Reclaiming Conversation (16 page)

But only a week ago, Haley stayed out all night without being in touch. There had been a technical problem with her phone (“I texted my parents but it didn't send”). This time her mother didn't send any texts. She came down to breakfast the following morning to talk to her daughter face-to-face. Haley says that she could see that her mother had been up all night and that she had been crying. Haley says, “This is the first time she got mad at me in person.”

Somehow, the years of alarmed texts from her mother had become something like seasonal rituals, part of going home. For Haley, only when the argument went live did it become real. Haley says, “It is streamlined . . . clean to take care of things over text . . . [but] it did not spark the thoughts I had when my mom got mad at me in person.”

I saw her face. My mom was almost crying. That can't be conveyed via text. She could be bawling. . . . If she sent a text, I wouldn't know. So in terms of sparking real reflection, there is something that is conveyed in emotions and facial expressions. . . . The way it made me feel didn't come from her words.

Recall Colin's question: What could be the “value proposition” of face-to-face conflict in a family? Haley's story suggests an answer. Texting about conflict cooled things down to the point where she lost track of her mother.

Since the early 1990s, as I have explored people's emotional investments in their online lives, I have suggested to psychotherapists that when they meet with patients, they use their patients' lives on the screen to spark conversations. Our profiles, avatars, websites—these are all places where, as we represent ourselves, we have an opportunity to rethink our identity. Using therapy to talk about our online lives can open up
new conversations about the self
. For many years, when I expressed this idea, I met with considerable resistance. And now, with far less resistance. Now, therapists are more likely to appreciate the extent to which online lives are evocative objects, tools for thinking about the self. They are dream spaces for the digital age.

Indeed, these days, therapists often don't have to ask patients to show them what they are doing online. Patients take the initiative themselves. As one family therapist told me: “When patients want to tell me what is going on in their lives, they read from their phones. A patient reads me texts from his children, his wife, his boss. This is usual. They want me to analyze what these texts ‘really mean.'” So these days, in addition to encouraging patients to share their lives on the screen, therapists often find it necessary to ask patients to put away their phones in order to be fully present in therapy.

But we know why patients want their therapists to see their screens: That is where there is a record of the exchanges that make us most anxious or elated or confused.

I
have my own family confusions when my daughter, at around sixteen, asks me if I am angry with her.

It turns out that my text messages have no or insufficient punctuation. Without exclamation marks and extra question marks and emoticons, what I think of as practical and loving messages sound brusque.

In texting, punctuation is everything. Every period, every comma, every exclamation point in a text counts.
Communities of practice form
. It's not so different from learning the rules of body language when you go to a foreign culture. If you don't know the rules and you make the wrong assumptions, meaningful connection can stop. When it comes to texting, a lack of fluency with the rules can divide generations and families.

Why does my daughter think I am angry with her when I text? She explains: “Mom, your texts are always, like, ‘Great.' And I know it's not great. What's happening? What are you really thinking?” There is no convincing her. When I texted her “Great,” it was because that really was what I meant. If she were there with me in person, that is what I would have said. But “Great” as a text message is cold. At the very least, it needs a lot of exclamation points.

My first—and it turns out, clumsy—move was to include terms of endearment in my texting. To little avail. She said that a text from me (“May I speak with you tonight, sweetheart?”) came off “like a death in the family.” I learn from my research that “Call??? When good for you????” would have been better. I add emojis to my iPhone. Emojis are little pictures of cats, hearts, buildings, lightning bolts, many hundreds of little things, and I feel ridiculous when I use them. I use them anyway. I ask my daughter if they are helping. She makes it clear that she knows I am trying.

If we are making any progress, it is not because my texting is improving but because she understands that I don't know how to text. This means she less frequently allows herself to “hear” what my texts would
communicate if you applied what she considers “standard texting rules.” In other words, I alarm my daughter less frequently.

Once, my inability to parse my daughter's rules of texting truly frustrated me. I had uncertain results in a round of medical testing and was scheduled for a critical diagnostic test. I debated whether to tell my daughter in advance that the test was taking place. If nothing was wrong, why worry her before there was anything to worry about? In this case, talking with friends convinced me that if things did not go well, my daughter might be upset to learn that I had struggled with a serious problem without telling her. She was not a child. She was a twenty-one-year-old woman. She might not be happy that I had avoided a conversation.

