Reclaiming Conversation (38 page)

I come to understand that part of what sustains apathy is that people think they are being tracked by algorithms whose power will be checked by humans with good sense if the system finds anything that might actually get them into trouble. But we are in trouble together. Interest in Linux as probable cause for surveillance? We're starting not to take ourselves seriously.

My research assistant says she's not worried about her data trail
because she sees the government as benign. They're interested in terrorists, not in her. But I persist. Now that my assistant knows she is subject to tracking because of her activity on the Linux forum, will it have a chilling effect on what she says online? Her answer is no, that she will say what she thinks and fight any attempt to use her thoughts against her “if it should ever come to that.” But historically, the moments when “it came to that” have usually been moments when it has been hard or too late to take action.

I recall how Lana summed up her thoughts about online privacy: She said she would worry about it “if something bad happens
.
” But we can turn this around and say that something bad
has
happened. We are challenged to draw the line, sometimes delicate, between “personalization” that seems banal (you buy shoes, so you see ads for shoes) and curation that poses larger questions.

In the 2012 presidential election, Facebook looked at random precincts and got people to go to the polls by telling them that their friends had voted. This political intervention was framed as a study, with the following research question: Can social media affect voter turnout? It can. Internet and law expert Jonathan Zittrain has called the
manipulation of votes by social media
“digital gerrymandering.” It is an unregulated threat. Facebook also did a study, a mood experiment, in which some people were shown posts from happy friends and some people were shown posts from unhappy friends
to see if this changed their moods
. It did. Social media has the power to shape our political actions and emotional lives. We're accustomed to media manipulation—advertising has always tried to do this. But having unprecedented kinds of information about us—from what medications we take to what time we go to bed—allows for unprecedented interventions and intrusions. What is at stake is a sense of a self in control of itself. And a citizenry that can think for itself.

I
have been talking to high school and college students about online privacy for decades. For years, when young people saw the “results” of online data collection, chiefly through the advertisements that appeared on their screens, it was hard for them to see the problem. The fact that a desirable sneaker or the perfect dress popped up didn't seem like a big deal. But in the years since Edward Snowden's revelations about how the government tracks our data, young people are more able to talk about the problems of data mining, in some measure because it has become associated (at least in their minds) with something easier to think about: spying. What Snowden was talking about seemed enough like old-fashioned spying that it gave people a way into a conversation about the more elusive thing: the incursions of everyday tracking.

So, after the Snowden revelations, high school students would begin a conversation about Snowden and then pivot to “Facebook knowing too much.” What did Facebook know? What did Facebook keep? And had they really given it permission to do all this?

Or they would begin a conversation by talking about how they were trying to stay away from Facebook, now a symbol of too much online data collection, and then pivot to Snowden. A different set of issues entirely, but Snowden gave them a handle on their general sense of worry. The worry, in essence: How much does the Internet “know” and what is the Internet going to do about it? After Snowden, the helpful ads on their screens had more of a backstory. Someone, many someones,
knows a lot more about them
than their sneaker preferences.

And yet it is easy for this conversation to slip away from us. Because just as we start to have it, we become infatuated with a new app that asks us to reveal more of ourselves: We could report our moods to see if there are concerns to address. We could track our resting heart rate or the amount of exercise we get each week. So we offer up data to improve ourselves and postpone the conversation about what happens to the data we share. If someday the fact that we were not careful about our diet in
our forties is held against us—when it comes to giving us an insurance rate in our fifties—we will have offered up this data freely.

Instead of pursuing the political conversation, we sign up for another app.

Technology companies will say—and they do—that if you don't want to share your data, don't use their services. If you don't want Google to know what you are searching, don't search on Google. When asked to comment on all that Google knows, its executive chairman said, in essence, that “
the way to deal is to just be good
.”

I have felt for a long time, as a mother and as a citizen, that in a democracy, we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to “hide,” a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected despite our techno-enthusiasms. You need space for real dissent. A mental space and a technical space (those mailboxes!). It's a private space where people are free to “not be good.” To me,
this conversation about technology, privacy, and democracy
is not Luddite or too late.

In the end, we will be defined not only by what we create but by
what we refuse to destroy
.

—JOHN SAWHILL, CONSERVATIONIST

T
horeau said that when the conversation in his cabin became loud and expansive, he
pushed his chairs to its far corners
. So to the idea that we might learn about ourselves through algorithms, the most ready answer is to embrace conversations that bring us back to ourselves, our friends, and our communities. As Thoreau would have it, the three chairs together, the room made large.

Thoreau's chairs capture a virtuous circle. We find our voice in solitude, and we bring it to public and private conversations that enrich our capacity for self-reflection. Now that circle has been disrupted; there is a crisis in our capacity to be alone and together. But we are in flight from those face-to-face conversations that enrich our imaginations and shepherd the imagined into the real. There is a crisis in our ability to understand others and be heard.

