Reclaiming Conversation (20 page)

Two years after I visit Holbrooke, the issues I met there seem as pressing as ever. In winter 2015, I visit with Greg Adams, the headmaster of Radway, a middle school in New York City, who tells me about a sixth grader, Luis, whose father committed suicide the year before. Ever since, Luis has been fragile and dependent on his sister, Juanita, a year ahead of him at school.

One day, Anna, a classmate of Luis's, becomes irritated that he interrupted her in the lunchroom when she was trying to talk to Juanita. The next day, Radway is in an uproar. Anna has posted on Facebook: “I hope Luis ends up just the way his father did.” Adams calls Anna into his office. He says he was “steaming, trying to stay in control. Smoke was coming out of my ears.” He asks Anna, “Why? Why would you do this?” Anna has an answer ready: “It was just on Facebook.” It is clear to Adams that Anna doesn't see what she did as altogether real.

The headmaster sets himself to “making Anna put herself in Luis's place.” In his office, Adams tells Anna, “We are not leaving until I have made you cry. We are not leaving my office until you are melted in tears.” He says that this takes him about fifteen minutes. “And then,” he says, “of course, I have to call Anna's mother about why I made her daughter cry.” But Adams is not reassured by Anna's tears. Somehow, Facebook gave her a way to think about other people as objects that can't be hurt. And a way to think about a kind of cruelty that doesn't count.

We have learned that people who would never allow themselves to be bullies in person feel free to be aggressive and vulgar online. The presence of a face and a voice reminds us that we are talking to a person. Rules of civility usually apply. But when we communicate on screens, we experience a kind of disinhibition. Research tells us that social media decrease self-control just as they cause a momentary
spike in self-confidence
. This means that online we are tempted to behave in ways that part of us knows will hurt others, but we seem to stop caring.

It is as though a signal is being jammed. For Adams, what is not getting through is a model of other people in which you see them as like you. Without this, his students can't feel empathy or form secure attachments. It is an environment that fosters bullying and casual cruelty. He does not find it surprising that a recent study concluded that the percentage of college students who feel safe and trusting in their attachments has decreased and the percentage who feel
insecure in their attachments
has increased.

T
he last time we saw Haley she was trying to console Natalie, a friend by her side who in a moment of loss had turned to “the people on the phone.” Haley was disappointed, but she says she understands what drove Natalie to her phone. At the time of that encounter, Haley's own social life centered around texting and messaging. She's not altogether happy about this, but this is what her life is about. Constant connectivity makes her feel that she belongs. “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.”

Haley has a cool eye on her numbers. Those “fifteen people,” and indeed her many hundreds of contacts on Facebook, are not so much friends as “people who will text me if I text them.” These relationships are close to contractual. Yet she says, “It's really hard for me to turn down a new friend on the network. It's hard for me not to try to accumulate as big a network as I can.” But she knows that not all of these “friends on the network” are friends. “In a weird way we treat friends like capital market items. You keep hangers-on, just to have more. . . . I do hoard friends.” Haley uses the “hangers-on” to keep up her numbers. She says it enables “that weird hoarding impulse.”

Is this kind of hoarding abundance or the sense of abundance? Haley's description of her pleasures helps us understand life in a gray zone, where the accumulation of friends who are not friends is at the same time both gratifying and alienating.

Haley insists that she likes the feeling of abundance that online friendships provide. But she also describes a half-formulated plan for getting back to basics. She says that next year, when she takes a semester abroad, she might delete her Facebook account. She worries that she will want to “show people what I'm doing and will miss having Facebook.”
But she's getting uncomfortable seeing friends as “capital market items” and with “that weird hoarding feeling.”

By the end of senior year, Haley has taken action. She has discarded her smartphone. She decided that her smartphone—she'd had one for five years—was overwhelming her friendships. For Haley, it wasn't just the phone “but the history on the phone. . . . When I texted someone I was so aware of the history the phone held. Every relationship was documented. And I carried the documentation—the texts and the email—with me all the time.”

Haley shows me her current phone, a flip phone, a “retro” phone. It makes calls. It sends texts but doesn't have enough memory to store more than a hundred of them. And of course it has no apps. This means it's not a way to access Facebook. Haley says she feels lighter. She says her friendships feel “unencumbered by past history. I am able to be more forgiving.”

W
e are at a choice point. Some feel liberated by the prospect of giving up their personal archives (to Haley, even the history of her texts feels like a burden), but some feel comforted by the prospect of developing
an ever more sophisticated archive
of every aspect of their life. This is the case for a group of people who experimented with a technology called Google Glass. Glass is a pair of spectacles that let you carry the web—along with all of its apps—wherever you go.

Andi, twenty-seven, is a graphic designer who applied to be in the first group of “explorers” who were issued Google Glass when it was ready for real-world trials. Andi joined the explorers because she wanted to experiment with ways to have a more reflective life. Glass can take photographs or video from the wearer's point of view. Andi programs her Glass to take a picture and record a minute of video every ten minutes. She tries to review and annotate her photographs every evening. So far, she finds her project comforting: “I don't know now what will be
important in my life. I will only know this later. I won't have to rely on memory to retrieve the important conversations. I'll have some record of them, even if I didn't think they were important at the time.” But at home, she usually takes off the glasses because her husband objects to the project. He thinks their conversations change when she is recording. And he doesn't like the idea that if he says something off-putting, it won't be enough to simply see the reaction in Andi's face and say he is sorry. His wife will have the record forever. Perhaps she will never be able to forgive because she will never be able to forget.

