefine what it means for an app to be successful. It shouldn’t be how much time a consumer has spent with it but whether it was time well spent. In the long run, consumers and industry together could reframe the design principles for our world of devices and apps.

sixty-year-old faculty member at a major teaching hospital says of the residents he currently trains: “They want to use tests to rationalize not talking to patients because talking to patients is difficult and usually takes skills young doctors don’t have.”

The physician and author Abraham Verghese writes about how medicine has moved away from treating the patient to treating the “iPatient,” the sum of the data we have collected about a person.

The dangers of physicians looking at screens rather than patients, the over-reliance on tests,

new profession—of medical scribes—has grown up, designed to separate the doctor from the many screens that demand his attention. The scribes are trained assistants who follow physicians around, filling in the reports required by insurance companies and computer record-keeping systems.

Next Steps: Inventions and Interventions

Champion conversation in the day-to-day.

In the day-to-day, managers need to make conversation the norm. Showing up to a face-to-face mentoring session should not feel that it requires an act of courage. It should feel like business as usual.

To reclaim conversation, we have to be explicit and make conversation a value at every level of an organization.

there was a greater chance of a first contact with a potential client turning into an ongoing account if that first contact was a telephone call rather than an email.

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.

“If you just go to a conference room, that usually isn’t enough privacy because they have glass walls—sometimes people will knock and come in.”

to do their “real” work they have to stay at home, take sick days, stay late at night, or “hide out” on the job.

When you really need to concentrate, everyone agrees, you should probably stay home.

Address the anxiety of disconnection. We work better together when we can also work alone. And we work best alone when we are undistracted.

on average, an office worker is distracted (electronically) every three minutes and that it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to get back on track.

if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.

We need to encourage the capacity for a solitude that is not isolating.

Sociability increases productivity and creativity. But so does the ability to have privacy when you need it.

Support the first steps toward solitude. Recall

help our employees learn to tolerate the anxiety of being left alone long enough to think their own thoughts.

You need face-to-face conversation to establish trust, to sell something, and to close the deal.

when you have to get to the “root cause of the problem.”

You need to talk face-to-face when someone h...