Laudato Si
107: “It can be said
that many problems or today’s world stem from the tendency, at times
unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological
paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The
effects of imposing this mode on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen
in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a
reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to
accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework
which ends up conditioning lifestyles and sharing social possibilities along
the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which
may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society
we want to build.”
Now, consider Professor Sherry Turkle’s, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.”
"Stop Googling. Let’s Talk"
By SHERRY TURKLE SEPT. 26, 2015
COLLEGE students tell me
they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same
time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in
middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now
they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it,
“elsewhere.”
These days, we feel less
of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89
percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last
social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of
adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the
conversation.
I’ve been studying the
psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five,
I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a
world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I’ve looked at
families, friendships and romance. I’ve studied schools, universities and
workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention
plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a “rule of three.” In a
conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three
people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to
look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having
their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect:
Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can
drop in and out.
Young people spoke to me
enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule
of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of
all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your
attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have
to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can
shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your
phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.
One 15-year-old I
interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to
dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their
conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A
15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way
his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and
during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising
him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college
junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts
are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are
together that’s the problem.”
It’s a powerful insight.
Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show
that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table
between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk
about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on
topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in
each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.
In 2010, a team at the
University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the
findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy
among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.
Across generations,
technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being
connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least
from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with
ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this
type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of
another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully
challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these
conversations, we learn who we are.
Of course, we can find
empathic conversations today, but the trend line is clear. It’s not only that
we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow
these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the
landscape.
In our hearts, we know
this, and now research is catching up with our intuitions. We face a
significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them
with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the
failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.
The trouble with talk
begins young. A few years ago, a private middle school asked me to consult with
its faculty: Students were not developing friendships the way they used to. At
a retreat, the dean described how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a
classmate from a school social event. It’s an age-old problem, except that this
time when the student was asked about her behavior, the dean reported that the
girl didn’t have much to say: “She was almost robotic in her response. She
said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that
the other student was hurt.”
The dean went on:
“Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like 8-year-olds. The way they exclude
one another is the way 8-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put
themselves in the place of other children.”
One teacher observed that
the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share
things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the
new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The
old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other
less.
But we are resilient. The
psychologist Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free
outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were
able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in
videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered
these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation,
things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in
someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand.
Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.
I have seen this
resilience during my own research at a device-free summer camp. At a nightly
cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day
wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike
might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature.
These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy
called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your
friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the
online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial
connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the
capacity for solitude.
In solitude we find
ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say
that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other
people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into
the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only
know how to be lonely.
A VIRTUOUS circle links
conversation to the capacity for self-reflection. When we are secure in
ourselves, we are able to really hear what other people have to say. At the
same time, conversation with other people, both in intimate settings and in
larger social groups, leads us to become better at inner dialogue.
But we have put this
virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be
solved with technology. Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of
Virginia, led a team that explored our capacity for solitude.
People were asked to sit in a chair and think, without a device or a book. They
were told that they would have from six to 15 minutes alone and that the only
rules were that they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. In one experiment,
many student subjects opted to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than
sit alone with their thoughts.
People sometimes say to
me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their
phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to
their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of
being together.
But this way of dividing
things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In
solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need
these skills to be fully present in conversation.
Every technology asks us
to confront human values. This is a good thing, because it causes us to
reaffirm what they are. If we are now ready to make face-to-face conversation a
priority, it is easier to see what the next steps should be. We are not looking
for simple solutions. We are looking for beginnings. Some of them may seem
familiar by now, but they are no less challenging for that. Each addresses only
a small piece of what silences us. Taken together, they can make a difference.
One start toward
reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial
conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently
to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think
of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase
performance and decrease stress.
But doing one thing at a
time is hard, because it means asserting ourselves over what technology makes
easy and what feels productive in the short term. Multitasking comes with its
own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion.
Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.
Our phones are not
accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do
but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the
degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to
commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that
vulnerability into account. We can choose not to carry our phones all the time.
We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work
on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or
work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation
and solitude. Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at
dinner, in the kitchen and in the car. Introduce this idea to children when
they are young so it doesn’t spring up as punitive but as a baseline of family
culture. In the workplace, too, the notion of sacred spaces makes sense:
Conversation among employees increases productivity.
We can also redesign
technology to leave more room for talking to each other. The “do not disturb”
feature on the iPhone offers one model. You are not interrupted by vibrations,
lights or rings, but you can set the phone to receive calls from designated
people or to signal when someone calls you repeatedly. Engineers are ready with
more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do
a task and then release us? What if the communications
industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers
spend on them but by whether it is time
well spent?
It is always wise to
approach our relationship with technology in the context that goes beyond it.
We live, for example, in a political culture where conversations are blocked by
our vulnerability to partisanship as well as by our new distractions. We
thought that online posting would make us bolder than we are in person, but a
2014 Pew studydemonstrated that people are less likely
to post opinions on social media when they fear their followers will disagree
with them. Designing for our vulnerabilities means finding ways to talk to
people, online and off, whose opinions differ from our own.
Sometimes it simply means
hearing people out. A college junior told me that she shied away from
conversation because it demanded that one live by the rigors of what she calls
the “seven minute rule.” It takes at least seven minutes to see how a
conversation is going to unfold. You can’t go to your phone before those seven
minutes are up. If the conversation goes quiet, you have to let it be. For
conversation, like life, has silences — what some young people I interviewed
called “the boring bits.” It is often in the moments when we stumble, hesitate
and fall silent that we most reveal ourselves to one another.
The young woman who is so
clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is
going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near
that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of
what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app
generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends
toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and
efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the
world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable
results.
This attitude can show up
in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you
have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools. So here is a first step:
To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back
against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too:
Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because
it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.
This is our moment to
acknowledge the unintended consequences of the technologies to which we are
vulnerable, but also to respect the resilience that has always been ours. We
have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history,
of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky
and face to face.
Sherry Turkle is a professor in the program in
Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of
“Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” from which this
essay is adapted.
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