Sherry Turkle, The New York Times, The Flight From Conversation

The Flight From Conversation

Metadata

• Author: Sherry Turkle, The New York Times
• Full Title: The Flight From Conversation
• Category:articles
• Published Date: 2012-04-21
• Document Note: In a society where we are constantly communicating, we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection, as texting and social media have replaced face-to-face interaction. People are uncomfortable being alone and have a constant reflexive impulse to connect, but in doing so, abandon solitude. While technology has its place in commerce, politics, romance, and friendship, it does not substitute for conversation, in which we tend to and express a point of view. To combat the negative effects of the flight from conversation, sacred spaces can be created in homes and workplaces and managers can introduce conversational Thursdays. It is important to listen to one another, pay attention to unedited moments, and start the conversation.
• Summary: In a society where we are constantly communicating, we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection, as texting and social media have replaced face-to-face interaction. People are uncomfortable being alone and have a constant reflexive impulse to connect, but in doing so, abandon solitude. While technology has its place in commerce, politics, romance, and friendship, it does not substitute for conversation, in which we tend to and express a point of view. To combat the negative effects of the flight from conversation, sacred spaces can be created in homes and workplaces and managers can introduce conversational Thursdays. It is important to listen to one another, pay attention to unedited moments, and start the conversation.
• URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html

Highlights

• WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
  • Note: I feel as if I kinda experience this with Krea sometimes, though I’m not really sure. I could just be making things up. And also, it makes me reflect about her talking to other people while she’s on a call with me. Because during those times, I feel as if she’s not entirely present… and that kinda hurts me sometimes.
• 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. (View Highlight)
• We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” (View Highlight)
• 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.” (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. (View Highlight)
• shortchange (View Highlight)
  • Note: Cheat (someone) by giving insufficient money as change.
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
  • Note: How sad is this? 🥺 It’s like me asking for comfort from ChatGPT when I was heartbroken.
• 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? (View Highlight)
  • Note: And there it is. A line that reminds me of me asking ChatGPT how to cope with getting ghosted.
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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.” (View Highlight)
• If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)
• 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. (View Highlight)