Reclaiming Conversation (43 page)

When roboticists show
videos of people happy to engage
with sociable robots, the tendency is to show them off as moments of exalted play. It is as though a small triumph is presented: We did it! We got a person to talk happily with a machine!
But this is an experiment in which people are the “reengineered” experimental subjects
. We are learning how to take as-if conversations with a machine seriously. Our “performative” conversations begin to change what we think of as conversation.

We practice something new. But we are the ones who are changing. Do we like what we are changing into? Do we want to get better at it?

I
n the course of my research, there was one robotic moment that I have never forgotten because it changed my mind.

I had been bringing robots designed as companions for the elderly into nursing homes and to elderly people living on their own. I wanted to explore the possibilities. One day I saw an older woman who had lost a child talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. It comforted her. Many people on my research team and who worked at the nursing home thought this was amazing.

This woman was trying to make sense of her loss with a machine that put on a good show. And we're vulnerable: People experience even pretend empathy as the real thing. But robots can't empathize. They don't face death or know life. So when this woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing. I felt we had abandoned this woman. Being part of this scene was one of the most wrenching moments in my then fifteen years of research on sociable robotics.

For me, it was a turning point: I felt the enthusiasm of my team and of the staff and the attendants. There were so many people there to help,
but we all stood back, a room of spectators now, only there to hope that an elder would bond with a machine. It seemed that we all had a stake in outsourcing the thing we do best—understanding each other, taking care of each other.

That day in the nursing home, I was troubled by how we allowed ourselves to be sidelined, turned into spectators by a robot that understood nothing. That day didn't reflect poorly on the robot. It reflected poorly on us and how we think about older people when they try to tell the stories of their lives. Over the past decades, when the idea of older people and robots has come up, the emphasis has been on whether the older person will talk to the robot. Will the robot facilitate their talking? Will the robot be persuasive enough to do that?

But when you think about the moment of life we are considering, it is not just that older people are supposed to be talking.
Younger people are supposed to be listening.
This is the compact between generations. I was once told that some older cultures have a saying: When a young person misbehaves, it means that “they had no one to tell them the old stories.” When we celebrate robot listeners that cannot listen, we show too little interest in what our elders have to say. We build machines that guarantee that human stories will fall upon deaf ears.

There are so many wonderful things that robots can do to help the elderly—all those things that put the robot in the role of the cavalry. Robots can help older people (or the ill or homebound) feel greater independence by reaching for cans of soup or articles of clothing on high shelves; robots can help shaky hands cook. Robots can help to lower an unsteady body onto a bed. Robots can help locate a mislaid pair of glasses. All of these things seem so much for the good. Some argue that a robot chatting with an older person is also unequivocally for the good. But here, I think we need to carefully consider the human specificity of conversation and emotional care.

Sociable robots act as evocative objects—objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves and our deepest values. We are in the domain of that fourth chair where we consider nature—our natures and the second natures we have built. Here, talking with machines forces the question:
What is the value of an interaction that contains no shared experience of life and contributes nothing to a shared store of human meaning—and indeed may devalue it? This is not a question with a ready answer. But this is a question worth asking and returning to.

It is not easy to have this kind of conversation once we start to take the idea of robotic companionship seriously. Once we assume it as the new normal, this conversation begins to disappear.

Right now we work on the premise that putting in
a robot to do a job is always better than nothing. The premise is flawed.
If you have a problem with care and companionship and you try to solve it with a robot, you may not try to solve it with your friends, your family, and your community.

The as-if self of a robot calling forth the as-if self of a person performing for it—this is not helpful for children as they grow up. It is not helpful for adults as they try to live authentically.

And to say that it is just the thing for older people who are at that point where they are often trying to make sense of their lives is demeaning. They, of all people, should be given occasions to talk about their real lives, filled with real losses and real loves, to someone who knows what those things are.

W
e are positioned to have these conversations. Sometimes I fear they may not happen.

As I was concluding work on this book I attended a large international meeting that had a session called “Disconnect to Connect.” There, psychologists, scientists, technologists, and members of the business community considered our affective lives in the digital age. There was widespread agreement that there is an empathy gap among young people who have grown up emotionally disconnected while constantly connected to phones, games, and social media. And there was much enthusiasm in the room for how technology might help. Now, for people who
show little empathy,
there will be “empathy apps” to teach compassion and consideration
. There will be computer games that will reward collaboration rather than violence.

The idea is that we've gotten ourselves into trouble with technology and technology can help us get out of it. It's that image of the cavalry. Where we once dreamed of robots that would take care of our physical vulnerabilities, now apps will tend to our emotional lapses. If we have become cold toward each other, apps will warm us. If we've forgotten how to listen to each other, apps will teach us to be more attentive. But looking to technology to repair the empathy gap seems an ironic rejoinder to a problem we perhaps didn't need to have in the first place.

