Reclaiming Conversation (44 page)

greater self-esteem and an improved ability to deal with others:
Roy Pea, Clifford Nass, Lyn Meheula, et al., “Media Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls,”
Developmental Psychology
48, no. 2 (2012): 327–36, doi:10.1037/a0027030.

the presence of a phone on the landscape:
The study in which even a phone turned off on a table “changes the topic” is Przybyliski and Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now?” As noted, a second study took the theme of “Can You Connect with Me Now?,” a laboratory experiment, and investigated it in a natural setting with similar results. It was in this second study that the phone on the landscape led to lesser feelings of empathic connection between people in the conversation. Misra, Cheng, Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect.”

Are we depriving them of skills:
We know that children from different socioeconomic backgrounds develop different language abilities. Those from less advantaged backgrounds know fewer words and have slower language-processing speeds. They start out behind in their ability to express themselves. If parents from all walks of life don't feel that conversation is important, all children will begin life with a language deficit and a deficit in the interpersonal skills that we learn through language. See Anne Fernald, Virginia A. Marchman, and Adriana Weisleder, “SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at Eighteen Months,”
Developmental Science
16, no. 2 (2013): 234–48.

“continuous partial attention”:
This term was coined by technology expert Linda Stone. See “Continuous Partial Attention,” http://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention.

the most powerful path to human connection:
Mark R. Dadds, Jennifer L. Allen, Bonamy R. Oliver, et al., “Love, Eye Contact, and the Developmental Origins of Empathy Versus Psychopathy,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
200 (2012): 191–96, doi:0.1192/bjp.bp.110.085720.

“gradual completion of thoughts while speaking”:
There are many translations of this essay and this sentiment. See, for example, Heinrich von Kleist,
On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,
David Constantine, ed. and trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 405.

love and politics:
In fact, as an example of how conversation brings us to our best ideas, Kleist uses Mirabeau's declaration of the rights of a nation at the start of the French Revolution. Mirabeau stumbles toward eloquence because he has an interlocutor. You can sense that he thrills his audience and himself.

In the new communications culture:
That there is a cognitive and emotional side to our desire for interruption was pointed out by Nicholas Carr. He said: “We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.” Carr, following Cory Doctorow, called the experience of being at a computer being “plugged into an ecosystem of interruption technologies.” See
The Shallows:
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 133–34, 91.

“Scandal! Caught playing iPhone”:
Alex Kantrowitz, “John McCain Unapologetic After Playing iPhone Poker During Syria Hearing,”
Forbes
, September 3, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkantrowitz/2013/09/03/john-mccain-unapologetic-after-playing-iphone-poker-during-syria-hearing/.

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

the experience of boredom is directly linked to creativity:
Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?,”
Creativity Research Journal
26, no. 2 (2014): 165–73. For an overview on this point, see Scott Adams, “The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do,”
Wall Street Journal
, August 6, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903454504576486412642177904.html.

What our brains want is new input:
For more on the neural reward systems involved in information-seeking behavior: Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?,”
Brain Research Reviews
28 (1998): 306–69. The public conversation of how the brain itself is changed by online life has been shaped by the work of Nicholas Carr in
The Shallows.
The argument is that the more one lives a life online, the more one is incapable of quiet reverie (and by extension, deep reading and full-attention conversation).

emotional life of teenage girls:
Nass studied the online life of young women, aged eight to twelve—a critical time in
the building of identity and a stable sense of self. One result of that work was this coauthored paper: Pea, Nass, Meheula, et al., “Media Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls.”

you are not focusing on your own feelings either:
Simon Baron-Cohen, an empathy researcher, made this point: “Empathy often goes hand-in-hand with self-awareness. The people who are good at empathy are not only good at picking up on other people's feelings, but they—they're also good at reflecting on their own behavior.” See “Does Empathy Explain Cruelty?,”
Science Friday
, September 30, 2011, http://www.sciencefriday.com/guests/simon-baron-cohen.html#page/full-width-list/1. For Baron-Cohen's argument on the decline in empathy as a cause of personal and social cruelty, see
The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
(New York: Basic Books, 2012).

capacities for self-reflection:
Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child's Growth?” For a review of people's tendency to recall negative events more strongly than positive ones: Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Catrin Finkenauer, “Bad Is Stronger than Good,”
Review of General Psychology
5, no. 4 (2001): 323–70, doi:10.1037//1089-2680.5.4.323. The work of Antonio Damasio and colleagues suggests that certain emotions—for example, admiration and compassion—actually take longer to process at a neural level than responses to physical pain. See Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio, et al., “Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion,”
PNAS
10, no. 19 (2009): 8021–26. In environments of mediated communication, this matters because interactions happen too quickly to elicit empathic responses. This study's lead researcher, Immordino-Yang, a former junior-high teacher, summed up this finding in an interview: “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.” A team led by Antonio Damasio also uncovered a link between compassion and the default mode network, the same region that is activated when people are alone with their thoughts. Admiration for virtue as well as compassion for social or psychological pain are processed in the default mode. Both are slower-processed responses, the kind that we are speeding ourselves out of in a life of good news. See Rick Nauert, “Twitter Tweets, Texting May Lack Compassion,” Psych Central, April 14, 2009, http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/04/14/twitter-tweets-texting-may-lack-compassion/5317.html).

