Or you can work the circle the other way: We struggle to pay attention to each other, and what suffers is our ability to know ourselves.
We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship—the virtues of Thoreau’s three chairs. But this flight is not inevitable. When the virtuous circle is broken, conversation cures.
For there is good news. Despite the pull of our technology, we are resilient. For example, in only five days at a summer camp that bans all electronic devices, children show an increased capacity for empathy as measured by their ability to identify the feelings of others by looking at photographs and videos of people’s faces. In my own research at a device-free summer camp, I hear what this resiliency sounds like.
At a nightly cabin chat, a group of fourteen-year-old boys talk about a recent three-day wilderness hike. One can imagine that 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 makes the biggest impression is time without a phone, what one boy calls “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” Another boy uses the cabin chat to reflect on his new taste for silence: “Don’t people know that sometimes you can just look out the window of a car and see the world go by and it’s wonderful?”
Crossroads
Just as some people will ask, “Why a book about conversation? We’re talking all the time,” some will say, “Why bring up the negative? You must know about all the wonderful new conversations that happen on the net!” I do know. I’ve gone to a reunion of my sixth-grade class from PS 216 Brooklyn that could never have happened if not for Facebook. Texts from my daughter, when she was twenty-three, made her seem closer to home even when she took a job on another coast. These from fall 2014: “Hi! I REALLY like Life After Life!” “Where do I get challah?” “My roommate and I are going to the party as Elsa and Anna from Frozen.” All of a sudden, with no warning, on my phone, in my hand, there will be a reference to a book or a food or a Halloween costume that reminds me of our intimacy and infuses my day with her presence. This is pleasurable and to be cherished. The problem comes if these “reminders” of intimacy lead us away from intimacy itself.
Most relationships are a blend of online and off-line interaction. Courtships take place via text. Political debates are sparked and social movements mobilize on websites. Why not focus on the positive—a celebration of these new exchanges?
Because these are the stories we tell each other to explain why our technologies are proof of progress. We like to hear these positive stories because they do not discourage us in our pursuit of the new—our new comforts, our new distractions, our new forms of commerce. And we like to hear them because if these are the only stories that matter, then we don’t have to attend to other feelings that persist—that we are somehow more lonely than before, that our children are less empathic than they should be for their age, and that it seems nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation at a family dinner.
We catch ourselves not looking into the eyes of our children or taking the time to talk with them just to have a few more hits of our email. Will we summon our attention if, a decade later, fearful of being alone but anxious about attachment, our children show us what it looks like to pay the price? It makes no sense to “match” this disturbing possibility with a happy story about Facebook friendship or Twitter exchanges. This isn’t a game in which we can cross our fingers and hope that the good will outweigh the bad. We want to take the good and also make the changes necessary so that we don’t pay a price that no technology is worth.
Generations
I remember the generation that first encountered networked personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These were machines you “went to” when you wanted to play games, or write, or work with spreadsheets, or send email. Computers offered aids to productivity and many new pleasures—but they did not suggest that text might displace talk.
Only a few years later, there would be cohorts of children who grew up with smartphones, social media, and chatty digital assistants. Today, these children, no longer children, are our teachers, businesspeople, doctors, and parents.
When these new generations consider the idea of a “flight from conversation,” they often ask, “Is that really a problem? If you text or iChat, isn’t that ‘talking’? And besides, you can get your message ‘right.’ What’s wrong with that?” When I talk with them about open-ended conversation, some ask me to specify its “value proposition.” Some tell me that conversation seems like “hard work,” with many invitations, often treacherous, to imperfection, loss of control, and boredom. Why are these worth fighting for?
Many of the things we all struggle with in love and work can be helped by conversation. Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled. We are diminished, in retreat. But to generations that grew up using their phones to text and message, these studies may be describing losses they don’t feel. They didn’t grow up with a lot of face-to-face talk.
Of course, across the generations, there are those who do not need to be convinced of the value of conversation. But even these partisans of conversation often surprise me. So many of them seem defeated. They say the future has overtaken them. A filmmaker who graduated from college in 2009 tells me that was the year conversation died. I am particularly struck by parents who say they want their children to stop texting at dinner but don’t feel they can object when the phones come out. They fear they are too late with their admonishments, that they will be left behind if they don’t embrace the new.
