Reclaiming Conversation (5 page)

The “empathy gap” starts with young children and continues throughout life. A graduate student in economics comments on what is missing when her friends apologize by text. She calls it an “artificial truce.”

The texted “I'm sorry” means, on the one hand, “I no longer want to have tension with you; let's be okay,” and at the same time says, “I'm not going to be next to you while you go through your feelings; just let me know when our troubles are over.” When I have a fight with my boyfriend and the fight ends with an “I'm sorry” text, it is 100 percent certain that the specific fight will come back again. It hasn't been resolved.

The “I'm sorry” text is a missed opportunity. These opportunities can be seized. Parents can insist that their children's apologies be done in person. One mother explains that her always-connected son, now thirteen, had a habit of canceling family plans by sending an email or text to announce his intentions. She has changed the rules. Now, if he wants to cancel a plan—say, dinner with his grandparents—he has to make a phone call to break the date.

That real-time telephone call teaches that his proposed actions will affect others. His mother says, “He can hear how my mother made the roast chicken and it's already in the oven. He can hear that his grandfather has already bought the syrup to make ice cream sundaes.” In sum, he can hear that he is expected and that his presence will be missed. She adds that since the new rules have gone into effect, there has rarely been a cancellation.

In-person apologies are no less potent in business settings. Managers tell me that a big part of their job has become teaching employees how to apologize face-to-face. One CEO says he cries out in frustration, even to longtime employees, “Apologize to him. Face-to-face. You were wrong. Say you are sorry.” Another tells me that in business, not being able to
say you're sorry face-to-face is “like driving a car but not knowing how to go in reverse.” Essentially, it means you can't drive. In his view, he is working with a lot of people who need driving lessons.

W
hen we move from conversation to connection, we shortchange ourselves. My concern is that over time we stop caring—or perhaps worse, we forget there is a difference. Gretchen is a college sophomore who doesn't see a difference. She sits in my office and tells me she is having a hard time concentrating on her coursework. It's roommate trouble. She's been flirting with a roommate's ex-boyfriend. She started out meaning no harm, but things escalated. Now the ex-boyfriend is using her as a weapon against her roommate. When we speak, Gretchen is distracted. Her grades are a disaster. I ask her if she wants to talk to someone in the counseling center. She says no, she needs to make things right with her roommate. What her roommate needs to hear, says Gretchen, is her apology and “the honest truth.” Gretchen adds, “That is what will restore my concentration.”

I ask Gretchen if she is comfortable going home now; it's close to dinnertime and her roommate is probably at the dorm, no more than a ten-minute walk from my office. Gretchen looks confused as though my question has no meaning. “I'm going to talk to her on Gchat,” she says. “I would never do this face-to-face. It's too emotional.”

I was taken aback when Stephen Colbert—as his “character,” a right-wing blowhard political talk show host—asked me a profound question during an appearance on his show: “Don't all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?” My answer was no. Many sips of connection don't add up to a gulp of conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying “I love
you.” But connecting in sips doesn't work so well for an apology. It doesn't work so well when we are called upon to see things from another's point of view. In these cases, we have to listen. We have to respond in real time. In these exchanges we show our temperament and character. We build trust.

Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of our online connections, we want immediate answers. In order to get them, we ask simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to a life of constant interruption.

O
n a balmy evening in June, I interview a group of twenty-five young people, from eighteen to twenty-four, who are in Boston for a summer study program. During our two hours together they tell me that if I really want to know how they communicate, I should be in their group chat. They are having it on an application for their mobile phones called WhatsApp. They invite me into their group, I accept, and our meeting continues. Now we are together in the room and online. Everything changes. Everyone is always “elsewhere” or just getting on their way. With everyone on the app, people switch rapidly between the talk in the room and the chat on their phones. At least half of the phone chat takes the form of images—cartoons, photos, and videos—many of which comment on the conversation in the room. As the students see it, images connect them, equal to any text or any talk.

In the room, the topic turns to how hard it is to separate from family and high school friends during college. But it is hard for this discussion to go very far because it is competing with the parallel activity of online chat and image curation.

Yet I see how happy these students are. They like moving in and out
of talk, text, and images; they like the continual feed. And they like always having someplace
else
to go. They say that their greatest fear is boredom. If for a moment students don't find enough stimulation in the room, they go to the chat. If they don't find the images compelling, they look for new ones. But sharing an image you find on the web is a particular kind of participation. You don't turn to your own experience, but pull instead from external sources. You express yourself but can maintain a certain distance.

As all of this is going on, I remember saying to my daughter when she was three, “Use your words.” At first I wonder at my association. I appreciate the pertinence (and the wit!) of the students' shared images, but to me, going to the images is also a way for these young people to slip away from our group conversation just as it becomes challenging. When things get complicated, it's easier to send a picture than to struggle with a hard idea. And another child-raising truism comes to mind, this one in my grandmother's voice: “Look at me when you speak to me.” We teach children the outward manifestations of full attention because we hope that by working backward from behavior we can get them to a more profound feeling state. This is the feeling state of attachment and empathic connection. We don't ask children to use their words or to look at us to make them obedient. We want words to be associated with feelings. Eye contact is
the most powerful path to human connection
.

