Reclaiming Conversation (50 page)

his biggest challenge as a professor:
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, “Sex, or the Unbearable: Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Conversation About Their New Book” (discussion, Tufts University, Somerville, MA, February 28, 2014).

life repays close, focused attention:
Not everyone characterizes the lecture this way. I am intrigued to discover that if you equate biometric measures of arousal with pedagogic success, experiments on the lecture show it to be under par. A group of students wore wristbands for a week that measured skin conductance as an index of “the arousal associated with emotion, education, and attention.” The sensor recorded regular, strong spikes during periods of study, lab work, and homework, but the readout flatlined during two activities: attending class and watching television. From Eric Mazur, et al. “Blended Models of Learning: Bringing Online to On-Campus,” MIT, March 21, 2013, citing Ming-Zher Poh, N. C. Swenson, and R. W. Picard, “A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity,”
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
57, no. 5 (May 2010): 1243–52, doi:10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487.

amounted to a love letter to conversation:
Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, “Daniel Kahneman—Biographical,” in
Les Prix Nobel
(
The Nobel Prizes
),
2002
, Tore Fraängsmyr, ed. (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 2003). Full text available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html.

one of the founding documents:
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,”
Science
185 (1974): 1124–31.

not virtual contact, but live contact:
Adam F. Falk, “In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor,”
Wall Street Journal
, August 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444327204577615592746799900.

students don't show up for office hours:
MIT, “MacVicar Day 2014,” MIT TechTV (video), March 14, 2014, http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/duevideos/videos/28190-macvicar-day-2014.

Students avoid faculty:
The complaint about students abandoning office hours goes beyond MIT. And faculty can't think of how to turn this around other than by making coming to office hours mandatory for a final grade.

the presence of one strong figure:
Laura Vivienne and Jean Rhodes, “Someone Who ‘Gets' Me: Adolescents' Perceptions of Relational Engagement with Key Adults” (manuscript under review, 2014).

WORK

Alan Johnson Miller and Associates:
As previously noted, all of the names of companies and institutions in this chapter have been changed. And all of the names of people as well.

clear link between sociability and
employee productivity:
The casual conversations Lister is talking about are part of the “water cooler effect,” a combination of social bonding and information sharing that depends on being physically together in a workplace. Ben Waber's work with sociometric badges—measuring productivity and where people were in social space—shows the power of that water cooler: Employee interaction improves productivity. See, for example, Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguin Olguin, Taemie Kim, et al., “Productivity Through Coffee Breaks: Changing Social Networks by Changing Break Structure,”
Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Sunbelt Social Network Conference
, Trento, Italy (2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1586375. See also Benjamin N. Waber,
People Analytics
(New Jersey: FT Press, 2013).

is also associated with reduced stress:
ibid.

The “conversation effect”:
Lynn Wu, Benjamin N. Waber, Sinan Aral, et al., “Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task,”
Proceedings
of the International Conference on Information Systems
(2008), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1130251.

“those conversations are worth it”:
“Presence vs. Productivity: How Managers View Telecommuting,” narrated by Neil Conan,
Talk of the Nation
, National Public Radio, February 27, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/02/27/173069965/presence-vs-productivity-how-managers-view-telecommuting.

asked employees to work from home whenever possible:
ReadyLearn is trying to streamline its organization by replacing employees who work in more expensive salary markets with employees who work in less expensive salary markets. So almost all teams are global teams and require Skype communication.

take another phone call:
Gretchen Gavett, “What People Are Really Doing When They're on a Conference Call,”
Harvard Business Review
, August 19, 2014, http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/what-people-are-really-doing-when-theyre-on-a-conference-call/?utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet&utm_campaign=Socialflow.

puts us into a state similar to vigilance:
Giles M. Phillips, “Mobile Users Are More Vigilant than Situated Users,” in
Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCI 2014, LNCS 8512
, Masaaki Kurousu, ed. (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014): 166–77.

the most rudimentary arguments:
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.

distracts everyone around the machine:
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.

with the attention that their problems deserve:
Rattan's experience is not unusual. In a survey of 1,215 workers worldwide, 66 percent say they aren't able to focus on one thing
at a time and 70 percent say they don't have regular time at work for creative or strategic thought. But the 20 percent who were able to focus on one task at a time were 50 percent more engaged in their work. The authors cite the rise of digital technology as the greatest influence on loss of thinking time because when information and requests come in, “we feel compelled to read and respond to [them] at all hours of the day and night.” The authors of the study, Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath of the Energy Project, wrote about their findings in “Why You Hate Work,”
New York Times,
May 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html. For a fuller report of their work, in partnership with the
Harvard Business Review
, see Tony Schwartz, Christine Porath, “The Power of Meeting Your Employees' Needs,”
Harvard Business Review
, June 30, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-power-of-meeting-your-employees-needs.

a “Tabless Thursday”:
James Hamblin, Katherine Wells, and Paul Rosenfeld, “Single-Tasking Is the New Multitasking,”
The Atlantic
(video), June 19, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/373027/singletasking-is-the-new-multitasking.

those who have experienced the change:
In one tradition of studying communications of the voice and body (focusing on when people are discussing likes and dislikes, feelings and attitudes), the psychologist Albert Mehrabian has come up with a “7 percent, 38 percent, 55 percent rule.” When we are together in the same room, 7 percent of how we feel is conveyed by words, 38 percent is conveyed through our tone of voice, and 55 percent through our body language. Albert Mehrabian,
Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981).