Andi has a strong reaction to her husband's concerns: “I think this is about inequality. I think he would feel different if he had Glass. It doesn't seem fair if only one person has a record. What you need is both partners keeping a record. I hope that when Glass is more widely available, he'll get it as well.”

Haley and Andi have opposite intuitions about what is important about memory. Haley is betting that everyone will want to power down. “I want people to live in the moment for friendship. Don't come with your history or expectations. You should be able to start your relationship from where you are now.” Andi has the opposite feeling. She believes that having a record of her past will allow her to live more fully in the present.

I speak to several users of Google Glass who go further than Andi. They hope that Glass (or something like it), by recording your life, will evolve into a kind of empathy machine. If you record your life from your point of view, you can then show it to others in the hope that they will understand you better. And if they, too, are recording their lives, you can see the world through their eyes. Conversation, in this case, may be a supplement to understanding. But they say it will often be unnecessary and that could be a good thing because not everyone is good at it. Glass reassures. If you fear you cannot adequately express your point of view, Glass will be a way to share it more effectively. If you fear you lack empathy, you look forward to being able to
take on the visual perspective of others
.

Ronald, twenty-six, a programmer at a renewable energy start-up,
has had Glass for six months. He says, “If you are bad at conversation, like me, Glass is important. You don't have to be good at describing what is happening with you, how you feel. Someone you care about can [look at a Glass video and] experience it directly.”

We've seen families who hoped to export conflict by having their disagreements by text message and email. Here is another idea that involves export—this time the wholesale export of your experience. Behind technological fantasies there is so often a deep sadness that human beings have simply not gotten it right and technology will help us do better.

I'm not optimistic about the empathy machine as a shortcut, or what one enthusiast describes to me as “training wheels for empathy.” Perhaps for some it makes sense as a supplement. But of course, with technology, we have a tendency to take what begins as a supplement and
turn it into a way of life
. Text messages weren't meant to disrupt dinner table conversations, but this supplement to talk became a substitution.

But it is a substitution that doesn't provide the essential. George Eliot referred to what the mother gives a child with her gaze as “the meeting eyes of love.” Research supports what literature and philosophy have told us for a long time. The development of empathy needs face-to-face conversation. And
it needs eye contact
.

The work of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has taught us that children need eye contact to develop parts of the brain that are involved with attachment. Without eye contact, there is a persistent sense of disconnection and problems with empathy. Siegel sums up
what a moment of eye contact accomplishes
: “Repeated tens of thousands of times in the child's life, these small moments of mutual rapport [serve to] transmit the best part of our humanity—our capacity for love—from one generation to the next.” Atsushi Senju, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies this mechanism through adulthood, showing that the parts of the brain that allow us to process another person's feelings and intentions are activated by eye contact. Emoticons on texts and emails, Senju found, don't have the same effect. He says, “A richer mode of communication is possible right
after making eye contact. It amplifies your ability to compute all the signals so you are able
to read the other person's brain
.”

With all of this to consider, what are we to make of the fact that when we have our phones out, our eyes are downward? (And of course, with Glass, our eyes are often busy reading what is on our screen display.) We've seen more and more research suggest that the always-on life erodes our capacity for empathy. Most dramatic to me is the study that found
a 40 percent drop in empathy
among college students in the past twenty years, as measured by standard psychological tests, a decline its authors suggested was due to students having less direct face-to-face contact with each other. We pay a price when we live our lives at a remove.

Some believe that children cope with the challenges of today's technology just as young people have coped with the new technologies that have come before. They are changing their styles of communication and will find their own balance. If adults worry, it is because we do not fully appreciate
the resourcefulness of the young
. I do think the young are resourceful, but there is also this: Phones, tablets, and the always-on-us wearables of our futures—all of these technologies of partial attention and downturned eyes—touch the most intimate moments in human development. They are poised to accompany children as they try to develop the capacity for attachment, solitude, and empathy. What looks like coping can take its toll.

I've said that to keep what we cherish about conversation, we have to design for our vulnerability. This has at least two aspects. A first is technical. If we don't want to be captured by our phones, we can, for example, design phones that intentionally “release” us after each transaction. And we can construct social environments that support our intentions. If we want to lose weight, we don't take for granted that the desire to go on a diet will lead to weight loss. It helps to diet with a friend. It helps to stock the right foods in the kitchen and to schedule regular meals. We'll go further in reclaiming conversation if we create environments that support conversation.

Since Socrates lamented the movement
from speech to writing,
observers have warned against each new mode of communication as destructive to a cherished mode of thought. I see mobile phones as having a distinctive quality that makes them stand out in this long historical conversation. When we write instead of speak, we are aware that we are making a choice, writing instead of speaking. In contrast, when we have our phones with us, we don't consider that by this fact we have compromised our face-to-face conversations. On the contrary, we defend the idea that we can text loving exchanges and catch-ups with friends as we have (parallel) conversations with the people around us. We find it hard to give up the idea that our phones are an accessory, a harmless, helpful supplement. But our technologies have not only changed what we do; they have changed who we are. And nowhere as profoundly as in our capacity for empathy.

In a series of 2014 lectures
, Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, took empathy out of its accustomed place in a discussion of how to treat others and focused instead on what it does to the development of the individual who offers it.