We once taught our children to ignore a ringing phone at dinner. We became annoyed if telemarketers interrupted us. Now, Facebook suggests that it may be a good thing to interrupt dinner ourselves.
And then there are three-chair conversations, conversations in the social world. Here I begin with examples from the world of work. I look at my own kind of workplace, the world of education, and also the business and corporate world. I saw striking commonalities between education and business, between the dynamics of classrooms and offices. I found conversation to be at the heart of the learning culture and I learned that conversation is good for the bottom line.
And both domains face similar threats to their cultures of conversation. In classrooms and offices, the cultural expectation for multitasking subverts conversation and constant interruption threatens achievement. Just as we go to dinners with friends that are not quite dinners together, we go to classes that are not quite classes and work meetings that are not quite meetings. What these not quite encounters have in common is that we all feel free to be on some device and to let our minds wander.
And, most recently, in both education and at work, conversation is challenged by new experiments that use technology to engage people from a distance. So, for example, there is the hope that online courses will make remote learning more “efficient” in ways that can be measured. One unexpected result of the online experiments has been to make the value of teachers and students talking face-to-face ever more clear. A teacher “live” in front of a classroom gives students an opportunity to watch someone think, boring bits and all. That teacher is a model for how thinking happens, including false starts and hindsight. There has been a parallel development in the workplace: Many of the firms that encouraged employees to work at home are calling them back to the office in order to have a more collaborative and productive workforce.
Of course, in many businesses, remote work is the cost-saving rule. I interview an executive, Howard Chen, who is the creator of a social media site for a multinational corporation. He is passionate about the necessity for advanced social media in his company because it has decided to close down local offices. In their place is a new system called “hoteling.” When people need the resources of an office, they bring their computer to a building where an automated system assigns them a room. When they get there and plug in their computer, a virtual telephone pops up on the screen. That is their company line for the day. They are “at work.”
So when Chen goes to the office, there are no regular colleagues around, no community at all. But this is all the more reason for him to be excited about the new social network he has designed. He dreams that it will restore life to his work environment, now stripped so bare of familiar objects and people. On the day I meet him, we are in a new hotel space. He responds to his unfamiliar physical surrounds by extolling the “sociability” of his social media. With only a few keystrokes he can call up an international database of all employees and their interests. This, he hopes, can be the basis for online conversations and new connections. He says, “Yeah, if you’re a soccer fan, you can talk to all the other soccer fans in the company. How cool is that?” But as an aside, he says that recently he has been feeling rather sad:
Last week I was sitting there and I finished doing something and I looked around and you could hear a pin drop. And I’m, like, this is ghastly. It’s just horrible. So I took out my iPhone and I recorded the silence for a minute to show my wife. This is what it sounds like, or doesn’t sound like, at work.
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.
This is all the more important because although the flight from conversation affects us as individuals, it also changes our life in communities. Here I consider three questions about politics and social policy on our new digital landscape.
First, the Internet gives us the possibility of sharing our views with anyone in the world, but it also can support information silos where we don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t agree with us. Studies show that people don’t like posting things that their followers won’t agree with—everyone wants to be liked. So technology can sustain ever more rigid partisanship that makes it hard to talk, enabling us to live in information bubbles that don’t let in dissenting voices.
Second, when politics goes online, people begin to talk about political action in terms of things they can do online. They are drawn to the idea that social change can happen by giving a “thumbs-up” or by subscribing to a group. The slow, hard work of politics—study, analysis, listening, trying to convince someone with a different point of view—these can get lost. The Internet is a good start, a place to bring people together. But politics continues in conversation and in relationships developed over time. I have said that technology gives us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Now I worry that it can also give us the illusion of progress without the demands of action.
Third, digital communication makes surveillance easier. The corporations that provide us with the means to talk on the net (to text, email, and chat) take our online activity as data. They declare ownership of it and use it, usually to better sell things to us. And we now know that our government routinely makes a copy of our communications as well. The boundaries have blurred between private communication and routine surveillance, between private communication and its repackaging as a commodity. So, in addition to the question What is intimacy without privacy? I consider another: What is democracy without privacy?
