Reclaiming Conversation (10 page)

Here is how Maggie, a college junior, describes that place: “When I check my Facebook and Twitter and email on my cell phone, I feel like I am forgetting to check something and I'll continue to look through those three things because I feel like I am missing something.” The process of checking draws her into the process of checking. Judy, another junior, speaks about Facebook on her phone as a “lucky charm” that will protect her from boredom. But when she describes her time with her phone, it seems as if it is training her to be bored with anything other than her phone:

If you're on some app and looking through stuff because you're bored, you can click your little round button and go through a circuit of apps. Even if nothing is happening you probably have an email. Sometimes when you're just sitting and talking to someone or in class it's boring. So you check your phone even if you know nothing has happened. That switching makes it so that when you're just sitting or engaged in one thing, it feels weird.

As Judy would put it, in the Facebook zone, you are never available for “just sitting” or “being engaged in one thing.” That's a problem: These are the building blocks of solitude.

It is helpful to compare the Facebook zone with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” In flow, you are asked to do a task that isn't so easy as to be mindless but isn't so hard as to be out of your grasp. If, when skiing, you are challenged but your skills are sufficient to give you a feeling of connection with the mountain, you are experiencing flow. For Csikszentmihalyi, experiences in the flow state
always lead to new learning and a stronger
sense of self
. Schüll's gamblers don't experience growth but entrapment and repetition. Madrigal calls the machine zone the “dark side of flow.”

Between flow and its dark side, where are we when we enter the Facebook zone? Maggie and Judy both say that cycling through apps takes them away from other—and they think more important—things they used to do, like going for a walk, drawing, and reading. They no longer make time for these activities, but they can't break away from their phones and are not sure they want to. In their stories, we see the “success” of devices whose goal, ultimately, is to keep their users connected.

A humorous moment made this point during a Boston visit of Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google. Schmidt was in town to speak about his recently published book. When he walked into the hall, he asked the audience, “How many of you are going to be on your phones during the lecture?” When a roomful of hands shot up he said, “Good! That's
what we want you to be doing
.” Apps are designed to keep you on apps. And the more of your downtime you spend cycling through apps, the less time you have to be alone with yourself.

C
ollege students are clear: What they count as solitude involves being online. One college junior tells me that she doesn't daydream but does something she calls “chilling.” It involves “aimlessly searching the web.” Think of it as daydreaming 2.0. But it doesn't do the work of daydreaming. In fact, she calls the web her “safety mechanism” against daydreaming. Time wandering the web protects her from the “danger” of having her mind wander. Another, in a similar spirit, calls her phone an “insurance policy” against boredom. Like the Fortune 500 vice-president alone at his desk, these young women understand that time alone without a phone creates anxiety.

I ask Carmen, twenty, if she ever has time to just sit and think. Her answer: “I would never do that.” If she has a quiet moment she goes to Facebook. She says she doesn't want to think about the past without it. “To think about your past experiences instead of looking at pictures or messages, it takes more effort to do that.”

Effort she would rather not put in. “The problem,” she explains, is that “if you think about the past without Facebook, you would have to consciously say, ‘Okay, now I am going to think. . . .' You would have to prepare to go sit by yourself.” To her, this is an unlikely idea. Carmen has reached a point where solitude means being alone with her laptop and the people she reaches through it, a new definition of solitude as crowd management.

Anya, twenty, describes an evening when she accompanied her college roommate to the hospital. A triage nurse decided that the roommate's stomach pain was not an emergency and so the two women had to wait for over five hours to see a doctor. They both went to their phones. When her phone began to lose its charge, Anya panicked.

My phone gets to the red mark and I started freaking out, like, “Oh no, it's about to die.” That anxious feeling. I really get anxious when my phone is about to die. And then it dies. I am not even joking when I tell you that I went around the entire hospital. I asked every worker, every nurse, every random person I could find if they had an iPhone charger. I finally found a random security guard. He took me to a back room so I could charge my phone. I will go to that length—even invade people's privacy.

This is disconnection anxiety in the presence of your best friend. Anya explains that she and her roommate didn't want to sit quietly with their thoughts. And in a related development, conversation felt like too much work. “We just wanted to be quiet and look at our phones and keep our minds preoccupied.”

P
eople like the image of a creative idea coming to someone as though a lightbulb turned on. But usually these “lightbulb” ideas have been long prepared.

Writing about his own experience, the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré explored the slow unfolding of what seem like “lightbulb” ideas. “Sudden illumination,” says Poincaré, is only “a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work,” work usually done alone.

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea
presents itself to the mind
.

