So much of tai chi is about “being with” and in a sense having a conversation with your partner or your group. You can’t text this while doing tai chi and
you learn something about relationship while doing tai chi. What are you learning with your Smart Phone? See why your Smart phone is hurting this
delicate dynamic. Tom
Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.
By SHERRY TURKLESEPT. 26, 2015
New
York Times
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 studyby 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.
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 study demonstrated 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.