The Fourth Chair
And I think of a “fourth chair.” I’ve said that when conversation got expansive, Thoreau took his guests into nature. I think of this as his fourth chair, his most philosophical one. These days, the way things have gotten philosophical causes us to confront how we have used technology to create a second nature, an artificial nature. For so long we have assumed that the conversations that matter are the conversations we have with other people. In recent years, this idea has been challenged by computer programs that seduce us not by their smarts but by their sociability. I explore proposals for new, more intimate conversations with “socially” competent machines—a development with the potential to change human nature itself. For me, our fourth-chair conversations are ones that Thoreau could not have envisaged: We are tempted to talk not only through machines but to them, with them.
At first, we met Siri, a digital companion always ready to engage. But that was just the beginning. As I write these words, the media is full of stories about the launch of the first “home robots” who are there to be always-available “best friendly companions” by acting as though they understand what you are saying when they exchange pleasantries through the magic of simulated feelings. Have we forgotten what conversation is? What friendship is? Is talking to machines companionship or abandonment?
We lose our words. Intelligence once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit. And yet we readily call machines intelligent now. Affective is another word that once meant a lot more than what any machine can deliver. Yet we have become used to describing machines that portray emotional states or can sense our emotional states as exemplars of “affective computing.” These new meanings become our new normal, and we forget other meanings. We have to struggle to recapture lost language, lost meanings, and perhaps, in time, lost experiences.
At one conference I attended, the robots were called “caring machines,” and when I objected, I was told we were using this word not because the robots care but because they will take care of us. Caring is a behavior. It is a function, not a feeling. The conference participants seemed puzzled: Why did I care so much about semantics? What’s wrong with me?
It is natural for words to change their meaning over time and with new circumstances. Intelligence and affective
have changed their meaning to accommodate what machines can do. But now the words caring, friend, companionship, and conversation?
A lot is at stake in these words. They are not yet lost. We need to remember these words and this conversation before we don’t know how to have it. Or before we think we can have it with a machine.
We paint ourselves into a corner where we endanger more than words.
I talk of our having arrived at a “robotic moment,” not because we have built robots that can be our companions but because we are willing to consider becoming theirs. I find people increasingly open to the idea that in the near future, machine companionship will be sufficient unto the day. People tell me that if a machine could give them the “feeling” of being intimately understood, that might be understanding enough. Or intimacy enough.
The ironies are substantial. We turn toward artificial intelligence for conversation just at the moment that we are in flight from conversations with each other.
More generally, in our fourth-chair conversations, we imagine ourselves in a new kind of world where machines talk to each other to make our lives easier. But who will we become in this world we call friction-free where machines (and without our doing any talking at all!) will know what we want, sometimes even before we do? They will know all about our online lives, so they’ll know our taste in music, art, politics, clothes, books, and food. They’ll know who we like and where we travel.
In that world, your smartphone will signal your favorite coffee shop as you set out in the morning to get a latte, which of course will be waiting for you when you arrive, exactly as you want it. In the spirit of friction-free, your phone will be able to reroute and guide you so that you can avoid your ex-girlfriend and see only designated friends on your path. 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.
Paths Forward
I explore the flight from conversation in digital culture by looking at big questions and small details. I begin with the conversations of solitude, romance, friendship, and family life and end with our desire to chat with robots. I report on the current state of conversation in schools, universities, and corporations, looking at children as they develop and adults as they love, learn, and work. In every case, I describe our vulnerability to settling for mere connection—why it tempts—and I make the case for reclaiming the richness of conversation.
Reclaiming conversation won’t be easy. We resist: It sometimes seems that we want to be taken away from the conversations that count. So I go to meetings where laptops are open and phones turned on. Yet the participants admit that constant interruptions are interfering with group work. When I ask the participants why they all continue to bring their devices to meetings, they say, “For emergencies.” I inquire further, and they admit that it’s not so much about emergencies—they’re bored, or they see an opportunity to double down on their emails. And other reasons come up: Some feel so much pressure to outsmart their peers that when they feel they can’t, they turn to their phones, pretending to do something else more “urgent” than anything that could be going on in the meeting. And sometimes the idea of “emergencies” on their phones is a strategy to step away from each other and their differences, to defer them for another day, another meeting.
