You’re at the dinner table or in a meeting or at a baseball game or in the classroom or in your bedroom or at a bar or, yes, in the bathroom — and you’re on your phone. You might be talking, but more likely you’re texting, posting, swiping, liking, tweeting, buying, browsing or, in my favorite metaphor of digital existence, “refreshing,” as though life’s staleness can be washed away with every new, fully realized screen.
This is the world of incessant connection, and for all the communication it supposedly provides, it’s destroying one essential thing: open-ended conversation. “We are being silenced by our technologies,” Sherry Turkle warns, “in a way, ‘cured of talking.’ ” And that silence means our ability to relate to others is disappearing, too. “We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship.”
A psychologist and the director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle has studied our relationship with technology for decades, showcasing her findings in works such as “Life on the Screen” and “Alone Together.” This is a persuasive and intimate book, one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.
“I had three chairs in my house,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in “Walden”; “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Thoreau’s chairs are a recurring theme for Turkle. Solitude, with the self-awareness it affords, helps us understand ourselves, she argues, which is essential to understanding others. Our conversations with other people — at home and school, in the workplace and the public square — put that empathy to work, sharpening our capacity for introspection. Reflect, talk, repeat.
But technology interrupts this cycle; it ends conversation. Our relationships now come stamped with “the assumption of divided attention,” Turkle explains. Reclaiming conversation is about “reclaiming our most fundamental human values.”
We are drawn to those sleek devices — always in our hands or always at hand — because they seem to grant three wishes: “First, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone.” A fourth wish, Turkle explains, is implied: that we will never be bored.
But in the rush to be heard by people far away, we lose those closest to us. “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,” Turkle writes.
Children learn that “no matter what they do, they will not win adults away from technology,” Turkle writes. “We see children deprived not only of words but of adults who will look them in the eye.”
The longer they are denied, and the longer they immerse themselves in their own devices, the harder it is for children to relate to peers as they grow older.
By adulthood, the ubiquity of the phone and the applications we access have not only stunted identity but confused it. A 34-year-old woman admits to Turkle that she spends time online performing “a better version of herself — one that will play well to her followers.”
At work, screens and tabs demand our attention. Young employees believe they are maximizing, but “when we think we are multitasking,” Turkle writes, “our brains are actually moving quickly from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add.”
The author’s prescriptions often read like captions for corporate motivational posters. “Slow down.” “Protect your creativity.” “Create sacred spaces for conversations.” Some suggestions seem obvious, but perhaps there are times when we need to hear obvious things. Turkle writes.
To her credit, Turkle doesn’t ask us to get rid of our phones altogether. “The goal is to use them with greater intention.” As Thoreau might say, more deliberately.