I am describing more than a flight from conversation. This is a flight from the responsibilities of mentorship. Technology enchants; it makes us forget what we know about life. The new—any old new—becomes confused with progress. But in our eagerness, we forget our responsibility to the new, to the generations that follow us. It is for us to pass on the most precious thing we know how to do: talking to the next generation about our experiences, our history; sharing what we think we did right and wrong.
It is not enough to ask your children to put away their phones. You have to model this behavior and put away your phone. If children don’t learn how to listen, to stand up for themselves and negotiate with others in classrooms or at family dinner, when will they learn the give-and-take that is necessary for good relationships or, for that matter, for the debate of citizens in a democracy? Reclaiming conversation begins with the acknowledgment that speaking and listening with attention are skills. They can be taught. They take practice and that practice can start now. In your home, in a classroom, at your job.
Stepping Up, Not Stepping Back
There are at least two audiences for this book. One audience needs to be persuaded that a flight from conversation suggests a problem and not an evolution. And it is a problem with a solution: If we make space for conversation, we come back to each other and we come back to ourselves.
And for the audience that feels defeated, whose members mourn an “inevitable” flight from conversation and see themselves as bystanders, I make another case: This is the wrong time to step back. Those who understand how conversation works—no matter what their ages—need to step up and pass on what they know.
We can step up in our families and friendships, but there are also the public conversations of Thoreau’s third chair. These conversations, too, need mentors. Here I think of teachers and students: The classroom is a social space where students can see how thinking happens. College faculty are often shy about asking students to put away their devices in classrooms. Only a few years ago, most professors told me that they didn’t want to be their students’ “nannies,” that this “policing” job was not for them. But we have learned that a student with an open laptop will multitask in class. And we have learned that this will degrade the performance not only of the studen
t with the open machine but of all the students around him or her. These days, faculty are less deferential. Many begin the semester by announcing a device-free classroom policy or specifically set aside class time for “tools down” conversation.
I have met CEOs who now make a point of instructing employees to work out disagreements and apologize to each other in person. A new manager, in his mid-thirties, admits that he shies away from face-to-face conversation but is inspired by a weekly “all hands” meeting in his company that is reserved for “just talk.” The new manager is insecure about what he can express, but he says of the weekly meeting: “That’s a place where I’m learning to have a conversation.” In another company, a manager begins her team’s meetings by having all laptops and cell phones put into a basket at the door. She’s tired of meetings where people do their email.
Beyond school and workplace, there is the public square.
In the media, one often hears a distinctive phrase: “We have to have a national conversation.” But the pundits who say it have become accustomed to quick cuts, partisan bickering, and dropping the subject—be it war or weather or racism—when the next news cycle hits. They are also accustomed to talking about news with a “crawl” of unrelated stories scrolling under their images on the screen. That crawl under the news began during the Iran hostage crisis of 1981. No matter what the news, Americans wanted instant updates on the American prisoners in Iran. The hostage crisis ended; the crawl that divides our attention remains. A more satisfying public conversation will require work. But it’s important not to confuse the difficult with the impossible. If we commit ourselves, it’s work we know how to do.
Does the Exception Make the Problem Go Away?
The problem I sum up as a “flight from conversation” doesn’t always capture our attention (the technology does!), so it’s easy to defer thinking about it. People are still together talking—this looks like conversation—so we may not notice how much our lives have changed. In this way, the flight from conversation is something like climate change: We feel safe in our homes day to day and we usually aren’t thinking about “thirty years from now.” And in the case of both climate change and conversation, there is the temptation to think that an exception means the problem isn’t real or will go away.
Weather patterns may be changing across the planet in alarming ways, but then you are faced with a beautiful sunny day, one of the most beautiful days you have ever seen, and somehow this makes it easier to put the problem out of mind. Similarly, we now rarely give each other our full attention, but every once in a while, we do. We forget how unusual this has become, that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with parents or friends. For them, phones have always come along.
I often speak to audiences of parents and many describe their difficulties in talking to their children. And then someone will raise a hand and say, “My son loves to talk and he is sixteen years old.” As if this means the case is closed.