And sometimes, I am told, they actively want to avoid the spontaneity of conversation. The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright. A college senior doesn’t go to his professors’ office hours. He will correspond with his teachers only through email. The student explains that if he sees his professors in person, he could get something “wrong.” Ever since ninth grade, when his preparations to go to an Ivy League college began in earnest, he and his parents have worked on his getting everything “right.” If he wasn’t getting enough playing time on a team, his father went in to see the coach. When his College Board scores weren’t high enough, he had personal tutors. He had no interest in science, but his high school guidance counselor decided that a summer program in neurobiology was what he needed to round out his college application. Now he is three years through that Ivy education and hoping for law school. He is still trying to get things right. “When you talk in person,” he says, “you are likely to make a slip.”
He thinks his no-office-hours policy is a reasonable strategy. He tells me that our culture has “zero tolerance” for making mistakes. If politicians make “slips,” it haunts them throughout their careers. And usually they make these mistakes while they are talking. He says, “I feel as though everyone in my generation wants to write things out—I certainly do—because then I can check it over and make sure it is okay. I don’t want to say a wrong thing.”
Studying conversation today brings forth many comments like these. They encourage a fresh look at our cultural expectations of getting everything “right.” And a fresh look at what we accomplish when we communicate perfection as a value to our children. Studying conversation suggests that it is time to rediscover an interest in the spontaneous. It suggests that it is time to rediscover an interest in the points of view of those with whom we disagree. And it suggests that we slow down enough to listen to them, one at a time.
These are not easy assignments. But I am hopeful about our moment. Some of the most “plugged in” people in America find conversation blocked and struggle for ways to reclaim it. Corporations devise strategies for workplace teams built on face-to-face meetings. They ask employees to take a break and not check their email after business hours. Or they insist that employees take a “smartphone-free” night during the business week. One CEO sets up pre-workday breakfasts where there are no phones or scheduled meetings. Others begin the day with technology-free “stand-up meetings.” There are new corporate programs for emotional self-help in an age of overconnection: I meet executives on technology “time-outs,” Sabbaths, and sabbaticals.
Even Silicon Valley parents who work for social media companies tell me that they send their children to technology-free schools in the hope that this will give their children greater emotional and intellectual range. Many were surprised to learn that Steve Jobs did not encourage his own children’s use of iPads or iPhones. His biographer reports that in Jobs’s family, the focus was on conversation: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer.” Our technological mandarins don’t always live the life they build for others. They go to vacation spots deemed “device-free” (that don’t allow phones, tablets, or laptops). This means that America has curious new digital divides. In our use of media, there are the haves and have-nots. And then there are those who have-so-much-that-they-know-when-to-put-it-away.
Sometimes people sense that there is a flight from conversation but want technology to restore it for them. When I give talks about the importance of conversation for young children, sometimes teachers in the audience will come up at the end of my presentation to say that they wholeheartedly agree (“Kids can’t talk anymore”) but go on to tell me how they are using messaging on the iPad to try to increase student sociability. Apps for sociability may increase sociability on apps; what children are missing, however, is an ease with each other face-to-face, the context in which empathy is born. Indeed, empathy, too, will have its own technologies: The researcher who found a 40 percent decrease in empathy in college students over the past twenty years has begun to develop apps for smartphones to encourage empathic habits.
Clearly, her finding about the decrease in empathy did not feel li
ke something she wanted to accept. It felt like something that called for action. But does a decrease in teenage empathy suggest the need for an empathy app? Or does it suggest that we make more time to talk to teenagers?
Sometimes it seems easier to invent a new technology than to start a conversation.
Every new technology offers an opportunity to ask if it serves our human purposes. From there begins the work of making technology better serve these purposes. It took generations to get nutrition labels on food; it took generations to get speed limits on roads and seat belts and air bags into cars. But food and transportation technology are safer because all of these are now in place. In the case of communications technology, we have just begun.
In every encounter, we need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes face-to-face conversation is not the right tool for a particular job. But having the whole person before you is reliably the best way to begin. It gives you the most information to decide which communication tools you need as you move forward. But what I’ve found is that once people have texting, chat, and email available, they stick with them even when they suspect that these are not the right tools for the job. Why? They are convenient. They make us feel in control. But when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and less in control, our relationships, creativity, and productivity thrive.
We are at a crossroads: So many people say they have no time to talk, really talk, but all the time in the world, day and night, to connect. When a moment of boredom arises, we have become accustomed to making it go away by searching for something—sometimes anything—on our phones. The next step is to take the same moment and respond by searching within ourselves. To do this, we have to cultivate the self as a resource. Beginning with the capacity for solitude.
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