http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all
By SHERRY TURKLE
The New York Times, Opinion
WE live in a technological universe in which we are always
communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere
connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work
executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on
Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me
about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with
someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection
and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about
their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us
carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but
also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.”
Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also
elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our
lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we
value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten
used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only
to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can
end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to
one another.
A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He
doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want
to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then
he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one
who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather
just do things on my BlackBerry.”
A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says
almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to
learn how to have a conversation.”
In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing
conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a
college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same
thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously
connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a
Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay
out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And
then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn
their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits,
the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch
with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one
another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we
can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a
Goldilocks effect.
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be.
This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch:
the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little —
just right.
Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have
learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from
conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which
we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop
caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add
up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter,
Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce,
romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not
substitute for conversation.
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information
or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love
you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to
understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one
another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean
to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation,
we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.
FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we
communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we
ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to
expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler
questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important
matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news.
Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were
nourish’d by.”
And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves.
So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn
skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us
what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something
truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust.
It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.
As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by
with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether.
Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as
psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he
could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad
about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database.
Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital
assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more
and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.
During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships
with technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening
to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to
have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides so many automatic
listeners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of
us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us.
Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots,
designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.
One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I
brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an
elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the
loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It
seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.
And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants
advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look
forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we
have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have
embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of
compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk
about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of
human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one
another?
WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem
increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of
companionship without the demands of relationship.
Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that
we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want
it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices
have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.
When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for
a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our
constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.
Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define
ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We
used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our
impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect.
But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be
separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we
turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as
though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly
fragile selves.
We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite
is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be
lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only
how to be lonely.
I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first,
deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen,
the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can
demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the
same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often
don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters.
Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce
conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between
texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to
the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in
which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to
one another.
I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked
the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked
with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one
another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing.
Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on
their own devices.
So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.
