Reclaiming Conversation (47 page)

“spark conversations along the way”:
Margaret E. Morris, personal communication to the author, July 3, 2014.

the chemicals associated with happiness:
Tara L. Kraft and Sarah D. Pressman, “Grin and Bear It: The Influence of Manipulated Facial Expression on the Stress Response,”
Psychological Science
23, no. 11 (2012): 1372–78, doi:10.1177/0956797612445312.

to say what comes to mind without self-censorship:
Avoiding self-censorship at the end of the Victorian age was one of the reasons that, originally, the psychoanalytic conversation avoided the face-to-face. The idea was that if the analyst sat behind the analysand, he or she would feel more comfortable saying whatever came to mind, and the analyst, too, would be free to let his or her mind move beyond the literal. In a session, the analyst follows the patient's train of associations with a free-floating attention of her own. The idea is to help both analysand and analyst engage the unconscious.

“solitude for two”:
Adam Phillips,
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

FAMILY

development depends on the environment:
Recall the study that shows 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. 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.

“
harder to learn later on
”:
Personal communication, email to author, July 2, 2014.

paid more attention to their phones:
Sixteen of the fifty-five adults in the study did not use a phone and four shared something on their phone with a child. Jennifer Radesky, Caroline J. Kistin, Barry Zuckerman, et al., “Patterns of Mobile Device Use by Caregivers and Children During Meals in Fast Food
Restaurants,”
Pediatrics
133, no. 4, doi:10.1542/peds.2013-370. Some fast-food restaurants are building tablets with touch screens into dining room tables. The idea is that customers will be able to order from these screens and then children can use them to play games. With this innovation, restaurants could become places of near silence. Patrons won't have to speak to a server to get food, and, as this study shows, already caregivers and children don't do much talking.

Infants deprived of eye contact:
Edward Tronick, Heidelise Als, Lauren Adamson, et al., “The Infant's Response to Entrapment Between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction,”
Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry
17, no. 1 (1978): 1–113, doi:10.1016/S0002-7138(09)62273-1. See also Lauren B. Adamson and Janet E. Frick, “The Still Face: A History of a Shared Experimental Paradigm,”
Infancy
4, no. 4 (October 1, 2003): 451–73, doi:10.1207/S15327078IN0404_01.

all of the attendant damage:
James Swain, Sara Konrath, Carolyn J. Dayton, et al., “Toward a Neuroscience of Interactive Parent-Infant Dyad Empathy,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
36, no. 4 (2013): 438–39, doi:10.1017/S0140525X12000660.

“We become, neurologically, what we think”:
Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 33.

read to children and with them:
For Maryanne Wolf's treatment of reading and the plasticity of the brain, see
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: Harper, 2007). Nicholas Carr was inspired by Wolf's research in his treatment of the more general notion of “your mind on Google.” For coverage of Wolf's more recent work in progress, see Michael S. Rosenwald, “Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Skimming, Researchers Say,”
Washington Post
, April 6, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html.

talking back to the television:
When computers are used in this “family hearth” spirit, they, too, can bring families together. The popularity of the Wii—the video game console that turned a TV screen into a virtual tennis court or bowling alley or golf course—was in part due to families' and friends' being able to play it together. This is a very different way of using a screen from Leslie's description of a “chain reaction,” where each person slips away to his own life on his own phone.

“I shall be fed”:
Erik Erikson,
Childhood and Society
(New York: W. W.Norton, 1950).

a device-free summer camp:
My visit took place in the summer of 2013. All of the adolescents I spoke with at camp were fourteen and fifteen. I interviewed them in six groups of around ten each. Of course, these “bunk chat” interviews took place in a special setting, a place where campers check in their phones at the beginning of a month-long session. So these campers were self-selected as teens willing to do without their phones for at least that long.

wait for the responses to come in:
“Louis C.K. Hates Cell Phones,” YouTube video,
Conan O'Brien
, posted by Team CoCo, September 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c.

new conversations about the self:
See, for example, Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together
(New York: Basic Books, 2011). And John Hamilton, “The World Wide Web,” Kim Leary, “Cyberplaces,” and Marsha Levy-Warren, “Computer Games,” in
The
Inner History of Devices
, Sherry Turkle, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).

Communities of practice form:
Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner,
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Instead of talking:
Here, in the family, an issue comes up that mirrors questions of privacy on a larger scale, something to which I'll return. See “The Public Square.”

FRIENDSHIP

eyes on your phone:
Macmillan Dictionary
, BuzzWord section, “Phubbing,” http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/phubbing.html.

including face-to-face communication:
By 2012, a Pew Research Center report found that “63 percent of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of daily communication, including phone calling by cell phone (39 percent do that with others every day), face-to-face socializing outside of school (35 percent), social network site messaging (29 percent), instant messaging (22 percent), talking on landlines (19 percent) and emailing (6 percent).” Amanda Lenhart, “Teens, Smartphones & Texting,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting. By 2015, 88 percent of teens had access to cell phones or smartphones and 90 percent of those teens texted daily. Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015,” Pew Research Center's Internet, Science, and Technology Project, April 9, 2015, http://pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015.

self-destructing text messages:
In this case, the receiver can choose to save a message, but the sender will be notified if they do.