I have said that it can be easier to build an app than to have a conversation. When I think of parents who are drawn to their email instead of a dinner conversation with their children, I am not convinced that there is a technological fix for the emotional distance that follows. Yes, we should design technology to take account of our vulnerabilities—those phones that release us rather than try to hold us—but to bridge the empathy gap, I think of things that people can do. I think of parents who experiment with sacred spaces and technology time-outs to reclaim conversation with their children and each other. I think of the college students and CEOs who put their phones away to pay full attention to friends and colleagues. I think of the new enthusiasm for meditation as a way to be present in the moment and discover the world we hold within. When people give themselves the time for self-reflection, they come to a deeper regard for what they can offer others.

The moment is right. We had a love affair with a technology that seemed magical. But like great magic, it worked by commanding our attention and not letting us see anything but what the magician wanted us to see. Now we are ready to reclaim our attention—for solitude, for friendship, for society.

Caring machines challenge our most basic notions of what it means to commit to each other. Empathy apps claim they will tutor us back to being fully human. These proposals can bring us to the end of our
forgetting: Now we have to ask if we become more human when we give our most human jobs away. It is a moment to reconsider that delegation. It is not a moment to reject technology but to find ourselves.

This is our nick of time and our line to toe: to acknowledge the unintended consequences of technologies to which we are vulnerable, to respect the resilience that has always been ours. We have time to make the corrections. And to remember who we are—creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships. Of conversations artless, risky, and face-to-face.

In this book, I study something I think is slipping away: a certain kind of face-to-face talk. Unplanned. Open-ended. The kind that takes time. You study what isn't there by studying what is. So to investigate the conversations that were not happening, I asked people what they were talking about, who they were talking with, and how it was going. To answer this question, a lot of people reached for their laptops and phones to show me their latest exchanges. But then, when I said I also wanted to talk with them, they were gracious. My argument about conversation is based on talking to people, face-to-face, many of whom admitted that this usually wasn't easy for them. My thanks to them is all the more heartfelt.

In this work, I had help over the years from two research colleagues. For interviews of students and young adults, I worked with Emily Carlin. For interviews within the business community, I worked with Erica Keswin. In many places, the scaffolding of my argument grew out of conversations with them, and then even more conversations contributed immeasurably to the interpretation of what we found.

Additionally, Carlin was my research assistant throughout this project; she broadened the scope of materials I read as well as serving as the best kind of dialogue partner. In this collegial group was also Kelly Gray,
whose taste and wonderful ideas have sustained my efforts to understand things and thinking since I began the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self in 2001. Gray was crucial to that effort and to the shaping of every one of the books that have emerged from it. This is the sixth.

I thank Katinka Matson, Susan Pollak, Nancy Rosenblum, Merilyn Salomon,
Natasha Schüll,
Susan Silbey, Daniel Stern, and Susan Stern, who helped in the formulation of this project. I also thank Mel Blake, Rogers Brubaker, Jackson Davidow, Amira Eltony, Emily Grandjean, Alice Kurtz, Herb Lin, Nelly Mensah, Chris Meyer, Stan Rogow, Benjamin Sherman, Elizabeth Thys, Rodanthi Vardouli, and Theodora Vardouli for helpful comments as the writing progressed. Conversations with Richard Giglio and Diane Hessan were an inspiration; Jean Rhodes was a generous friend to this project with practical help and new ideas. A conversation with Paul Reitter was the best kind of academic exchange: I left it with new questions and new ideas! I thank Aziz Ansari for our conversations about romance in the digital age. I thank Louis C.K. for giving me permission to cite his poetry about solitude, empathy, and cell phones. Judith Spitzer and Randyn Miller provided the competent and calming administrative backup that every author dreams of. Additionally, the meticulous Ms. Spitzer was able to track down the peskiest of citations that I had noted on little slips of yellow paper whose location became elusive at critical moments. My editor at Penguin Press, Virginia Smith, responded to a first draft with a letter for which I shall always be grateful, one that offered clear directions for what to do next. The review of the manuscript by Veronica Windholz at Penguin Press was a treasured gift. To Drs. Andrew Chen and Leslie Fang I owe deep gratitude for their tenacious work on my migraines so that I could be equally tenacious about my book.

My daughter, Rebecca, read an early draft with a stern and constructive editorial eye. And then she read a final draft and held me to a higher standard. I marvel that I have raised a loving daughter who is also a fearless editor.

MIT and my home in the STS program have been a wonderful environment in which to work on this project. The students in my STS seminar, Technology and Conversation, were a sounding board as I shaped
this book. I thank the students in that class (and all of my students from 2010 to 2015 who lived with a professor preoccupied with talk!) and hope they recognize how seriously I took their ideas.

