Reclaiming Conversation (48 page)

take on the visual perspective of others:
Google has canceled the Glass project for now, but while it distributed the product to its beta testers, known as Glass “explorers,” I heard many variations on the idea that Glass would serve as an empathy prosthetic or empathy supplement or empathy trainer. One Glass explorer, a man of twenty-six, talks about providing Glass to those who have done acts of violence against minorities so that they could see the racial violence from the point of view of the victims. He knows that there are programs, such as Facing History and Ourselves, that get people talking about violence, genocide, victims, and perpetrators and about putting yourself in the place of the other. But he thinks that technology will be more effective than “that kind of thing.” Why? “Seeing is more powerful than listening. People get bored with words nowadays. They want to see things. They don't want a long story.” As he sees it, in place of the long talks of the past that we relied on to develop empathy and a moral code, we will take this shortcut: an empathy machine. Is a first-person view of violence what our racially and economically divided society is missing? Or is it simply what we can give ourselves with technology? I am moved by the hopefulness of Glass explorers: Their technology is wondrous and they want it to be useful for serious human problems. But having a technology does not mean that it is useful for every human job. For some human jobs, we may have the appropriate technology already: people in conversation.

turn it into a way of life:
Enthusiasm among Glass users is high for using this technology to support those on the autism spectrum, certainly as a support for those with Asperger's. With Glass, one can replay interactions and conversations again and again that were not fully understood the first time.

it needs eye contact:
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.

what a moment of eye contact accomplishes:
Daniel Siegel, cited in Mark Matousek, “The Meeting Eyes of Love: How Empathy Is Born in Us,” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethical-wisdom/201104/the-meeting-eyes-love-how-empathy-is-born-in-us.

“to read the other person's brain”:
At Sushi Senji cited in Kate Murphy, “Psst. Look Over Here,”
New York Times
, May 16, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/sunday-review/the-eyes-have-it.html.

a 40 percent drop in empathy:
This is drawn from the paper in which psychologist Sara Konrath collated evidence from seventy-two studies that suggests 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. 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 1, 2011): 180–98, doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

the resourcefulness of the young:
The most persuasive formulation of this argument comes in Internet scholar danah boyd's book on social networks and teens. danah boyd,
It's Complicated
:
The Social Lives of Networked Teens
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

Since Socrates lamented the movement:
Plato,
Phadedrus
, Christopher Rowe, trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005).

In a series of 2014 lectures:
Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Empathy,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge, MA, April 8–10, 2014.

“from a relationship to a feeling”:
William Deresiewicz, “Faux Friendship,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, December 6, 2009, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308.

They accomplish “what everyone likes”:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008 [1990]), 186.

“My friend is one”:
Henry David Thoreau,
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau,
Bradford Torrey, ed., Journal IV, May 1, 1852–February 27, 1853 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906), 397.

“any increase in complexity entails”:
Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow,
189.

ROMANCE

where you trust and share your life:
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.

“paradox of choice”:
Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward, “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice,”
Positive Psychology in Practice
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2004). My discussion follows Schwartz's analysis of choice and its stresses. I found the dynamic he describes reflected in interviews where the conversation was about dating.

leads to depression and feelings of loneliness:
cited in ibid., 108–110.

something they have committed to:
Increasingly, people live in smaller familial and communal circles. As noted, one study comparing data from 1985 and 2004 found that the mean number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters of importance to them dropped by nearly one third. The number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled. The survey found that both family and nonfamily confidants dropped, with the loss greatest in nonfamily connections. See 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, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 353–75, doi: 10.1177/000312240607100301.

more satisfied with how the chocolates tasted:
Sheena Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?”
Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology
79, no. 6 (December 2000): 995–1006, doi:10.1037//0022-3514.79.6.995.

to make space for them:
Sociologist Jeremy Birnholtz suggests that in their online practices, people sometimes rely on so-called butler lies—a strategy for availability management—to get around the downside of constant communication. For example, if a woman doesn't want to text with a particular suitor, she might respond to a text by saying, “Can't talk now. I'm at the movies.” See, for example, Lindsay Reynolds, Madeline E. Smith, Jeremy P. Birnholtz, et al., “Butler Lies from Both Sides: Actions and Perceptions of Unavailability Management in Texting,” in
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(2013): 769–78, doi:10.1145/2441776.2441862.

distracted by their mobile phones:
Forty-two percent of cell-owning eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in serious relationships say their partners have been distracted by their mobile phones while they were together (25 percent of all couples say this). Amanda Lenhart and Maeve Duggan, “Couples, the Internet, and Social Media,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, February 11, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/11/couples-the-internet-and-social-media/. A 2015 British study had one quarter of cell phone users taking calls during sex. http://www.yourtango.com/201165808/shocking-stat-25-percent-people-answer-phone-during-sex. In America, a 2013 Harris poll had 20 percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds answering the phone during sex. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cell-phone-use-during-sex-believe-it/.