There is no reliable way to reach my daughter without texting her, so I texted: “Darling, call me when you can.” Within seconds, she texted back: “What's wrong?” I texted back: “Nothing is wrong. I just want to make a date to get together.” She pressed: “What about?” My next text: “I'd rather talk in person, sweetheart.” And again from her: “What about? What's wrong?” Now we were on the phone. “Becca, why are you so concerned? I just want to have coffee.” At the time, my daughter was in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I live in Boston. We often had coffee.

She knew why she was concerned. “It's your text. There is no punctuation. The whole way you are texting is weird. It says that something is the matter.” There was no going back. The conversation I wanted to have in person would happen on the telephone. I told her about my test. I told her that I thought she should know about it. She got it all out of me. And over time, I came to understand the hypothetical text message that
might
have gotten me to the coffee date I wanted. It would have had to be nonchalant, with another message or punctuation carrying the message that nothing much was at stake. I
should
have said something like, “Hey . . . am swinging by the Square tomorrow :) on my way to a meeting later!!!!! . . . do you have time for an early breakfast??? Henrietta's Table? Not dorm food???”

Something truthful emerges. The “right” punctuation might have gotten me to a face-to-face meeting by creating a pretense. My inability
to follow the codes simply got us to the truth. In the end that was fine. But I didn't want to have that conversation over the telephone. Across the generations, there is a lot of learning to do.

W
hen Margot—the enthusiast of “fighting by text”—becomes frustrated that her son, Toby, the high school senior, won't commit to telling her where he and his friends are going (something she feels she has a right to know), she decides not to keep asking. Instead of working out his responsibility to her in a conversation, she goes to a technical workaround.

She asks Toby to install the application Find My Friends. With the application turned on, he will show up on a map on her iPhone as a dot.

Find My Friends began as Margot's way of dealing with an uncommunicative son, but now her entire family uses it. In Margot's family, there is a new compact. If your phone is on, your family knows where you are. You don't need to check in.

This new compact makes certain conversations easy to sidestep. For example, you can avoid the conversation that Haley's mother finally insisted on when she tearfully confronted her surprised daughter and made clear that there will be no more staying out all night without checking in to say she is safe. With Find My Friends, Margot can check the location of any family member. But is it progress to be able to avoid that parent-child conversation—in this case a conversation that would have been with Toby? The conversation would have been about good judgment and understanding the concern of those who love you. It would also have been about what we owe each other.

Even awkward, unpleasant conversations can do a lot of work. A face-to-face conversation about Toby's whereabouts could teach how to set boundaries and how to stand up for yourself without diminishing the feelings of the person you address. It could also teach about legal things: Margot is responsible for her underage son. It could teach about
separation: Toby may want to assert himself—to have secrets. That may not be a bad thing. Even if he can't get precisely what he wants, it might do his parents good to know that he wants more privacy. Maybe they can find some other way to give it to him.

Margot is getting what she wants without conversation. But she is giving up a lot. In her family, location dots are calming. There is now no need—and no obvious opportunity—to have difficult conversations about responsibility and trust.
Instead of talking
, you agree to surveillance.

T
here is no reason to idealize family conversations of the past. They could be stilted. They could be dominated by parents who proclaimed opinions or who demanded idealized accounts of the day from obedient children.

But you don't need to idealize the past to cast a steady eye on the present. Digital culture offers us new possibilities for talk and new possibilities for silence.

We are vulnerable to our new technologies in ways we did not anticipate.

We sense that new social rules allow us to check our phones almost all the time, but we also sense that on some human level these rules don't feel right. One woman tells me of a long hospitalization. Her husband can be with her almost all the time because Wi-Fi at the hospital enables him to work from her bedside. But she also says that during her long weeks of hospitalization, she and her husband have barely spoken because he hardly looks up from his laptop and smartphone.