It was the dream of early computer scientists to have machines do the
fast and routine work
so that the slow and creative work could be done by people. In 1945, the inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush dreamed of a device he called a Memex (an idea often considered a precursor to the web) that would take care of logical processes in order to leave more time for the slow unfolding of human creativity. Ironically, as we move closer to the world Bush imagined, the opposite may have happened. Machines present us with information at a volume and velocity that we try, unsuccessfully, to keep up with. But we try. And the effort means that we are often so busy communicating that we don't have time to think. K–12 teachers and college professors use the same words to describe their students: rushed, impatient, not interested in process, unable to be alone with their thoughts. It's as though we are waiting for the lightbulb without taking the time or the time alone for the “long, unconscious prior work.”

The psychologist Jonathan Schooler demonstrated that “mind
wandering” is a stepping-stone to creativity. “The mind is inherently restless,” says Schooler. “It's always looking to attend to the most interesting
thing in its environment
.” If children grow up expecting that the most interesting thing in their environment is going to be on their phones, we have to teach them to give their inner worlds a chance. Indeed, in a quiet moment, all of us, child and adult, have to fight the impulse to turn first to our devices.

Our devices compel us because we respond to every search and every new piece of information (and every new text) as though it had the urgency of
a threat in the wild
. So stimulation by what is new (and social) draws us toward some immediate goal. But daydreaming moves us toward the longer term. It helps us develop the base for a stable self and helps us
come up with new solutions
. To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.

Reclaiming conversation begins with reclaiming our capacity for solitude. When we reach for a phone to push reverie away, we should get into the habit of asking why. Perhaps we are not moving toward our phones but away from something else. Are we hiding from anxiety? Are we hiding from a good idea that will demand difficult work? Are we hiding from a question that will take time to sort through?

In our world of “I share, therefore I am” we are not primed to give solitude a chance. We can cultivate a different attitude, beginning with our children. We can give them time without electronic devices. And we can give them more time alone. The teachers who complain that parents see free time as their children's enemy are pointing to something real. Children can't develop the capacity for solitude if they don't have the experience of being “bored” and then turning within rather than to a screen.

When young children go to their bedrooms at night, they should go without their phones or tablets. Recall Erikson's thought that children need “stillness”
to find their identity
. The social critic William Deresiewicz argues that these days, online, we rob ourselves of the conditions to think independently. Leadership, he says, “means gathering yourself
together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into
a cloud of electronic and social input
.” You don't have to move to a cabin in the woods to get these benefits, but even a short amount of solitude lets people hear their own thoughts. It opens up the space for self-reflection.

I Tweet, Therefore I Am

As long as I have my phone, I would never just sit alone and think. . . . When I have a quiet moment, I never just think. My phone is my safety mechanism from having to talk to new people or letting my mind wander. I know that this is very bad . . . but texting to pass the time is my way of life.

—VANESSA, A COLLEGE JUNIOR

O
ne of the rewards of solitude is an increased capacity for self-reflection—the conversations we have with ourselves in the hope of greater insight about who we are and want to be. Professionally, what is our vocation? Personally, what gives us purpose and meaning? Can we forgive our transgressions and those of others? In self-reflection, we come to understand ourselves better and we nurture our capacity for relationship.

Different traditions—philosophical, religious, spiritual, and psychological—have made claims on these high-stakes conversations. In the West, since the early twentieth century, the psychoanalytic tradition made its own claim. At its core, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic technique, but it proposed itself as a sensibility for thinking about the self that went beyond the professional boundaries of psychoanalysts and their patients. The psychoanalytic movement became a psychoanalytic
culture whose core assumptions were popularized in novels, films, and the press.

So, whether or not you had ever been in treatment with an analyst or read a word of Freud, a certain set of ideas became familiar to you as you thought about your past, your present, and your possibilities for change. This tradition of self-reflection stresses history, the meaning of language, and the power of the unconscious. It teaches that our lives are “peopled” by
those who have mattered most to us
. They live within us for better and worse. We learn to recognize their influence in our strengths and vulnerabilities. If your parents were aggressive, you may be on the defensive whether or not it is warranted. If your parents were withdrawn, you may feel orphaned even if surrounded by loved ones.

The psychoanalytic tradition makes us aware of our human tendency to see the world through the prism of what our most significant relationships have told us about ourselves. It teaches that self-reflection can help us make our way past this cacophony of internalized voices to a place that feels more authentically “ours.” In that place, we can see how we are shaped by our histories but achieve a certain distance from them.