The students who invited me onto WhatsApp said I could understand them best if I shared their app. But once we shared WhatsApp, their faces were mostly turned down, eyes on their phones.

On this June evening, in the mash-up of talk, texts, and images, the students keep returning to the idea that digital conversations are valuable because they are “low risk.” The students talk about how, when they are online, they can edit messages before sending them. And whether the text is to a potential employer or a romantic prospect, if it's important, they often ask friends to go over their writing to help ensure they are getting it “right.” These are the perks of connection. But in conversations that could potentially take unexpected directions, people don't always try to get things “right.” They learn to be surprised by the things
they say. And to enjoy that experience. The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the
gradual completion of thoughts while speaking
.” Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that “appetite comes from eating” and observes that it is equally the case that “ideas come from speaking.” The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery. Notably, von Kleist is not interested in broadcasting or the kind of posting that social media would provide. The thrill of “risky talk” comes from being in the presence of and in close connection to your listener.

The idea that risky talk might be exciting is far from my students' minds during our evening on WhatsApp. In fact, someone in the group says that one of the good things about sending images is that it makes communication even
less
risky than sending edited texts. Like text, images can be edited. They can be cropped and passed through the perfect filter. And the more you manipulate them, he says, the more you can keep them ambiguous and “open to interpretation.” He sees this as a good thing because you can't be hurt if you haven't declared yourself. But if you haven't declared yourself, you haven't tried out an idea. Or expressed a feeling. Declaring and defending yourself is how you learn to be forthright. It is a skill that helps in both
love and politics
.

In Boston, once the group is both talking out loud and attending to WhatsApp, all communications are constantly interrupted. Phones interrupt talk; talk interrupts phones. I ask everyone how they feel about these interruptions and my question hardly seems to make sense. This group doesn't experience the intrusions of WhatsApp as interruption. One young man says, commenting on the buzz, “This is my life.”

In the new communications culture
,
interruption is not experienced as interruption but as another connection
. Only half joking, people in their teens and twenties tell me that the most commonly heard phrase at dinner with their friends is “Wait, what?” Everyone is always missing a beat, the time it takes to find an image or send a text.

When people say they're “addicted” to their phones, they are not only saying that they want what their phones provide. They are also saying that they don't
want what their phones allow them to avoid.
The thing I hear most is that going to your phone makes it easier to avoid boredom or anxiety. But both of these may signal that you are learning something new, something alive and disruptive. You may be stretching yourself in a new direction. Boredom and anxiety are signs to attend more closely to things, not to turn away.

We don't live in a silent world of no talk. But we drop in and out of the talk we have. And we have very little patience for talk that demands sustained attention. When talk becomes difficult or when talk turns to quiet, we've given ourselves permission to go elsewhere. To avoid life's challenges and boring bits.

A
college senior has a boy in her dorm room. They're in bed together. But when he goes to the bathroom, she takes out her phone and goes on Tinder, an app where she can check out men in the area who might be interested in meeting—or more. She says, “I have no idea why I did this—I really like this guy. . . . I want to date him, but I couldn't help myself. Nothing was happening on Facebook; I didn't have any new emails.” Lying there in bed, waiting for her lover to come out of the bathroom, she had hit one of life's boring bits.

When I share this story with people under thirty, I usually get shrugs. This is how things are. A dull moment is never necessary. And you always want to know who is trying to reach you. Or who might be available to you. But the sensibility in which we want a constant stream of stimulation and expect to edit out life's “boring bits” has also come to characterize their elders.

A young father, thirty-four, tells me that when he gives his two-year-old daughter a bath, he finds it boring. And he's feeling guilty. Just a few nights earlier, instead of sitting patiently with her, talking and singing to her, as he did with his older children, he began to check email on his phone. And it wasn't the first time. “I know I shouldn't but I do,” he
says. “That bath time should be a time for relaxing with my daughter. But I can't do it. I'm on and off my phone the whole time. I find the downtime of her bath boring.”

In a very different setting, Senator John McCain found himself feeling restless on the floor of the Senate during hearings on Syria. So he played poker on his iPhone to escape the feeling. When a picture of his game got into the press, McCain tweeted a joke about being caught out. “
Scandal! Caught playing iPhone
game at 3+ hour Senate hearing—worst of all I lost!”

Escaping to something like video poker when you come to a moment of boredom has become the norm. But when senators are comfortable saying that going “elsewhere” is normal during a hearing on the crisis in Syria, it becomes harder to expect full attention from anyone in any situation, certainly in any classroom or meeting. This is unfortunate because studies show that
open screens degrade the performance
of everyone who can see them—their owners and everyone sitting around them.

And we have to reconsider the value of the “boring bits” from which we flee. In work, love, and friendship, relationships of mutuality depend on listening to what might be boring to you but is of interest to someone else. In conversation, a “lull” may be on its way to becoming something else. If a moment in a conversation is slow, there is no way to know when things will pick up except to stay with the conversation. People take time to think and then they think of something new.

More generally,
the experience of boredom is directly linked to creativity
and innovation. I've said that, like anxiety, it can signal new learning. If we remain curious about our boredom, we can use it as a moment to step back and make a new connection. Or it offers a moment, as von Kleist would have it, to reach out and speak a thought that will only emerge in connection with a listener.