Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

They are not developing that way of relating where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other.

The Holbrooke teachers are enthusiastic users of educational technology. But on their retreat, they follow what some call the precautionary principle: “Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action.” These teachers believe they see indications of harm. It is a struggle to get children to talk to each other in class, to directly address each other. It is a struggle to get them to meet with faculty. And one teacher observes: “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. As these teachers see it, the old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

I was invited to Holbrooke because for many decades I have studied children’s development in technological culture. I began in the late 1970s, when a few schools were experimenting with personal computers in classrooms or special computer laboratories. I work on this question still, when many children come to school with a tablet or laptop of their own, or one their school has issued.

From the beginning, I found that children used the digital world to play with issues of identity. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, children used simple programming as an expressive medium. A thirteen-year-old who had programmed a graphical world of her own said: “When you program a computer, you put a little piece of your mind into the computer’s mind and you come to see yourself differently.” Later, when personal computers became portals to online games, children experimented with identity by building avatars. The particulars changed with new games and new computers, but something essential remained constant: Virtual space is a place to explore the self.

Also constant was the anxiety of adults around children and machines. From the beginning, teachers and parents worried that computers were too compelling. They watched, unhappy, as children became lost in games and forgot about the people around them, preferring, at long stretches, the worlds in the machine.

One sixteen-year-old describes this refuge: “On computers, if things are unpredictable, it’s in a predictable way.” Programmable worlds can be made exciting, but they also offer new possibilities for a kind of experience that some began to call friction-free. Newton’s laws need not apply. Virtual objects can be made to simply glide along. And you, too, can glide along if that’s how things are programmed. In virtual worlds, you can face challenging encounters—with scoundrels and wizards and spells—that you know for sure will work out in the end. Or you can die and be reborn. Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation.

From the early days, I saw that computers offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship and then, as the programs got really good, the illusion of friendship without the demands of intimacy. Because, face-to-face, people ask for things that computers never do. With people, things go best if you pay close attention and know how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Real people demand responses to what they are feeling. And not just any response.

Time in simulation gets children ready for more time in simulation. Time with people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation. And this brings me back to the anxieties of the Holbrooke teachers. As the Holbrooke middle schoolers began to spend more time texting, they lost practice in face-to-face talk. That means lost practice in the empathic arts—learning to make eye contact, to listen, and to attend to others. Conversation is on the path toward the experience of intimacy, community, and communion. Reclaiming conversation is a step toward reclaiming our most fundamental human values.

Mobile technology is here to stay, along with all the wonders it brings. Yet it is time for us to consider how it may get in the way of other things we hold dear—and how once we recognize this, we can take action: We can both redesign technology and change how we bring it into our lives.

A Partisan of Conversation

I have spent my professional life as a student of conversation, trained as a sociologist, a teacher, and a clinical psychologist. These vocations have made me a partisan of conversation because they have taught me to appreciate the work that conversation can do—from Socratic classrooms to small talk around water coolers.

My mentor, the sociologist David Riesman, called these vocations “the talking trades.” He was right. They rely on conversation and they approach it with high expectations. Each has an answer to the question: What is the work of conversation?

Sociologists and anthropologists use conversation to make sense of the web of relationships at home, at work, and in public life. When things go right, the social scientist’s interview becomes an open, easy exchange. This often happens after trust has been established, when the researcher’s notebook has been closed, when people who only a few minutes earlier had been “participants” in “your study” realize that there is something in this for them. Your question becomes their question as well. A conversation begins.

In the classroom, conversations carry more than the details of a subject; teachers are there to help students learn how to ask questions and be dissatisfied with easy answers. More than this, conversations with a good teacher communicate that learning isn’t all about the answers. It’s about what the answers mean. Conversations help students build narratives—whether about gun control or the Civil War—that will allow them to learn and remember in a way that has meaning for them. Without these narratives, you can learn a new fact but not know what to do with it, how to make sense of it. In therapy, conversation explores the meanings of the relationships that animate our lives. It attends to pauses, hesitations, associations, the things that are said through silence. It commits to a kind of conversation that doesn’t give “advice” but helps people discover what they have hidden from themselves so they can find their inner compass.

Conversations in these traditions have a lot in common. When they work best, people don’t just speak but listen, both to others and to themselves. They allow themselves to be vulnerable. They are fully present and open to where things might go.

You don’t need to be in the talking trades to recognize the work conversation can do. I have asked people of all ages and circumstances to tell me about their most important conversations—with children, with friends, with spouses, partners, lovers, and colleagues. It was a question people wanted to answer. They offered the conversation when they fell in love, when they realized that their parents were vulnerable and needed their care, when they understood that their children were no longer children. They offered the conversation when they were confirmed in a career choice because a mentor gave them a chance to run with a quirky idea.

With all of this in mind, when I hear lovers say that they prefer to “talk” by editing a text on their smartphones, when I hear families say that they air their differences on email to avoid face-to-face tension, when I hear corporate vice-presidents describe business meetings as “downtime for emptying your inbox,” I hear a desire for distraction, comfort, and efficiency. But I also know that these moves won’t allow conversation to do the work it can do.

The Virtuous Circle

We are being silenced by our technologies—in a way, “cured of talking.” These silences—often in the presence of our children—have led to a crisis of empathy that has diminished us at home, at work, and in public life. I’ve said that the remedy, most simply, is a talking cure. This book is my case for conversation.

I begin my case by turning to someone many people think of—mistakenly—as a hermit who tried to get away from talk. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to learn to live more “deliberately”—away from the crush of random chatter. But the cabin furniture he chose to secure that ambition suggests no simple “retreat.” He said that in his cabin there were “three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”

These three chairs plot the points on a virtuous circle that links conversation to the capacity for empathy and for self-reflection. In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. When we are secure in ourselves we are able to listen to other people and really hear what they have to say. And then in conversation with other people we become better at inner dialogue.

Of course, this virtuous circle is an ideal type, but taking that into account, it works. Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

Technology disrupts this virtuous circle.

The disruptions begin with solitude, Thoreau’s first chair. Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. In one experiment, people were asked to sit quietly—without a phone or a book—for fifteen minutes. At the start of the experiment, they were also asked if they would consider administering electroshocks to themselves if they became bored. They said absolutely not: No matter what, shocking themselves would be out of the question. But after just six minutes alone, a good number of them were doing just that.

These results are stunning, but in a way, not surprising. These days, we see that when people are alone at a stop sign or in the checkout line at the supermarket, they seem almost panicked and they reach for their phones. We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve.

And this is where the virtuous circle breaks down: Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other. If we can’t find our own center, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.

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 student 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.”