But the case is not closed. We have not assessed the full human consequences of digital media. We want to focus on its pleasures. Its problems have to do with unintended consequences. To take the measure of these, I follow a path suggested by Thoreau’s three chairs: a first for solitude, a second for friendship, and a third for society.
Thoreau said that when conversation became expansive, he brought his guests out into nature. This image leads me to think of a “fourth chair”: conversations that Thoreau could not have envisaged. I look at how we have built a “second nature,” an artificial nature, and try to enter into dialogue with it. We have built machines that speak, and, in speaking to them, we cannot help but attribute human nature to objects that have none.
We have embarked upon a voyage of forgetting. It has several stations. At a first, we speak through machines and forget how essential face-to-face conversation is to our relationships, our creativity, and our capacity for empathy. At a second, we take a further step and speak not just through machines but to machines. This is a turning point. When we consider conversations with machines about our most human predicaments, we face a moment of reckoning that can bring us to the end of our forgetting. It is an opportunity to reaffirm what makes us most human.
The Moment Is Right to Reclaim Conversation
In 2011, when I published Alone Together, a book critical of our inattention to each other in our always-connected lives, I knew I was describing complications that most people did not want to see. As a culture, we were smitten with our technology. Like young lovers, we were afraid that too much talking would spoil the romance. But now, only a few years later, the atmosphere has changed. We are ready to talk. When we have our mobile devices with us, we see that we turn away from our children, romantic partners, and work colleagues. We are ready to reconsider the too-simple enthusiasm of “the more connected we are, the better off we are.”
Now, we begin to take the measure of how our communications compel us. We have learned that we get a neurochemical high from connecting. We recognize that we crave a feeling of being “always on” that keeps us from doing our best, being our best. So we allow ourselves a certain disenchantment with what technology has made possible.
We recognize that we need things that social media inhibit. My previous work described an evolving problem; this book is a call to action. It is time to make the course corrections. We have everything we need to begin. We have each other.
The Flight from Conversation
My guess—and I think this will be debated for a long time—is that humans are very communicative, and so the fact that you’re talking to more people with shorter bursts of communication is probably net neutral to positive.
—ERIC SCHMIDT, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF GOOGLE
Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?
—STEPHEN COLBERT, ACTOR AND COMEDIAN
These days, we want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to wherever else we want to be, because what we value most is control over where we put our attention. Our manners have evolved to accommodate our new priorities. When you’re out to dinner with friends, you can’t assume that you have their undivided attention. Cameron, a college junior in New Hampshire, says that when his friends have dinner, “and I hate this, everyone puts their phones next to them when they eat. And then, they’re always checking them.” The night before at dinner he had texted a friend sitting next to him (“’S’up, dude?”) just to get his attention.
Cameron’s objection is common, for this is the reality: When college students go to dinner, they want the company of their friends in the dining hall and they also want the freedom to go to their phones. To have both at the same time, they observe what some call the “rule of three”: When you are with a group at dinner you have to check that at least three people have their heads up from their phones 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.
I meet with Cameron and seven of his friends. One of them, Eleanor, describes the rule of three as a strategy of continual scanning:
Let’s say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something—like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever. It’s my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they’re pretty, well, fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, “Wait, what . . .” and sort of have people fill you in a bit when you drop out.
The effect of the rule of three is what you might expect. As Eleanor says, conversation is fragmented. And everyone tries to keep it light.
Even a Silent Phone Disconnects Us
Keeping talk light when phones are on the landscape becomes a new social grace. One of Eleanor’s friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to “lighten things up.” And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you’re not at the dinner table. When “eyes are down” at phones, she says, “conversation stays light well beyond dinner.”
When I first planned the research that would lead to this book, my idea was to focus on our new patterns of texting and messaging. What made them compelling? Unique? But early in my study, when I met with these New Hampshire students, their response to my original question was to point me to another question that they thought was more important. “I would put it this way,” says Cameron. “There are fewer conversations—not with the people you’re texting, but with the people around you!” As he says this, we are in a circle of eight, talking together, and heads are going down to check phones. A few try not to, but it is a struggle.
Cameron sums up what he sees around him. “Our texts are fine. It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”
It was a powerful intuition. What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.
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