Fear of Missing Out:
Studies have shown that when users passively follow the photos and postings of other people, as opposed to actively writing their own posts and uploading their own photos, they tend to experience more envy and feelings of loneliness. For example, see Edson C. Tandoc, Patrick Ferrucci, and Margaret Duffy, “Facebook Use, Envy, and Depression Among College Students: Is Facebooking Depressing?”
Computers in Human Behavior
43 (2015): 139–46, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.053. For a general overview of research on Facebook and unhappiness, see Maria Konnikova, “Why Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,”
The New Yorker
, September 10, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.

Riesman's “other-direction”:
David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd, Revised Edition: A Study of the Changing
American Character
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001 [1950]).

shaped by their phones:
In 2012, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly one in four American teens had a smartphone (as opposed to a cell phone)—by 2013, this had risen to half of all American teens. In 2015, Pew found that 88 percent of American teens have access to a cell phone of some kind, with 73 percent having smartphones. For 2012 numbers, see Amanda Lenhart, “Cell Phone Ownership,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, March 19, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/cell-phone-ownership. For 2013 numbers, see Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan, et al., “Teens and Technology 2014,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, March 13, 2013. For 2015 numbers, see Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media, and Technology Overview 2015.”

Susan Sontag wrote:
Sontag writes that her own formulation is an update of Mallarmé's nineteenth-century assertion that “Today, everything exists to end in a book.” Susan Sontag,
On Photography
(New York: Picador, 2001 [1973]).

everything from glasses:
Google Glass is one example of wearable technology that will display messages directly in a wearer's visual field. For more information on one of the tap bracelets, see http://www.usemagnet.com.

we keep conversations light:
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. See also Shalinni 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: 10.1177/00139165 1453975.

can still sting:
A recent study shows that people's perceptions of their relationships are not adversely affected by mobile phone use as long as both people are on the same page about the norms governing that use. It doesn't matter if people think that larger societal rules about mobile phones are being followed. What matters is if they share an understanding about the rules they will follow together. Jeffrey Hall, Nancy Baym, and Kate Miltner, “Put Down That Phone and Talk to Me: Understanding the Roles of Mobile Phone Norm Adherence and Similarity in Relationships,”
Mobile Media & Communication
2, no. 2 (May 1, 2014): 134–53, doi:10.1177/2050157913517684. But the study leaves a question unanswered. Even if you give a friend “permission” to use a phone and drop out of an ongoing conversation, even if you say that it doesn't upset you, your relationship may be changing in ways that a self-report survey cannot capture. For example, “Can You Connect with Me Now?” and “The iPhone Effect” report on studies that show that the mere presence of a phone on a social landscape affects what people talk about. These studies suggest that you may not feel angry with a friend for interrupting a conversation to make a call, but that doesn't mean
the nature of your conversation hasn't changed.

“if they don't get satisfaction”:
This way of thinking about friendship treats it as an “app.” This sensibility is discussed by Howard Gardner, a professor of developmental psychology and education at Harvard, and Katie Davis, a professor at the University of Washington Information School, in
The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Gardner and Davis distinguish between “app-dependent” and “app-enabled.” We are app-dependent when our sense of what is possible is constrained by an app and when we approach only problems for which there is an app solution. We are app-enabled when we use apps as time-savers so we can focus on what is important to us, or as starting points for new directions. Gardner and Davis are concerned that young people may be tending more toward app dependence.

spike in self-confidence:
Keith Wilcox and Andrew T. Stephen, “Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control,”
Journal of Consumer Research
40 (November 27, 2012), doi:10.1086/668794.

insecure in their attachments:
Sara H. Konrath, William J. Chopik, Courtney K. Hsing, et al., “Changes in Adult Attachment Styles in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,”
Personal Social Psychology Review
(2014): 1–23, doi:10.1177/1088868314530516.

an ever more sophisticated archive:
There have been extensive experiments in technologies for life capture. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Steve Mann of the MIT Media Lab wore wearable devices to record the experience of everyday life. Mann's intent was both to make a statement about surveillance—by doing surveillance on his own environment—and to experiment with computation and remembrance. On his experience, see Steve Mann, with Hal Niedzviecki,
Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
(New York: Random House, 2001). Thad Starner, also of the cyborg group at the Media Lab, worked on the Remembrance Agent, a tool that would sit on your computer desktop (or now your mobile device) and not only record what you were doing but also make suggestions about what you might be interested in looking at next. See Bradley J. Rhodes and Thad Starner, “Remembrance Agent: A Continuously Running Personal Information Retrieval System,”
Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM '96)
, 487–95, www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/remembrance.html). These ideas were taken up by Gordon Bell, who, along with Jim Gemmell, developed a system, MyLifeBits, whose aspiration was—by providing the user with a wearable camera and microphones—to record a life as it unfolded. See Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “A Digital Life,”
Scientific American
296, no. 3 (March 2007): 58–65, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-digital-life. Bell and Gemmell published a book-length discussion of this project,
Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
(New York: Dutton, 2009). Google Glass is a more recent incarnation of this long-standing technological dream.