Another talks about her experience during the period of mourning after her mother's death, known in the Jewish tradition as “sitting Shiva.” During the Shiva, the immediate family of the deceased stays at home and receives guests. Traditionally, they bring food. The Wi-Fi network in her house has been disabled for the mourning period, but the cellular
network, over which individuals have no control, is on. During this woman's Shiva, her guests sit and talk to her. But after a bit, they retreat to quiet corners of her house to text and do email on their phones. She tells me that she finds herself upset by these guests although she understands that being able to “hop on their email” may be what allows them to make lengthier visits.

Both women—the hospitalized woman and the woman describing her period of mourning—ask me what I think is the “right attitude” for someone in their situation. They want attention. They find themselves taken aback that they have to compete for it. They are hurt, even resentful. But they are insecure in their feelings.

Each woman expects a certain kind of conversation and finds an unexpected silence. But neither woman is confident that she has a case to make because now it is normal to bring a phone wherever you go. We almost forget we are carrying our phones, so much do they seem a part of us. Each woman presents her story as though it poses questions of etiquette. Each muses aloud about “What is the correct way to view this situation?” But the stories are about more than etiquette. They are about the challenges to close ties when technology enters our most intimate circles. In each case, their questions about the “right attitude” are about more than what to do. They are about what to
feel
.

We are vulnerable: Going to technology starts to feel easier, if not better, than going to each other. Simply keeping this in mind may help us make more deliberate choices for our families.

Whether a family chooses to create device-free “sacred spaces” at home or chooses to cultivate daily habits of family conversation—devices or no devices—children recognize a commitment to conversation. And they see it as a commitment to family and to them. I think this can make the difference between children who struggle to express themselves and those who are fluent, between children who can reach out and form friendships and those who may find it hard to Find Their Friends.

The Quality of Empathy (Is Strained)

With my friends, it's either no conversation or conversation about what's going on, on your phone.

—A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY

You can put so little effort in when you text and then you get instant gratification. I can connect with fifteen people with no effort and it feels so good to just extend the feelers and get a positive response. I would rather have that than a conversation a lot of the time.

—A TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

T
revor, twenty-six, is a master of phubbing—the art of talking to other people but with your
eyes on your phone
. And Trevor is never far from his phone. When I tell him I'm working on a book on conversation, his reaction is close to a snort: “Conversation? It died in 2009.”

That was the year he was a college senior, majoring in history.

That's the year we shared things on Facebook instead of talking to each other. We put our energy into our profiles. We talked about what we had put online. The focus of friendship became what you found online
and how you would share that with your friends. These days, you do it with Instagram or Snapchat. People are less into their profiles. But the idea is the same. Don't talk it. Post it. Share it.

Trevor says that when he was in college, social media changed his “face-to-face world.” He recalls a farewell party for graduating seniors:

People barely spoke. They ordered drinks and food. Sat with their dates. Looked at their phones. They didn't even try. Everyone knew that when they got home they would see the pictures of the party. They could save the comments until then. We weren't really saying good-bye. It was just good-bye until we got to our rooms and logged onto Facebook.

And, says Trevor, “even our style of talking in class was different.” There was less give-and-take during class time. Students got into a style that was less conversational but resembled the composed “postings” you would do on Facebook. In class,

You would try to say something brilliant . . . something prepared in advance . . . and then you'd sit back and wait for your responses. You didn't have to really engage. The idea of saying something as it occurred to you and getting a conversation going, that was gone. . . . And you didn't just do this new thing in classes, you did it with your friends. Now, you'd say what you [had planned] to say. And then, you'd get your responses.

Using this style of participation was a balm for academic anxiety. And Trevor says that his friends used it to relieve social anxiety as well. “By composing your thoughts in advance the social anxieties of friendship could go away.” His comment reminds me of the Stanford freshman who told Clifford Nass that “technology makes emotions easy.”

T
revor's report, as Mark Twain might have it, greatly exaggerates the death of conversation. But this much is true: These days, day to day, teenagers choose to use texting more than any other form of communication,
including face-to-face communication
. And styles of online talk can change in the time it takes for a new app to capture the collective imagination.