“they'd agreed to type, not talk”:
Tao Lin,
Taipei
(New York: Vintage Contemporaries Original, 2013), 241.

“fight tracking” apps:
Examples include “Marriage Fight Tracker” for the iPhone.

can be a place for personal growth:
These are the themes of my earlier work on identity and the Internet, where for over a decade I studied people who created online avatars. Sherry Turkle,
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

He tried to live it out:
On the issue of dependencies facilitated by digital media—and how this affects relationships—see Jeffrey K. Hall and Nancy K. Baym, “Calling and Texting (Too Much): Mobile Maintenance Expectations, (Over)dependence, Entrapment, and Friendship Satisfaction,”
New Media & Society
14, no. 2 (March 1, 2012): 316–31, doi:10.1177/1461444811415047.

EDUCATION

“
From what I hear
”:
Anant Agarwal, cited in Jeffrey R. Young, “The New Rock-Star Professor,”
Slate
, November 6, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/ 2013/11/udacity_coursera_should_celebrities_teach_moocs.html.

we add to the mix:
And if we don't do a worse job, it takes us longer. Carrie B. Fried, “Laptop Use and Its Effects on Student Learning,”
Computers and Education
50 (2008): 906–14, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.09.006.

how to organize their time:
Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony
D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(2009), doi:10.1073/pnas.0903620106.

said that they text:
Deborah R. Tindell and Robert W. Bohlander, “The Use and Abuse of Cell Phones and Text Messaging in the Classroom: A Survey of College Students,”
College Teaching
60, no. 1 (January 2012): 1–9, doi:10.1080/87567555.2011.604802.

when students are in class multitasking:
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 series of ads:
“AT&T Commercial—It's Not Complicated, ‘Dizzy,'” YouTube video, posted by CommercialCow, February 4, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaSl_VgqbE.

the novelist Zadie Smith:
See the acknowledgments in Zadie Smith,
NW: A Novel
(New York: Penguin Press, 2013).

to be unhelpfully nostalgic:
Katherine N. Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention,”
Profession
(2007): 187–99.

“change that environment to fit the students”:
ibid., 195.

“
on the material being presented
”:
ibid., 196.

“we've got to work on that”:
The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New Digital Age,'” YouTube video, February 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGzB7uveh0.

how technology will “reshape” people:
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen,
The New Digital Age: How Technology Is Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business
(New York: Knopf, 2013).

are being produced at six minutes:
Philip J. Guo, Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin, “How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos,”
Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale Conference
(2014), doi:10.1145/2556325.2566239. See also Philip J. Guo, “Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement,” edX (blog), November 13, 2013, https://www.edx.org/blog/optimal-video-length-student-engagement#.U71MsxZFFBW.

what she calls “deep reading”:
Michael S. Rosenwald, “Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Scanning and 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.

depending on how attention is allocated:
Wolf has a developmental argument for how capacity can be lost: “The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. When it comes to building this reading circuit in a brain that has no preprogrammed set-up for it, there is no genetic guarantee that any individual novice reader will ever form the expert reading brain circuitry that most of us form. The
reading circuit's very plasticity is also its Achilles' heel. It can be fully fashioned over time and fully implemented when we read, or it can be short-circuited—either early on in its formation period or later, after its formation, in the execution of only part of its potentially available cognitive resources. Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read—and what we absorb from our reading—will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.” Maryanne Wolf, “Our ‘Deep Reading' Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions,”
Nieman Reports
, Summer 2010, http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102396/Our-Deep-Reading-Brain-Its-Digital-Evolution-Poses-Questions.aspx. And Wolf's argument for plasticity gives her a specific anxiety: “My major worry is that, confronted with a digital glut of immediate information that requires and receives less and less intellectual effort, many new (and many older) readers will have neither the time nor the motivation to think through the possible layers of meaning in what they read. The omnipresence of multiple distractions for attention—and the brain's own natural attraction to novelty—contribute to a mind-set toward reading that seeks to reduce information to its lowest conceptual denominator. Sound bites, text bites, and mind bites are a reflection of a culture that has forgotten or become too distracted by and too drawn to the next piece of new information to allow itself time to think.” See Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai, “The Importance of Deep Reading,”
Educational Leadership
66, no. 6 (March 2009): 32–37, http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/The-Importance-of-Deep-Reading.aspx.