‘Why are we doing this?':
Business theorist Clay Christensen writes about the importance of disruptive innovation to the long-term health of a firm. To make radical, creative change people need data, but they also need time to think and talk. They can't be looking too anxiously at short-term results. Short-term thinking leads corporations to allocate resources to things that have already been successful. It doesn't open space for disruptive innovation.

In Christensen's terms, Tripp feels that his company has made it harder for disruptive innovation to happen because it has destroyed the places it was most likely to come from. That was the relationship among people who worked together every day, who talked together every day about problems and how to solve them. Tripp's company responded to short-term financial results and so is not as likely to get what Christensen calls “market-creating” change, the kind of change that makes the real difference. See, for example, Clayton Christensen, “The Capitalist's Dilemma,”
Harvard Business Review,
June 2014, http://hbr.org/2014/06/the -capitalists-dilemma/ar/1.

to increase their productivity and creativity:
While one tradition of work measures productivity in relation to interactions of workers on site, other research tracks the numbers of times a scholarly work is cited and links this to the physical proximity of its authors. Collocation is shown to increase the impact of collaboration.
See, for example, Kyungjoon Lee, John S. Brownstein, Richard G. Mills, et al., “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?”
PLOS ONE
5, no. 12 (2010), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014279.

more productive when they talk more:
Waber, Olguin, Kim, et al., “Productivity Through Coffee Breaks.”

whether it was time well spent:
“Time spent vs. time well spent” is the phrase used by Tristan Harris at Google to talk about his vision of a new consumer/industry alliance to build technology that will better serve humanity. In his December 2014 TEDx presentation in Brussels, Harris compared your phone to a slot machine that offered two sad choices: Either you are distracted or you have a fear of missing out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4.

treating the “iPatient”:
Abraham Verghese, “Treat the Patient, Not the CT Scan,”
New York Times
, February 26, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/opinion/27verghese.html?pagewanted=all, and “Culture Shock—Patient as Icon, Icon as Patient,”
New England Journal of Medicine
359, no. 26 (2008): 2748–51, doi:10.1056/NEJMp0807461.

all of these are being discussed:
For example, see Robert Wachter,
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype,
and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015).

doctors can more easily engage with patients:
On the invention of the profession of medical scribes, see Katie Hafner, “A Busy Doctor's Right Hand, Ever Ready to Type,”
New York Times
, January 12, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/a-busy-doctors-right-hand-ever-ready-to-type.html.

complete important tasks one by one:
For one advocate of slowing things down, see David Levy, “No Time to Think: Reflections on Information Technology and Contemplative Scholarship,”
Ethics and Inf
ormation Technology
9, no. 4 (2007): 237–49, doi:10.1007/s10676-007-9142-6.

be more intentional about the use of technology:
In January 2015, a New York City–based campaign, “Bored and Brilliant,” enlisted thousands to give up aspects of their smartphone use every day. It began from the premise that boredom inspires brilliance and the observation that when you have a smartphone, you don't allow yourself to be bored. When the organizers assessed the results they found that the greatest impact of the challenge was to increase awareness of how phones shape our sensibilities. http://www.wnyc.org/series/bored-and-brilliant. In other words, the impact of the challenge was intentionality.

in an open floor plan:
For an overview of research on the social, psychological, and economic implications of the open office plan, see Maria Konnikova, “The Open-Office Trap,”
The New Yorker
, January 7, 2014.

a “quiet car” for productivity:
It is relevant to recall the striking finding about the power of privacy to maximize productivity among programmers. Susan Cain sums it up this way: “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.” Susan Cain,
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
(New York: Crown, 2012), 84.

twenty-three minutes to get back on track:
These findings from the work of attention researcher Gloria Mark and her research team were reported in Rachel Emma Silverman's “Workplace Distrations: Here's Why You Won't Finish This Article,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 11, 2012, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388. It is significant that Mark's findings include managers, financial analysts, and software developers. Silverman's article also summarizes the efforts of companies that are trying to enforce policies of forced attention. One company has done away with email altogether. Others set aside special times for creative thinking. In one case, there is a no-email policy; in another, there are special hours when email is not allowed and which are deemed as times for creative thinking. For a bibliography of Mark's work on “interruption science,” see http://mail.free-knowledge.org/ref erences/authors/gloria_mark.html.