Reclaiming Conversation (4 page)

The real emergency may be parents and children not having conversations or sharing a silence between them that gives each the time to bring up a funny story or a troubling thought. A counselor at a device-free camp describes a common experience that the staff is having. If you go on a walk in the woods with a camper who has been acting up (perhaps getting into fights, perhaps bullying younger boys in the dining hall), an hour can go by in silence. Sometimes two. “And then,” the counselor says, “and then, there will be the question. And then, there will be the conversation.”

O
ur mobile devices seem to grant three wishes, as though gifts from a benevolent genie: 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. And the granting of these three wishes implies another reward: that we will never have to be bored. But in creative conversations, in conversations in which people get to really know each other, you usually have to tolerate a bit of boredom. People often struggle and stumble when they grapple with something new. Conversations of discovery tend to have long silences. But these days, people often tell me that silence is a “lull” from which they want to escape. When there is silence, “It's good to have your phone. There are always things to do on your phone.” But before we had our phones, we might have found these silences “full” rather than boring. Now we retreat from them before we'll ever know.

I said that I began my research planning to investigate the sentiment “I'd rather text than talk.” Technology makes possible so many new kinds of connections—on email, text, and Twitter, just for a start. I thought I would explore what makes them appealing and unique.

But soon my interviews—across generations—put another issue at center stage. What people say to each other when they are together is shaped by what their phones have taught them, and indeed by the simple fact that they have their phones with them. The presence of always-on and always-on-you technology—the brute fact of gadgets in the palm or on the table—changes the conversations we have when we talk in person. As I've noted, people with phones make themselves less vulnerable to each other and feel less connected to each other than those who talk without
the presence of a phone on the landscape
.

In the midst of our great experiment with technology, we are often caught between what we know we should do and the urge to check our phones. Across generations, we let technology take us away from conversation yet yearn for what we've lost. We reach for a moment of correction, an opportunity to recapture things we know by heart. When we invest in conversation, we get a payoff in self-knowledge, empathy, and the experience of community. When we move from conversation to mere connection, we get a lot of unintended consequences.

By now, several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and caretakers to be only half there. Many parents text at breakfast and dinner, and parents and babysitters ignore children when they take them to playgrounds and parks. In these new silences at meals and at playtime, caretakers are not modeling the skills of relationship, which are the same as the skills for conversation. These are above all empathic skills: You attend to the feelings of others; you signal that you will try to understand them. Children, too, text rather than talk with each other at school and on the playground. Anxious about the give-and-take of conversation, young people are uncertain in their attachments. And, anxious in their attachments, young people are uncertain about conversation.

These days, the first generation of children that grew up with smartphones is about to or has recently graduated from college. Intelligent and creative, they are at the beginning of their careers, but employers report that they come to work with unexpected phobias and anxieties. They don't know how to begin and end conversations. They have a hard time with eye contact. They say that talking on the telephone makes them anxious. It is worth asking a hard question: Are we unintentionally depriving our children of tools they need at the very moment they need them?
Are we depriving them of skills
that are crucial to friendship, creativity, love, and work?

A high school senior tells me he fears any conversation that he cannot edit and revise. But he senses its worth. “For later in life I'll need to learn how to have a conversation, learn how to find common ground.” But for now, he is only wistful. He says, “Someday, someday soon, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn to have a conversation.” His tone is serious. He knows what he does not know.

W
alking through a campus library or almost any office, one sees the same thing: people in their own bubbles, furiously typing on keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene at his office: Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptop, tablet, and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

The senior partner realizes that the junior associates retreat to their cockpits in the name of efficiency. But he says that if they end up not interacting with their colleagues, the fallout will be more damaging than what they gain from doing “all of those emails.” He worries that life in the cockpit leaves the junior associates isolated from ongoing, informal conversations in the firm. He wants reassurance that the new recruits are
part of the team. He believes that in the end, success at his firm demands a commitment to in-person collaboration.

There are times in business when electronic exchanges are the only choice. But in the law firm where the “pilot” works, many are
actively
finding ways around face-to-face
conversation.
There, the young recruits are forthright about wanting to avoid even the “real-time” commitment of a telephone call. And the senior partner says that the strategy of hiding from conversation “is catching,” rapidly crossing generations. In fact, it is an older lawyer who first tells me that he doesn't like to interrupt his colleagues because “they're busy on their email,” before he corrects himself: “Actually, I'm the one; I don't want to talk to people now. It's easier to just deal with colleagues on my phone.” He, too, has become a “pilot.” The isolation of the cockpit is not just for the young.

And we use technology to isolate ourselves at home as well as at work. I meet families who say they like to “talk problems out” by text or email or messaging rather than in person. Some refer to this practice as “fighting by text.” They tell me that electronic talk “keeps the peace” because with this regime, there are no out-of-control confrontations. Tempers never flare. One mother argues that when family members don't fear outbursts, they are more likely to express their feelings.

A woman in her thirties lists the advantages of online disagreements with her partner: “We get our ideas out in a cooler way. We can fight without saying things we'll regret.” And she adds another benefit: Fighting by text offers the possibility of documentation. “If we fight by text, I have a record of what was said.”