Since Trevor met Facebook, young people have moved from wanting to put their energy into managing a Facebook-style profile to being more interested in ephemeral ten-second communications on Snapchat. They seem less interested in being defined by what they say
about
themselves and would rather be known as they are in the everyday, by how they behave and what they share. Snapchats and Instagrams and the very short videos of Vine have become the media of the moment.

I see the rapidity of change in two conversations in early 2014. In the first I am with a college senior who talks to me about FaceTime. She dismisses it: “
We
don't do that. You have to hold it [the phone] in front of your face with your
arm
; you can't do anything else.” Only a week later, a group of high school freshmen talk to me about the merits of FaceTime—they use it for after-school conversations with friends while running other apps on their iPads or phones. They
like
FaceTime because it allows them to multitask during conversations. Tired arms never come up.

Junior high school students use Snapchat video to record “sides” of conversation that they send back and forth—sort of like an asynchronous FaceTime. Recently, Snapchat introduced a new feature. Where users could previously only send pictures that would automatically disappear after the receiver viewed them for a preset time, now people can send
self-destructing text messages
. The ephemerality of conversation reborn—this time with a chance to edit before you hit send.

What is clear is that across generations, the profile, once the defining concept of social media, has come to seem almost onerous. Trevor
describes it as too “heavy.” But as he contemplates the “lightness” of posting a photo on Instagram, he points out that “what endures” across the apps—old and new—is “that going out for a drink often seems like too much work.” He adds that “it still takes a lot to risk having to sit down with each other and just see what happens.” A group of thirteen-year-old FaceTime enthusiasts tell me that they use the app to talk to friends who live in their neighborhood. Why not visit? They explain: Keeping the exchange online means “you can always leave” and “you can do other things on social media at the same time.” Continual attention is what 2009 taught that friendship didn't require.

That year—and for several before—I was interviewing students in high schools in the Northeast and I heard the idea take hold that friendship always presents you with a choice. If you have something to say, you can wait to say it until you are together—online. Young people came to this at first slowly, then faster as their technology gave them new options. Flip phones, Sidekicks, instant messages. And then there were the game changers: MySpace, Facebook, and smartphones that gave messaging a new fluidity, turning it into something that seemed close to magic.

I've kept up with the cohort of students who graduated from high school in the years 2008–2010. As they have matured, certain things have remained constant. Friends want to be together, but when they get together, the point isn't necessarily to talk—what counts most is physical closeness. And when friends are physically together, they often layer their conversation so that part of it is online (with the same people who are in the room).

Bree, a college senior in 2014, says that when she is with her friends, “I'll jump online with the people I'm with, just briefly, to get a point across. . . . I never really learned how to do a good job with talking in person.” James, a classmate, does the same thing: “Even when I'm with my friends, I'll go online to make a point. . . . I'm more at home. Online life makes the conversation work. . . . It's just so relaxing to have that texting channel open.”

If you punctuate face-to-face conversation with text messages, have
you opened up conversation or disrupted it? James thinks you have made it more “relaxing.” Bree thinks she needs the extra channel because she is missing the skills for “in-person talk.”

I think of Bree when I look back to the early years of the smartphone and how it presented an alternative to conversation. I recall a 2008 birthday party for a fifteen-year-old girl with very little talking, the guests in small groups, several looking at phones together. Some guests stood alone, immersed in their own phones, texting. Some took pictures of themselves and friends. There was clustering near the refreshments; people took pictures of the food. Fifteen is a difficult year for socializing across the sexes. Here, phones provided a welcome alternative to talk.

Before there were smartphones, an event such as the birthday party would have meant long silences, some stumbling around, and a few brief conversations with members of the opposite sex. These might have been awkward. But when they occurred, an important step would have been taken. Developmentally, the fifteen-year-olds would be closer to having sixteen-year-old confidence in their ability to connect. Eyes down at screens do not provide this groundwork.

The social preferences of Amy as a high school senior in 2008 help to explain the silences of a birthday party when the teenage guests have Facebook on their mind. Amy barely says a word to boys at school or a party, but she rushes home to talk to them online. There, Amy says, you can “take a breath,” relax, and plan what you are going to say before sending your message. In person a conversation can get out of control, go flat, or stop dead. Online, Amy feels playful.