But we also demonstrate a striking resilience. I am not surprised that a study of children who put their devices away for five days at camp shows that they
begin to recover their empathic capacity
. In my own experiences observing children at such a camp, I saw how easy it was for them to appreciate—as though for the first time—the value of conversation, with themselves and others.

The campers I met spoke about solitude and empathy. Campers said they were more interested in their summer friends than in their friends
at school. They thought the difference was that at home they talk with their friends about what's on their phones; at camp, they talk to each other about what's on their minds.

And as I participated in nightly cabin chats, campers remarked on their deepening relationships with counselors. The camp counselors were offering campers something close to exotic: undivided attention. While on duty, the counselors, too, had taken a break from their phones.

Many campers come back every year to this device-free camp. Several of the returning campers remark that each year they notice that they like themselves better at the end of the summer. They say that what they notice most is that they have become better friends and teammates. Also, they are nicer to their parents.

And they speak frankly about how hard it is to keep up their “camp selves” when they get home. There, family and friends are preoccupied with technology—and it is hard to resist following along.

At camp I learn many lessons. Among them: We don't have to give up our phones, but we have to use them more deliberately. And sometimes, just as deliberately, we need to take a break. I think of how Clifford Nass compared the parts of the brain that process emotion to muscles—
they atrophy if not exercised
but can be strengthened through face-to-face conversation. Time without our phones is restorative. It provides time to practice.

For most of us, our exercises in conversation will not be at device-free summer camps. Most of the time, we'll reclaim conversation by working to protect sacred spaces, spaces without technology, in our everyday lives. With more experience away from our devices, we'll develop a better sense of when we need solitude and when we need to give each other undivided attention.

As we become comfortable with our own need for “tools down” conversations, we'll learn to ask for them. And we'll take the petitions of others more seriously: when a child needs his parent to listen, when a teacher wants to reach a distracted class, when a business meeting is trying to rectify a serious misunderstanding, when a friend turns to a friend and says, “I want to talk.”

P
eople often say to me, “What next?”

Every technology asks us to confront our human values. This is a good thing, because it causes us to reaffirm what they are. From there it is easier to see next steps and guideposts. We are not looking for simple solutions. We are looking for beginnings.

Remember the power of your phone. It's not an accessory.
It's a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are. Don't automatically walk into every situation with a device in hand: When going to our phones is an option, we find it hard to turn back to each other, even when efficiency or politeness would suggest we do just that. The mere presence of a phone signals that your attention is divided, even if you don't intend it to be
.
It will limit the conversation in many ways: how you'll listen, what will be discussed, the degree of connection you'll feel. Rich conversations have difficulty competing with even a silent phone. To clear a path for conversation, set aside laptops and tablets. Put away your phone.

Slow down.
Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. To have them, you have to learn to listen to your own voice.
A first step is to slow down
sufficiently to make this possible.

Online life has ramped up the volume of what everyone sees on any day and the velocity with which it whizzes by. We are often too busy communicating to think, create, or collaborate. We come to online life with the expectation that we can ask a question and get an almost immediate answer. In order to meet our expectations, we begin to ask simpler questions. We end up dumbing down our communications and this makes it harder to approach complex problems.

Protect your creativity. Take your time and take quiet time. Find your own agenda and keep your own pace.
Tutored by technology, we become reactive and transactional in our exchanges because this is what technology makes easy
.
We all struggle with this. But many successful people I've talked with say that a key to their achievement is that they don't even try
to empty their email inbox. They set aside specific times to deal with their most important messages but never let an inbox set their agenda.

So if as a parent or teacher or employer you receive an email request, respond by saying that you need time to
think
about it. This seems a small thing, but it is too rarely done. A thirty-year-old consultant tells me that in her world, this response would be “age-inappropriate.” This makes me think that it is time to reconsider our sense of the appropriate in every domain. To respond to an email by saying “I'm thinking” says that you value reflection and you don't let yourself be rushed just because technology can rush you. Emails and texts make quick responses possible; they don't make them wise.

Again and again, I've seen people retreat to screens because only there do they feel they can “keep up” with the pace of machine life. I think of Vannevar Bush and his dream in 1945 that
a mechanical “Memex” would free us
for the kind of slow creative thinking that only people know how to do. Instead we too often try to speed up to a pace our machines suggest to us. It's time
to return to the spirit of Bush's original idea
.

We help children slow down by keeping them in touch with materials such as mud and modeling clay. The resistance of the physical fires their imaginations and keeps them grounded. This kind of creativity can be sparked beyond playrooms, classrooms, and parks. And it should happen all through life. At Google, employees come together to work with concrete materials in specially designed spaces known as “garages.” The idea is simple: Adults need play as much as children do. Use space and materials
to encourage thought, talk, and new ideas
. It's an idea that can be brought from corporate spaces into family life.