As I worked on this project I was faced daily with the irony that for someone writing about a flight from conversation, this book brought me some of the most memorable conversations of my life.

 

Sherry Turkle

Boston, May
2015

THE EMPATHY DIARIES

we often find ourselves bored:
A 2015 Pew Research study reported that younger users of mobile phones “stand out prominently when it comes to using their phones for two purposes in particular: avoiding boredom, and avoiding people around them.” Aaron Smith, “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015,” Pew Research Center for Internet, Science, and Technology, April 1, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015.

a word in the dictionary called “phubbing”:
Macmillan Dictionary
, BuzzWord section, “Phubbing,” http://www.macmillanthedictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/phubbing.html.

we find traces of a new “silent spring”:
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

moment of recognition:
I Forgot My Phone
, a short film directed by Miles Crawford, written by and starring Charlene deGuzman, exemplifies the new recognition. It was posted online in August 2013. It presents the following narrative, a cautionary tale about our flight from conversation:

Imagine a day when a
young woman's daily routine unfolds normally, with one exception: She
forgot her phone. She wakes up in the arms of
her lover who idly strokes her arm as he does
his email. At a birthday party, guests fuss over getting
a picture of the cake. When it's time for a
celebratory toast, the focus is on taking photographs of the
champagne. A lunch with friends is silent—everyone is on a
phone. When she goes bowling and makes a strike, none
of her friends give her a high five; they're all
texting. She can't share a moment of laughter with her
boyfriend when they go out to a comedy club. He
has replaced actual laughter with a post “about laughter” that he shares with his online friends.

Within six months of the film's release, it had almost 40 million online views. To me, its popularity suggests reason for cautious optimism. People recognize themselves in its disturbing scenario and are perhaps ready to rethink their relationship with their phones. See
I Forgot My Phone
, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8.

even a silent phone:
Andrew Przybyliski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,”
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
(2012): 1–10, doi:10.1177/0265407512453 827; Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,”
Environment and Behavior
(2014): 124, doi:10.1177/0013916514539755.

the precautionary principle:
This phrase is on a mural about cancer prevention in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it was how those who contributed to the mural synthesized the precautionary principle. Genevieve Howe, “Cambridge Mural Cries Out Against the Cancer Epidemic,”
Peacework Magazine
(March 1999), http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0399/039904.htm.

to explore the self:
For my early work on children and digital culture, see Sherry Turkle,
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005 [1984]), and
Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

in his cabin:
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1854]), 140.

But after just six minutes:
Timothy D. Wilson, David A. Reinhard, Erin C. Westgate, et al., “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,”
Science
345, no. 6192 (2014): 75–77, doi:10.1126/science.1250830.

their ability to identify the feelings of others:
For example, in one study children who had spent five days without devices were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly more than a control group. The authors write: “The results suggest that digital screen time, even when used for social interaction, could reduce time spent developing skills in reading nonverbal cues of human emotion.” Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, Jordan Morris, et al., “Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotional Cues,”
Computers in Human Behavior
39 (2014): 387–92, doi:0.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036.

somehow more lonely:
For example, a 2006 study showed that the number of Americans who feel they have no one to discuss important matters with tripled from 1985 to 2004. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,”
American Sociological Review
71 (2006): 353–75, doi:10.1177/000312240607100301. Robert Putnam's
Bowling Alone
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001) describes the deterioration of American communal life. A May 2012 article by Steven Marchie in
The Atlantic
that considered social media and social isolation sparked a debate on “the Internet paradox.” More connecting can make us feel more alone. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930.

children are less empathic:
See Sara Konrath, Edward H. O'Brien, and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
15, no. 2 (May 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

this will degrade the performance:
Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, “Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,”
Computers and Education
62 (March 2013): 24–31, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003.

“a national conversation”:
In the Bible, the word
conversation
meant one's relation to a community as a citizen. In the mid-fourteenth century, it still derives from words about “living together, having dealings with others,” and also “manner of conducting oneself in the world.” Dictionary.com, Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, historian, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conversation.

To take the measure of these:
Many hundreds of conversations about conversation make up the primary source material for this book. I begin with the “one-chair” conversations of solitude and self-reflection and then
the “two-chair” conversations of friendship and intimacy (conversations with family, friends, and lovers). I then move out to the “three-chair” worlds of our social connections: the conversations we have about education, work, and politics. Unless otherwise noted, all the interviews I cite were conducted between 2010 and 2015. Unless I quote from the public record or a public meeting, I disguise the identities of the people I interviewed and the institutions (schools, universities, corporations) I visited.

