Reclaiming Conversation (46 page)

“solitude is everything”:
As quoted in Sy Safransky, ed.,
Sunbeams: A Book of Quo
tations (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1990), 42.

“wants to move out of it”:
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1984 [1929]), 54.

facilitates healthy development:
Reed Larson, “The Emergence of Solitude as a Constructive Domain of Experience in Early Adolescence,”
Child Development
68, no. 1 (1997): 80–93.

finding some for ourselves:
Here I see some reason for optimism. The growing interest in meditation and practices of “mindfulness”—as a personal practice and, increasingly, something introduced in business settings—is itself an expression of people and organizations wanting to develop the capacity for solitude. On the enthusiasm for mindfulness in business, see David Gelles,
Mindful Work
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2015), and David Hochman, “Mindfulness—Getting Its Share of Attention,”
New York
Times
, November 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/fashion/mindfulness-and-meditation-are-capturing-attention.html?pagewanted=all.

We have testimony about solitude:
See http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit.

“freedom from interruption”:
Cain continues: “Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was acceptably private compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.” Cain,
Quiet
, 84.

infer emotional states:
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,”
Science
342, no. 6156 (October 18, 2013): 377–80, doi:10.1126/science.1239918. P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp, “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation,”
PLOS ONE,
January 30, 2013, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055341.

“see things through”:
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has researched and popularized the idea of “true grit” as a predictor for success. Angela Lee Duckworth and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, “True Grit,”
Association for Psychological Science Observer
26, no. 4 (2013), http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/april-13/true-grit.html.

signal developmental achievement:
Winnicott is known for his focus on the child's “capacity to be alone.” See Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” 29–37. For an eloquent elaboration of Winnicott's perspective on boredom, see Adam Phillips,
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 69.

“
being
that machine”:
Natasha Dow Schüll,
Addiction by Design
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 173.

the “Facebook zone”:
Alexis Madrigal, “The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Can't Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook,”
The Atlantic,
July 31, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-machine-zone
-this-is-where-you-go-when-you-just-cant-stop-looking-at-pictures-on-facebook/278185.

sense of self:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper, 2008 [1990]).

“what we want you to be doing”:
The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New DigitalAge,'” YouTube video, February 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGzB7uveh0.

“
presents itself to the mind
”:
Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,”
The Monist
20 no. 3 (1910): 321–35.

fast and routine work:
David Levy, a computer scientist and philosopher at the Information School at the University of Washington, has tried to systematize Poincaré's intuition. He has researched the link between slow and deliberate effort and creativity's “lightbulb moments,” drawing on accounts of scientists, artists, and philosophers.

Levy points out that philosophers have long made the distinction between fast, routine thought and slow, deeper efforts. And Levy traces the fast/slow distinction from the medieval scholastics who distinguished between
ratio
(discursive thought) and
intellectus
(simply looking) to Vannevar Bush's distinction of logical processes (those that happen “along an accepted groove”) and mature and creative processes. See David Levy, “No Time to Think: Reflections on Information Technology and Contemplative Scholarship,”
Ethics and Information Technology
9, no. 4 (2007): 237–49, doi:10.1007/s10676-007-9142-6.

“thing in its environment”:
Jonathan Schooler, cited in Josie Glausiusz, “Devoted to Distraction,”
Psychology Today
, March 1, 2009, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200903/devoted-distraction.

a threat in the wild:
Maggie Jackson's
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
(New York: Prometheus Books, 2008) touches on the psychological and social underpinnings of our distracted lives—see in particular pp. 45–127. See also 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.

come up with new solutions:
Jonathan Schooler, cited in Glausiusz, “Devoted to Distraction.”

to find their identity:
Erikson,
Identity and the Life Cycle
and
Childhood and Society.

“a cloud of electronic and social input”:
William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and Leadership: If You Want Others to Follow, Learn to Be Alone with Your Thoughts,”
American Scholar
, March 1, 2010, http://Theamericanscholar.Org/Solitude-And-Leadership/#.Vdf1b-Erhx4.

SELF-REFLECTION

those who have mattered most to us:
See, for example, how the philosopher Charles Taylor captures the notion of what psychoanalysis would call internalized objects: “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents,
for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” Charles Taylor,
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 [1992]), 37.

quantified or algorithmic self:
This phrase was first used by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who is working on an ethnography of self-tracking.
Keeping Track: Personal Informatics, Self-Regulation, and the Data-Driven Life
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming 2016).

experiment with identity:
Sherry Turkle,
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). See also Amy Bruckman, “Identity Workshops: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality,” unpublished essay (Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/people/asb/papers/identity-workshop.ps.