Understanding our capacity for projection helps us see what is around us rather than use our present to work out unresolved conflicts from our past. So, the psychoanalytic tradition sees self-reflection as a path toward realism. If jealousy and danger threaten, you don't paper it over. If love is offered, you can see it.

These rewards of self-reflection take time to achieve—and of course, we don't give ourselves much time these days. And they take discipline. In every case, they depend on developing the capacity to pause and think through the knotty thought, the tangled relationship.
If I am afraid, is there danger or inhibition? If I feel bold, am I well prepared or reckless? If I want to leave a relationship, have I been treated badly or am I afraid of commitment?

T
he psychoanalytic tradition asks us to cultivate both the capacity for solitude and the capacity for disciplined self-reflection. There are many things that discourage us. Sometimes it is just the hope for a simpler way to understand ourselves. It would be nice if troubles could be cured by the right pill or the right mantra or the right behavioral adjustment.

And now, there is the hope that self-reflection could perhaps be made more efficient by technological intervention. The list of candidate technologies is already long: a computer programmed to behave in the manner of a therapist; devices that help you track your physiology for patterns that will help you understand your psychology; programs that analyze the words in your diary and come up with a diagnosis of your mental state. These last are certified as the “real you” because they are based on what is measurable about your behavior, your “output.” They are served up as your
quantified or algorithmic self
.

Never underestimate the power of a new evocative object. The story of how we use technologies of self-report and quantified self-report to think about ourselves is just beginning. Used with intention, they may provoke reflection that brings us closer to ourselves. But they can't do it alone. Apps can give you a number; only people can provide a narrative. Technology can expose mechanism; people have to find meaning.

It is striking that some of our most-used applications—such as Facebook—seem set up to inspire narration. After all, on Facebook, the basic protocol is to record and illustrate the events of one's life. Of course, we've seen that the story is not so simple. Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation.

M
elissa's home life is turbulent. She's a high school senior and for years, her parents, threatening divorce, have turned every meal into a quarrel. In the past, Melissa found refuge in modern dance, photography, and, most of all, in her handwritten journal. She says that sometimes she rereads it just to see the changes in her penmanship, entry by entry. They offer clues to her state of mind.

I wrote in it every night. In a book. I like writing. And it's funny to go back and see—you can tell if I'm angry. Sometimes, the letters look angry. That means I'm angry and I'm writing angry. And . . . then—if something was really bothering me—I can go back and read what I wrote down, how I felt, how I dealt with it.

These days, Melissa's journaling is hasty; she usually skips it and turns instead to social media. I meet her just as Facebook is becoming the emotional center of her life. She has been rejected from the four colleges that were her “first choice” schools. She is leaving home to attend a small rural college in upstate New York. She says that her increased involvement with Facebook began when she found a Facebook page that perfectly suits her situation. It's called “I GOT REJECTED FROM MY FIRST CHOICE SCHOOL.” There, Melissa corresponds with other people who share her disappointments about college. Among them are people who survived going to their “fourth choice school” and had successful careers afterward. Now, Melissa says, she spends almost all her free time on Facebook. And then she adds, softly, “I wish I wasn't but I am.”

Why the conflict? Melissa needs social support. Her college plans disappoint her; her home life offers no comfort. Life on Facebook (with its tailor-made “I GOT REJECTED” page) is a place to tell her story. But Melissa says that even with all of these positive things, it's “hard to
find balance” when she goes on Facebook, because once she gets there, it's “consuming” and very hard to put away. More disturbing, Melissa says that she now finds it “almost impossible to do the things I actually think I need to do—to sit by myself, write in my journal, talk to my brother, call my best friend.” Instead she feels “stuck” on Facebook, posting about food, reading profiles, and “stalking” people in her class. “I get lost in reading other people's messages or profiles or talking to them. And it's always stuff that is so pointless and it's just a waste of time, and I hate wasting time, but I get lost in it. I'll look at the clock and it'll say 7:14, and I'll look back and it'll seem like a minute later and it'll be 8:30 p.m.” Facebook wasn't designed to stall self-reflection. But it often does.

Melissa thinks that part of what keeps her stuck on Facebook is anxiety about being left out. In middle school, she felt excluded, and “that fear just creeps up. Yeah. So wanting to be in the know, always online, is a way of saying, ‘OK, if it's happening, I want to be on top of it.'” So, she checks Facebook. “I always
have
to check it. . . . One of my fears is being left out or missing something.” Facebook assuages that fear.