Create sacred spaces for conversation.
In the day-to-day, families carve them out—no devices at dinner, in the kitchen, or in the car. Introduce this idea to children when they are young so that it doesn't spring up as punitive but is set up as a baseline of family culture. It can be an ordinary thing for a mother of a four-year-old to say: “In our family we need time without any electronics to be alone, quietly. And we need time to talk to each other. I don't text in the car while I'm driving. So that makes it a perfect time for us to talk or just look out the window.”

Remember that we teach the capacity for solitude by being quiet alongside children who have our attention. Design your environment to protect yourself against unnecessary interruptions. Take a neighborhood walk—alone or with family or friends—without devices. Experiment with an evening or a weekend off the net as a regular part of your routine. Be realistic about how you are going to signal a new attitude about committing focused attention to your children. What children need is to understand your intention and values. If you can't spend two hours with your children in the park without your phone, adjust your plan. Take your children to the park for one hour and give them your full attention.

And just as families need these protected spaces, so do schools and universities and workplaces. Increasingly, there is demand in universities for study and lounge space that is Wi-Fi-free. When we wired the universities, every last room of them, we didn't consider that we were making it harder for students to attend to their peers or their own thoughts. Yet these showed up as unintended consequences. In offices, we can make space for conversation without digital connection; we can trade casual Fridays for conversational Thursdays. Setting aside a space communicates that, in this place, people pay attention to each other. They take a breath.

Think of unitasking as the next big thing.
In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.

But doing one thing at a time is hard, because it means asserting ourselves over what technology makes easy and over what feels productive in the short term. Multitasking comes with its own high. Our brains crave the fast and unpredictable, the quick hit of the new. We know this is a human vulnerability. Unless we design our lives and technology to work around it, we resign ourselves to diminished performance.

When I talk to managers, parents, and educators, I realize that they are increasingly familiar with the studies that show how multitasking degrades performance. But in practice, I see multitasking everywhere. Unitasking is key to productivity and creativity. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

Talk to people with whom you don't agree.
Conversation is inhibited as much by our prejudices as by our distractions. A recent study characterizes the political conversations on social media as a “spiral of silence.” People don't want to post opinions on social media that
they fear their followers will disagree
with. A technology that makes it possible to interact with everyone does not necessarily have everyone interacting. People use the Internet to limit their interactions to those with whom they agree. And social media users are less willing than non-users to discuss their views off-line.

Our reticence to talk to those with opposing opinions extends to the face-to-face world. A recent study shows that college students all across the United States who declare themselves to be committed Republicans or Democrats will not discuss political matters with students on their campus
who do not share their views
. This means that they will avoid political discussion with those who live down the hall, who share a bathroom. We turn the physical realm into an echo chamber of what we have so easily created online. It's a cozy life, but we risk not learning anything new.

We can do better. We can teach our children to talk to people who disagree with them by modeling these conversations ourselves. We can show them that it helps to begin by talking about how you see causes, reasons, values.
Even a small amount of common ground can nurture a conversation
.

Obey the seven-minute rule.
This is the rule, suggested to me by a college junior, that grows out of the observation that it takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold. The rule is that you have to let it unfold and not go to your phone before those seven minutes pass. If there is a lull in the conversation, let it be. The seven-minute rule suggests other strategies for a life enriched by solitude, self-reflection, and presence. Learn to see boredom as an opportunity to find something interesting within yourself. Let yourself go there, have your association, and then come back to your train of thought or to the conversation. Our minds work, and sometimes at their best, when we
daydream. When you return from reverie, you may be bringing back something deeply pertinent.

Conversation, like life, has silences and boring bits. This bears repeating: It is often in the moments when we stumble and hesitate and fall silent that we reveal ourselves to each other. Digital communication can lead us to an edited life. We should not forget that an unedited life is also worth living.

Challenge a view of the world as apps.
The “app generation” is what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the generation that
grew up with phones in hand
and apps at the ready. It's a way to describe people who bring an engineering sensibility to everyday life and certainly to their educational experience. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results. By this logic, you go to certain schools, you get certain grades, you take certain summer enrichment courses and join certain extracurricular activities, and the app works: You get into an Ivy.

The app way of thinking can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with a set of tools. At school and work, the app way of thinking can show up as a lack of creativity and innovation. Your options are laid out and you pick from the menu. We've seen middle school teachers facing students who had an instrumental view of friendship and parents who saw school as an app for getting their children into college. From the teachers' point of view, students had no time to dream. No occasion to structure their own time. Or learn about situations that had no certain outcomes.