Reclaiming Conversation Quotes

“The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, “Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?” The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the better idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other’s breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“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. So stimulation by what is new (and social) draws us toward some immediate goal. But daydreaming moves us toward the longer term. It helps us develop the base for a stable self and helps us come up with new solutions. To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“But who said that a life without conflict, without being reminded of past mistakes, past pain, or one where you can avoid rubbing shoulders with troublesome people, is good? Was it the same person who said that life shouldn’t have boring bits? In this case, if technology gives us the feeling that we can communicate with total control, life’s contingencies become a problem. Just because technology can help us solve a “problem” doesn’t mean it was a problem in the first place.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“Research tells us that being comfortable with our vulnerabilities is central to our happiness, our creativity, and even our productivity.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“I said that we use digital “passbacks” to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you. Of”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online?”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“When children grow up with time alone with their thoughts, they feel a certain ground under their feet. Their imaginations bring them comfort. If children always have something outside of themselves to respond to, they don’t build up this resource. So it is not surprising that today young people become anxious if they are alone without a device. They are likely to say they are bored. From the youngest ages they have been diverted by structured play and the shiny objects of digital culture. Shiny”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“It used to be that we imagined our mobile phones were there so that we could talk to each other. Now we want our mobile phones to talk to us.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don’t always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it’s up to us to promote “unitasking.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We’ve seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they’re not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“A chemistry professor puts it this way: “In my class I want students to daydream. They can go back to the text if they missed a key fact. But if they went off in thought . . . they might be making the private connection that pulls the course together for them.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“People really liked [the iPad] because . . . they could look things up really quickly in class, but also . . . people were getting really distracted. Like, my sister had an iPad and she said that her and her friends’ texts were blocked but they had school emails. And they would sit in class and pretend to be researching but really they were emailing back and forth just because they were bored—or they would take screenshots of a test practice sheet and send it out to their friends that hadn’t had the class yet. 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.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“We work so hard to build our online connections. We have so much faith in them. But we must take care that in the end we do not simply feel alone with our devices.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“I said that we use digital “passbacks” to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: “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.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“Sadness is poetic. . . . You are lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings because when you let yourself have sad feelings your body has like antibodies that come rushing in to meet the sad feelings. But because we don’t want that first feeling of sad, we push it away with our phones. So you never feel completely happy or completely sad. You just feel kind of satisfied with your products. And then . . . you die.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“A love of solitude and self-reflection enables sociability.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“In the classroom, conversations carry more than the details of a subject; teachers are there to help students learn how to ask questions and be dissatisfied with east answers. More than this, conversations with a good teacher communicate that learning isn't all about the answers. It's about what the answers mean. Conversations help students build narratives - whether about gun control or the Civil War - that will allow them to learn and remember in a way that has meaning for them. Without these narratives, you can learn a new fact but not know what to do with it, how to make sense of it. In therapy, conversations explore the meanings of the relationships that animate our lives. It attends to pauses, hesitations, associations, the things that are said through silence. It commits to a kind of conversation that doesn't give "advice" but helps people discover what they have hidden from themselves so they can find their inner compass.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“But in creative conversations, in conversations in which people get to really know each other, you usually have to tolerate a bit of boredom.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. When we are secure in ourselves we are able to listen to other people and really hear what they have to say. And then in conversation with other people we become better at inner dialogue.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“if we don’t have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don’t know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“You pass your photo through Photoshop and then others go photo shopping.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

“You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age