Although Melissa uses Facebook as a substitute for her journal (she says, “It's easier”), she is less honest on the digital page. She says that when she wrote in her journal, she felt as if she was writing for herself. When she switched to Facebook, she went into “performance” mode. She shares her thoughts, but she also thinks about how they will “play.” Melissa says that sometimes when she wrote in her journal, she had fantasies of other people finding or reading it someday, but her fantasies put that day far in the future—they really didn't influence what she wrote. What she writes on Facebook, however, is designed to make her popular
now
.

So Melissa wrote a pleasing profile for Facebook, one that reflected the person she
wanted
to be, her aspirational self. She said things that would draw people toward her. And when she does her daily sharing, she is selective. For example, she doesn't write about the arguments in her family. All of this had made it onto the pages of her journal, but now, on Facebook, Melissa only wants to publish good news.

I have found that when people use the aspirational self as an object for self-reflection, it can make them feel curiously envious—of themselves. It can be helpful, of course, to know your aspirations. That's useful information for reflecting on who you want to become. But on Facebook, you can get busy performing that self, pretending it is who you already are.

Our performances of self on Facebook are very different from how people use game avatars for self-reflection. I have long studied how digital objects inform how we think about ourselves, including many years of work on the psychology of role-playing games. The avatars we create for online gaming (in most games we choose their bodies, their faces, and their personality traits) were not designed to facilitate self-reflection. And yet they can do just that. When people construct an avatar, they often give it qualities that allow them to express aspects of themselves they would like to explore. This means that a game world can become a place to
experiment with identity
. In his mid-thirties, a software engineer found himself frustrated by his difficulties being assertive. In his mind, assertive men came across as bullies while assertive women seemed like attractive “Katharine Hepburn types.” He decided to experiment with being more assertive by playing strong women in online games. His virtual practice served him well. After years online as a strong woman, he became comfortable as a more assertive man.

I've found that, surprisingly, using avatars to experiment with identity can be more straightforward than using a Facebook profile for this purpose. In the case of the avatar, you begin with clarity that you are “playing” a character that is someone other than you. That's the game. On Facebook, you are, ostensibly, representing yourself and talking about your own life. That's why people friend you. They want to know what
you
are doing and thinking.

In theory, you know the difference between yourself and your Facebook self. But lines blur and it can be hard to keep them straight. It's like telling very small lies over time. You forget the truth because it is so close to the lies.

And these days, using the web for self-reflection poses the very real question of how truthful to be. For we know that it is not a private space, not a journal or a diary locked away. It is a new thing: a public space that we may nevertheless experience as the most private place in the world.

S
elf-reflection makes us vulnerable. That's why its traditions so often include ways of protecting one's
privacy
(we lock and hide our diaries) and confidentiality (as in relationships with a therapist or a clergyman). Social media encourage us to play by another set of rules. You share as you reflect; you reflect as you share. And the companies that provide the platforms for all of this get to see and keep it all. Privacy, loosely defined as freedom from being observed, is gone. At what cost?

In the mid-1990s, when the web was new, I spoke to Alan, a history graduate student, twenty-seven, about Netscape, one of the first web browsers. He said, “I search what interests me and I learn what interests me by what I search.” Alan did those early searches believing that they left no trace. He talked about the freedom to “look at things I would be embarrassed to take out of the library. Somebody might see the book.” This kind of exploration is compromised if we don't feel in a private space. And now we know that online, we are
not
in a private space. Yet people still tell me they behave as Alan did,
as though
their activities were private.

So now consider David, forty-seven, a television producer who shares Alan's sensibility. He, too, discovers his interests as he searches the web. But I meet David in 2013, two decades after I spoke with Alan. David is eager to elaborate on the “giant upside” of the time he spends online: “Putting on my earbuds and getting into my iPhone world is my Zen. That's my retreat.” David says that cycling through his apps is his time for self-reflection: “You flip between your music, your news, your entertainment,
your people.
You control it. You own it. That's my zone.” Here, the definition of self-reflection has narrowed: It means control over
your connections. We've seen this before, solitude defined as time with a managed crowd.

Like Alan, David says that he likes to look back on his online history. David has email, Tweets, Facebook, and texts. He calls them his “tracks.” Like Alan, he knows himself through where he's been. He says that for him, wandering the web “is like thinking aloud.” But unlike Alan, the way he uses the net to explore his interests is starting to make him anxious. He knows that when he “thinks aloud” online, other people are in a position to listen.

For David, being plugged in provides a sense of identity, but he knows that it also creates him as a data product to be bought and sold. And as an object for potential government surveillance. So as David follows his “tracks,” he is in a setting for self-reflection where if he does not self-censor, he feels he is being foolish, naive, or even transgressive. And yet this potential transgression has become such an everyday thing that he chooses to forget it might be transgression at all.