“a sentimental education”:
Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child's Growth?”

every six and a half minutes:
This statistic is from a widely reported study of mobile phone usage commissioned by Nokia in 2013. For example, see “Mobile Users Can't Leave Their Phone Alone for Six Minutes and Check It up to 150 Times a Day,”
Mail Online
, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276752/Mobile-users-leave-phone-minutes-check-150-times-day.html.

There are now baby bouncers:
This
is known as the iPad Apptivity Seat, made by Fisher-Price. Here is how it is described on Amazon: “It's a grow-with-me seat for baby that's soothing, entertaining, and has a touch of technology, too.” It should be noted that the seat did draw pushback from the public. http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/action/tell-fisher-price-no-ipad-bouncy-seats-infants.

within five minutes of waking up:
Marketers rely on this fact—these numbers come from a report co-released by Ipsos MediaCT and Wikia (a web hosting and wiki farm site): “Generation Z: The Limitless Generation Study of 1,200 Teen Wikia Users by Wikia and Ipsos MediaCT,” PR NewsWire, March 19, 2013, http://www.wikia.com/Generation_Z:_A_Look_at_the_Technology_and_Media_Habits_of_Today's_Teens.

send one hundred texts a day:
Amanda Lenhardt, “Teens, Smartphones, and Texting,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting.

sleep with their phones:
Amanda Lenhardt, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, et al., “Teens and Mobile Phones,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, April 20, 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/04/20/teens-and-mobile-phones.

do not “unplug,” ever:
“Generation Z: The Limitless Generation Study of 1200 Teen Wikia Users by Wikia and Ipsos MediaCT,” PR NewsWire.

six or seven simultaneous streams:
This finding is from research conducted by the LEGO company. It was brought to my attention by Sasha Strauss's presentation at the Milken Institute's conference in May 2014. “Capturing the ‘Cool Factor' in Consumer Tech,”
Currency of Ideas
, May 2014, http://currency-of-ideas.tumblr.com/post/84355392003/capturing-the-cool-factor-in-consumer-tech.

likely to be using four at a time:
The top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four media at one time whenever they are using media. Clifford Nass, “The Myth of Multitasking,” narrated by Ira Flatow,
Talk of the Nation
, National Public Radio, May 10, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking.

degrades our performance:
Ophir, Nass, and Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” New research suggests that a small percentage of the population—1 to 2 percent—are able to multitask. For the other 98 to 99 percent of the world, every new task degrades performance, and there is a further irony: The more you multitask, the worse you get at multitasking. Maria Konnikova, “Multitask Masters,”
The New Yorker
, May 7, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05/multitask-masters.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20(173).

it makes us less productive:
Zheng Wang and John M. Tchernev, “The ‘Myth' of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications,”
Journal of Communication
62 (2012): 493–513, doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01641.x.

depression, social anxiety:
Becker, Alzahabi, and Hopwood, “Media Multitasking Is Associated with
Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety.”

problems with self-esteem:
Pea, Nass, Meheula, et al. “Media Use: Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old-Girls.”

“the seeking drive”:
Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp coined this term. Jaak Panskepp,
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151. For a generalist's concerned view about the neuroscience of technology use, see Emily Yoffe, “Seeking How the Brain Hardwires Us to Love Google, Twitter, and Texting. And Why That's Dangerous,”
Slate
, August 12, 2009, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/08/seeking.html.

design for vulnerability
:
I owe this evocative phrase to a conversation with Emily Carlin.

“a deliberate action”:
Giles M. Phillips, “Are Mobile Users More Vigilant?,”
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Web Science
(2014): 289–90, doi:10.1145/2615569.2615642.

health and emotional well-being:
There are signs that within the technology industry, a new generation of designers is converging on this theme. See, for example, Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook's “like” button, and Tristan Harris, currently working at Google, arguing for design that does not seize and capture our attention but helps us live our fullest lives. This is design that would measure the success of an app, as Harris puts it, not by time spent but by “time well spent.” See Rosenstein in May 2014, http://techcrunch.com/video/do-great-things-keynote-by-justin-rosenstein-of-asana/518220046/ and Harris in December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5r Rh9AZf4. Harris hopes that “time well spent” could become a new branding standard, much as the label “organic” is something that consumers look for. Personal communication with author, April 6, 2015.

words that mean:
Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford University Press, 2015, http://www.oed.com). http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40748?rskey=URvqon&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.

may not even know:
For a review of how universities are trying to put conversation on the curriculum, see “The University: The Social Emotional Well-Being of College Students,” Aspen Ideas Festival, July 1, 2014, http://www.aspenideas.org/session/social-emotional-well-being-college-students.