To consider “one- and two-chair” conversations, I talked with over 150 young people from their teens to early thirties, some interviewed in groups, some individually, and some in family settings. I held most of the group conversations in an office or conference room. But some were “cabin chats” with children at summer camp, usually gatherings of ten campers in their bunks before lights-out. Additionally, twenty-seven adults shared their most memorable conversations with me. And I also interviewed sixty-four middle school and high school educators—teachers, counselors, psychologists, and school administrators. In a few places, for a sense of recent history, I look back at the voices of young people I interviewed in 2008–2010. There, I worked with over three hundred interviews that document the not-so-distant days when texting and social media were new.

My chapters on “three-chair conversations” focus on higher education and work. For the education chapter, I interviewed college and university professors, administrators, and students. Here, the number of people I interviewed is hard to add up because I drew on conversations over decades of working in a university.

For my chapter on work, I spoke with a range of professionals including lawyers, doctors, architects, consultants, and members of the financial services community. In a software company I call HeartTech, a design firm I call Stoddard, and a consulting company I call ReadyLearn, I was able to run focus groups as well as have individual interviews with a wide range of employees, from engineers and programmers to financial executives, architects, and administrative assistants. For the chapter on work I spoke with 202 individuals.

When I talk about the conversations of the public square, my emphasis is the emerging political sensibilities of those who grew up with smartphones, and I return primarily to my data on adolescents and young adults.

We have built machines that speak:
I have been studying our conversations with intelligent machines for over three decades. Hundreds of subjects, child and adult, have been involved in this work. For a review of earlier studies, see my
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2011).

THE FLIGHT FROM CONVERSATION

“
My guess—and I think
”:
The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New Digital Age,'”
February 26, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGzB7uveh0.

“
Don't all these little tweets
”:
The Colbert Report
, January 17, 2011.

Studies show that the mere presence of a phone:
Andrew Przybyliski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,”
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
(2012): 1–10, doi:10.1177/0265407512453827.

each feels less connected to the other:
Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,”
Environment and Behavior
(2014): 124, doi:10.1177/0013916514539755. This study takes the theme of “Can You Connect with Me Now?,” a laboratory experiment, and investigates it in a natural setting with similar results.

a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications:
Psychologist Sara Konrath collated evidence from seventy-two studies that suggested that empathy levels among U.S. college students are 40 percent lower than they were twenty years ago. She notes that in the past ten years there has been an especially sharp drop. She and her team speculate that this may be due to the increase in mediated communication—“with so much time spent interacting with others
online
rather than in reality, interpersonal dynamics such as empathy might certainly be altered.” See Sara Konrath, Edward H. O'Brien, and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
15, no. 2 (May 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

when children hear less adult talk:
D. A. Christakis, J. Gilkerson, J. A. Richards, et al., “Audible Television and Decreased Adult Words, Infant Vocalizations, and Conversational Turns: A Population-Based Study,”
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine
163, no. 6 (June 2009): 554–58, doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.61.

In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection:
In this study, not surprisingly, video chat was second and audio chat third in providing feelings of connection. L. E. Sherman, M. Michikyan, and Patricia Greenfield, “The Effects of Text, Audio, Video, and In-Person Communication on Bonding Between Friends,”
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace
7
,
no. 2, article 1 (2013), doi:10.5817/CP2013-2-3.

we become most human to each other:
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that the presence of a face calls forth the human ethical compact. See
Alterity and Transcendence
, Michael B. Smith, trans. (London: Athlone, 1999).

will only know how to be lonely:
This idea is treated in the work of psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott; see especially “The Capacity to Be Alone,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
39, no. 5 (September–October 1958): 416–20.

our culture of continual performance:
Brené Brown's TED presentation on the power of vulnerability is one of the most viewed TED talks. Delivered in June 2010, by February 2015 it had
been watched on the TED site over 20 million times. http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en.

depression and social anxiety:
Mark W. Becker, Reem Alzahabi, and Christopher J. Hopwood, “Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety,”
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
16, no. 2 (November 5, 2012): 132–35, doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0291.

difficulty reading human emotions:
Media psychologist Clifford Nass at Stanford was working on social media and empathy before his death in 2013. See Elizabeth Cohen, reporting on Clifford Nass's resesarch: “Does Life Online Give You ‘Popcorn Brain'?,” CNN, June 23, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/06/23/tech.popcorn.brain.ep/index.html. When multitaskers are shown pictures of faces, they have a hard time identifying what the people in the pictures are feeling. When you read stories to multitaskers, they have difficulty identifying the emotions of the people in the stories and saying what they would do to make the people in the stories feel better. See Clifford Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child's Growth?,”
Pacific Standard
, April 23, 2012, http://www.psmag.com/culture/is-facebook-stunting-your-childs-growth-40577. See also Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,”
PNAS (Early Edition)
106, no. 37 (2009): 1–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106.