Privacy . . . At what cost?:
Just the perception of being observed can lead to feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. So it is not surprising that the more people give up their privacy, the less happy they feel. Kate Murphy, “We Want Privacy but Can't Stop Sharing,”
New York Times
, October 4, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/sunday-review/we-want-privacy-but-cant-stop-sharing.html. Social penetration theory sketches out the reciprocal patterns of disclosure that in the face-to-face world protect privacy and lead to intimacy. These patterns are disrupted online. New mores take over. See Irwin Altman and Dalmas Arnold Taylor,
Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships
(New York: Holt, 1973). But even with diminished privacy, people stay on social media, afraid of being out of the game. And once we are on social media, our natural inclinations about the pace of self-disclosure become confused. People worry that they share “too much” online, but they do it because these are the new norms. There are starting to be some changes in how Americans behave online in the post-Snowden years, with some people showing greater reticence. See Lee Rainie and Mary Madden, “Americans' Privacy Strategies Post-Snowden,” Pew Research Center for Internet, Technology, and Society, March 16, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/03/16/americans-privacy-strategies-post-snowden.

“watch the football?”:
Jamie Bartlett, “Brand You: Why Facebook and Twitter Are Deliberately Turning Us into Narcissists,”
The Telegraph,
December 27, 2013, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100011912/why-facebook-google-and-twitter-are-deliberately-turning-us-into-narcissists. Facebook was not alone here. Google and Twitter offer similar compilations—also with background music.

“nice musical transition in between”:
Reactions to the “year in review” feature were in the news at the close of 2014. The six-year-old daughter of web design consultant and author Eric Meyer died in June. When he received his Facebook collage, he was upset. His daughter was featured prominently, surrounded by jolly balloons and dancing cartoons. Meyer wrote on his blog: “This inadvertent
algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house. But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.”

Meyer suggested simple fixes. Facebook could hold off on making a picture until it was sure a user wanted it. And don't “push” the app on people. “Maybe ask them if they'd like to try a preview—just a simple yes or no. . . . It may not be possible to reliably pre-detect whether a person wants to see their year in review, but it's not at all hard to ask politely—empathetically—if it's something they want.” Facebook apologized. Meyer ends his blog with a call for the industry to think more about the people they touch. That argument, writ large, touches on the larger themes of this book. Meyer says, “If I could fix one thing about our industry, just one thing, it would be that: to increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios.” http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty.

The Facebook algorithm:
Facebook did its curation project as a special ten-year anniversary project. Other apps are dedicated to this kind of curation as their sole purpose. One, Timehop, sends users a snapshot of what they were doing a year ago. It describes itself as “A time capsule of you.” It puts this information in the context of the “I share, therefore I am” sensibility, assuming that you will “Celebrate the best moments of the past with your friends!” See www.timehop.com for details.

or degree of focus:
Of course, some people are more committed to the idea of a quantified self than others. As in any movement, there are different levels of participation. Some simply track their exercise program on a mobile app and find it useful for staying with a weight loss program. Some bring the data from their devices to meetings for help with its analysis; some work to develop more perfect tracking devices and ways of elaborating what this all means for thinking about the self.

wanted to understand the algorithm:
Technology critic Evgeny Morozov describes the opacity problem in this model of self: If you don't understand the algorithm that produced your output, “it doesn't necessarily translate into any holistic understanding of the self who is behaving.” Evgeny Morozov, interviewed by Natasha Dow Schüll, Public Books, 2013, http://www.publicbooks.org/interviews/the-folly-of-technological-solutionism-an-interview-with-evgeny-morozov. See also Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Numerical Madness,”
Harper's
, September 2013, http://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/numer ical-madness.

which words had “triggered”:
750words.com uses the text-analysis system Regressive Imagery Dictionary to report on a user's emotional state. See http://www.kovcomp.co.uk/wordstat/RID.html.

tempted to stop there:
Evgeny Morozov,
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
(New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

“just an element in a narrative process?”:
Natasha Dow Schüll, interviewing Morozov for Public Books
.

psychologist at the Intel Corporation:
Examples of the research of Morris and her team include Margaret Morris, Quasi Kathawala, Todd K. Leen, et al., “Mobile Therapy and Mood Sampling: Case Study Evaluations of a Cell Phone Application for Emotional Self-Awareness,”
Journal of Medical Internet Research
12, no. 2 (2010), doi:10.2196/jmir.1371, and Margie Morris and Farzin Guilak, “Mobile Heart Health: Project Highlight,”
IEEE Pervasive Computing
8, no. 2 (2009), doi:10.1109/MPRV.2009.31.