If you have a relationship with a person, you think they're cute and stuff, you can make more of a conversation online than you would be able to in person because when you're in person, you're intimidated by the person. You like them. You don't know if they like you back. Online, you can say “Hi,” and they'll say “Hi” back, and you can start a full-blown conversation. In person, there are so many reasons why you don't want to talk to that person. Because you think, “Maybe they think I'm ugly” or something like that.

Given these anxieties, when she is having a face-to-face conversation with a boy, Amy tries to keep things short and then get him online as soon as she can.

When we talk online, we talk about a whole bunch of stuff, but when I'm on the phone with a boy or in person, it's like “Ahh, mad awkward!” . . . Let's say you are both together face-to-face. Unless you come up with some kind of question or something, like if you say, “How was school?” or whatever, you've got nothing. And let's say he says, “Good,” or “Fine” . . . You've still got nothing.

By the time Amy was a high school senior, the culture had made her anxieties easier to live with. In fact, the social mores around cell phones had moved most friendships toward online exchanges, not just those with a promise of romance. Facebook friending and group texting—these were among the first steps in creating an online circle that felt like your own private community, a family of always-available friends.

I
n 2008, I talk to Rona, a high school senior, who has just joined Facebook and says what this means to her: “Your friends become more like family and you want to talk to them in the most relaxed way.” It turns out that what Rona means by “relaxed” is particular: She can reach her friends immediately and have them get back to her immediately. New habits take hold as children feel a responsibility to be on call for their friends. In 2008, high school homework means, as Rona puts it, “an open laptop, Sidekick, and an every-five-minute check to see if anyone sent me anything.” She knows the rules:
“If someone sends me
a
message on Facebook, I have to . . . I feel the need to get it and get back to them when they're still online.”

In contrast, telephone calls don't have to be returned. Rona says that if she calls her best friend, her friend will respond by text. Rona
understands. Telephone calls “put you on the spot.” Texting gives more space to say things right and make things right. If “you do something wrong you can fix it right away.” I ask Rona to go over this again because I want to make sure I understand. Isn't the telephone a way to have the person
right there
if you want to correct a misunderstanding?

“Not really,” says Rona. The phone call is in real time and she sees real time as a place of awkwardness. Again, relaxation comes from fast response time with the possibility of editing. The phone is not a safe place to “just kind of put yourself together with somebody to see what your feelings are.”

That's what Facebook and texting are for. That's where you share a self in process. But you share best if you can edit, because you want to share what your friends will find acceptable. And young people come to expect their friends to be there to receive their messages. They need them to be. Sharing is how you come to feel most real to yourself.

But now Rona, accustomed to her online social life, is afraid to “put herself out there,” unedited, when she meets people face-to-face. In person, Rona says, “you could do something that the other person might not like . . . and you're scared that something is going to make you look stupid.”

Looking back, Trevor's comment that conversation died during his senior year in college no longer seems so flip. In interviews I conducted from 2008 to 2010 with high school and college students, they make it clear that the back-and-forth of unrehearsed “real-time” conversation is something that makes you “unnecessarily” vulnerable. And it presents technical difficulties. When you are with your friends in person, you will also want to be on your phone,
texting them and
other friends.
This parallel set of commitments doesn't leave much space for “real-time” conversation.

At the limit, you have to get your friends to pipe down in order to get down to the serious business of composing your notes to them. It may be at the limit, but it is common enough that there are collections of comic strips devoted to depicting friends and lovers sitting opposite each other, texting each other, trying to set up dates to be together.

I
t is spring 2008 and eight seniors at an all-male day school in Connecticut are talking about their phones. Only a few months earlier, most of them had received smartphones as holiday gifts and texting has exploded.

Oliver begins by saying that “it's official”—texting is the “baseline” for his friendships. In fact, his friends would think that something was wrong if he didn't keep it up. He tells me that most of his conversations with friends start with a text and continue in person. He searches for a metaphor: “The text is an outline of what you're going to talk to a person about if they're your good friend.” But then he corrects himself: That is not right. Most often, the in-person conversation doesn't happen, so you just “go with the text.” So the “outline” actually ends up being the conversation itself, and Oliver says he has gotten used to this; it doesn't bother him.