In all of these cases, we use technology to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect.
It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

At home, at school, at work, we see a flight from conversation. But in these moments of flight, there are moments of opportunity. We can reclaim conversation. Consider dinner.

Y
oung people tell me it would be nice to have the attention of their friends at meals but that this has become an unrealistic expectation. Social norms work against it, plus “you don't really want to give up what's coming in on your phone.” For anyone who grew up with texting, “
continuous partial attention
” is the new normal, but many are aware of the price they pay for its routines.

I interview college students who text continuously in each other's presence yet tell me they cherish the moments when their friends put down their phones. For them, what counts as a special moment is when you are with a friend who gets a text but chooses to ignore it, silencing his or her phone instead. For one woman, a college sophomore, “It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person.” For a senior man, “If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.”

A junior admits that she wants to ask her friends to put away their phones at meals but she can't do it because she would be socially out of line. “It's hard to ask someone to give you their undivided attention.” She elaborates: “Imagine me saying, ‘I'm so happy to see you, would you mind putting your phone away so that we can have a nice breakfast conversation?' And they would think, ‘Well, that's really weird.'” Asking for full attention at a meal, she says, “would be age inappropriate.”

What is “age appropriate” is that “rule of three,” the mealtime strategy where you make sure that enough people are participating in a group conversation before you give yourself permission to look at your phone. Young people recognize that full attention is important, yet they are unwilling to give it to each other. They treat their friends the way that made them feel so bad when they were growing up with distracted parents—parents on phones.

Some young people accept their vulnerability to being distracted and try to design around it. They come up with a dinner game, usually played at a restaurant. It recognizes that everyone wants to text at dinner, but
that the conversation is better if you don't. The game is called “cell phone tower.” All the dinner guests take their phones and place them in a pile in the center of the table. No phones are turned off. The first person to touch a phone when it rings pays for the meal.

Why do you need a game to force you to pay attention to your friends? One college junior says that “rationally” she knows that if she sends a text to a friend during the dinner hour, it is reasonable that she won't get a reply until after dinner. And that's fine. But if someone sends
her
a text during dinner, she can't relax until she has responded. She says, “I tell myself, ‘Don't read it at the table!' But you want to read it, you do read it; it's a weird little pressure to have.”

This comment about the “weird little pressure” to respond immediately to a dinnertime text reminds me of a conversation I had with a student in one of my undergraduate seminars—a class on memoir—who came to office hours to tell me that although she felt committed to the seminar, she had been checking her phone during class time. She had been feeling guilty—in the class, after all, students had been telling their life stories—and she wanted to talk to me about her texting. She said she felt “compelled” to check her messages. Why? All she could offer was that she needed to know who was reaching out to her, who was interested in her. Her formulation: “We are not as strong as technology's pull.” Phones exert a seductive undertow. The economies of the “cell phone tower” help individuals swim against the tide.

In all of this, there is no simple narrative of “digital natives” at ease in the world they grew up in. On the contrary. The story of conversation today is a story of conflict on a landscape of clear expectations.

Indeed, when college students talk about how they communicate today, they express seemingly irreconcilable positions. In a group of college juniors, one man goes from saying “All of my texting is logistical. It's just a convenience” to admitting that he can't follow most dinner conversations because he feels such pressure to keep up with his phone. Another makes wistful remarks about the future of communication, such as “Maybe something new will be invented.” The implication is that this “something new” might be less distracting than what he has
now. Two women say that they don't look forward to what they have now being in their future—but they can't imagine alternatives. One man suggests that maybe there isn't a problem at all: Humans are “co-evolving” with their phones to become a new species. But his note of optimism ends when he jokes about being “addicted to texting” because it “always feels safer than talking.” He throws up his hands: “It's not my fault, my mother gave me my first phone.” Advertisers know their customers. I look up at a sign in a San Francisco subway station for a food delivery service that will deliver from a wide range of restaurants in the Bay Area. It reads, “Everything great about eating combined with everything great about not talking to people!”

I
n this atmosphere, we indulge a preference to apologize by text. It has always been hard to sit down and say you're sorry when you've made a mistake. Now we have alternatives that we find less stressful: We can send a photo with an annotation, or we can send a text or an email. We don't have to apologize to each other; we can type, “I'm sorry.” And hit send. But face-to-face, you get to see that you have hurt the other person. The other person gets to see that you are upset. It is this realization that triggers the beginning of forgiveness.

None of this happens with “I'm sorry,”
hit send
. At the moment of remorse, you export the feeling rather than allowing a moment of insight. You displace an inner conflict without processing it; you send the feeling off on its way. A face-to-face apology is an occasion to practice empathic skills. If you are the penitent, you are called upon to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And if you are the person receiving the apology, you, too, are asked to see things from the other side so that you can move toward empathy. In a digital connection, you can sidestep all this. So a lot is at stake when we move away from face-to-face apologies. If we don't put children in the situations that teach empathy (and a
face-to-face apology is one of these), it is not surprising that they have difficulty seeing the effects of their words on others.