Reclaiming Conversation (18 page)

Indeed, Randall says that when things get quiet with a friend, he finds it “hard to focus.” That's when he is likely to take a photograph and upload it to social media. When he does this, he takes his attention off his friend. But in another way, the photograph is his effort to reach out. Randall is doing what he knows how to do. The conversation has stopped, but the photograph says “We are together.” The photograph speaks when Randall doesn't have words or is not sure what his friend is trying to communicate. It is Randall's effort to navigate the conversation's quiet spaces. When he moves his friend's image to the screen, he is ready for Facebook and a conversation he can manage.

Posting often involves choosing among several similar photographs, cropping, or selecting a favorite filter—for example, one that turns the photograph sepia or into something that looks as though it was shot on a 1950s Brownie camera. There are moments, as one plays with all of this, when one has the occasion to attend to a friend in a different way, to notice a change in expression, a change in posture, to sense something new. Is this communion, but at a manageable distance?

In 1979
Susan Sontag wrote
, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online? One thing
seems clear: Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared.

As this happens, our ideas about comfort change. For Randall, they expand from what a friend can offer to what a phone can offer—among other things, “comfortable” places to find your friends.

Right now: Facebook, texting, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine. In the pipeline:
everything from glasses
that transmit messages directly onto the visual field of the person you are trying to reach to a bracelet you tap to send a coded message to someone wearing a matching bracelet. What all of these have in common: They are “friendship technologies” to make you less vulnerable to ever feeling alone.

J
oelle, a senior at a large state university, talks about her phone as a “security blanket.” It's easy to feel isolated if you are not with your closest friends; people won't talk to you. “You can't expect a lot from your peers. Certainly not conversation.” A phone always gives you a way to look busy.

So we never have to be truly alone in any situation. You get to a party and text your friend that you are at a party and don't know anyone. You ask them where they are. But you aren't necessarily being vulnerable at the party. Because you're removing yourself and showing that you are choosing to be on your phone. It isn't that no one wants to talk to you. It's that you're choosing not to talk to anyone else because you're on your phone.

Vanessa, a college junior, shares a similar story to illustrate how her phone almost always makes her feel less vulnerable. If she arrives at an exam room a few minutes early, or at a party where she doesn't know anyone, she will take out her phone rather than turn to the person next
to her. I ask Vanessa if she is shy. She says she doesn't think so. It's more that in her group of friends, striking up a conversation with strangers would go against the norm. And besides, it takes so much work. The phone gives her an easy way to stay in touch with her private social world.

In these accounts, there are new silences. Classes where you don't talk to classmates because you pretend to be doing important things on your phone. Conversations you interrupt to “refresh” your phone, text a distant friend, or take a photo. Parties where you sit in a corner and text friends who are not with you.

What makes these new silences acceptable? Or appealing? We've met Haley, the college junior who was upset when her parents used their phones at dinner. She thinks she has part of the answer to why we are willing to put up with phones that cut off conversations. She calls it “the seven-minute rule.”

Haley thinks that realistically, seven minutes is the amount of time you have to wait to see if something interesting is going to happen in a conversation. It's the amount of time you have to wait before you should give up and take out your phone.
If you want
to be in real conversations, you have to be willing to put in those seven minutes.
She says that they are not necessarily interesting minutes. In those seven minutes, “you might be bored.”

You know the seven-minute rule? It's that lull. That really uncomfortable, shitty thing where you're, like, “Oh no, should I go? Should I leave? Is this over?” And you don't know how to end it. And just like the work you have to put in, you have to go through so much unpleasantness before you actually hit something. In real conversation, sitting next to each other. And then it can be really good. But inevitably . . . you're, like, “Okay . . . What now?” It's an art.

As Haley describes her own practice, she makes it clear that she often doesn't put in her seven minutes. She skips a conversation and sends a
text instead. Why? “It feels enclosed and self-contained. Whereas it's messy in a conversation and it's scary for that reason.” She speaks for many. We don't put in our seven minutes and we don't let the conversation happen. We use our phones to take what we can get. And often, we make what we can get good enough.

I
n 2008, you had to justify being inattentive to friends you were physically with. Oliver, Jasper, and their crew even asked a friend to “monitor” them in case they fell into bad habits. By 2014, there are no more “monitors.” The mores of friendship include being “there” for a friend by providing physical presence while your friend is on the phone, texting other people.

Among college students, some rebel—not many—and make strenuous efforts to stay off their phones when they are with friends. Some say they don't like dividing their attention, but take it as a given of “life today.” Others talk about a “natural evolution”—we will get better at multitasked conversation. We will become better at picking up where conversations left off. Others think that the evolution will be in social expectations. We will come to experience people in the room and “people on the phone” as equally present. The trick, hard now, but perhaps not so hard in ten years, is not to devalue yourself when the friend beside you turns to the “people on the phone.”

Carl, twenty-three, a graduate student in computer science, sees physical and electronic presence as socially on par. And when you see these as equal, you aren't critical of your friend if he or she turns away from you to pay attention to someone on the phone. Turning to the person on the phone is like turning to another friend present in the room.

Carl's position seems pragmatic, but I see little evidence that it makes emotional sense. I remember the first time—sometime in the late 1990s—that a graduate student pointed out to me how hurt he felt when his friends took cell phone calls when he was with them. He told me it
made him feel like a tape recorder that someone was putting “on pause.” A friend turning away from him to attend to a “friend in the phone” made him feel like a machine. These days, we have learned to crave interruption—we like the buzz of the new—but emotionally, not much has changed. When Haley tried to console an unhappy friend who started to text other people in the middle of their conversation, she says she felt invisible, like smoke that had disappeared.

The story Haley tells is this: She was out for dinner with her best friend, Natalie, when Natalie received an upsetting text from an ex-boyfriend. Haley tried to console Natalie, but her friend was more interested in what other friends were saying who were leaving messages on the network. Here is how Haley describes Natalie's turn to the “people in the phone”:

I am not great at consoling people at all but I was hugging her and trying so hard. I decided that it was my chance to console her. She had been there for me. It had been an uneven break. I decided to go all out. I was trying all of these different methods. And five minutes into me trying to console her she sent out five texts to people describing the situation and then started reading their feedback while I was talking to her. We were walking down the street and she was just texting her “consolation network.” So then I changed my approach and started asking her what people were saying over text. And I tried to engage with her on that strange and oblique access point. But it was so weird to not be the primary person even though I was the only real person there.

Terrible. She was texting people that were hundreds of miles away instead of talking to me.

Why do we turn away from the people before us to go to the people on our phones? Haley gave one answer. In person, we have to wait seven minutes in order to see where a conversation is going. But if it is acceptable to answer a text during a conversation with a friend, we have an excuse to not even try to put in those seven minutes. And then, once we are on the phone, we can get more of what we have become accustomed
to: the validation that texts can provide, along with the fact that they come in great numbers.

Haley talked about Natalie's consolation network and her consolation texts. Think of those online consolations as the first minutes of a conversation, the first things you might say to an unhappy friend. You provide support. You say you are sorry and how much you care for them. When you allow yourself to be consoled by a friend in person, you take the chance that things might go beyond this. There is more of a chance for the conversation to open out onto more delicate areas. If, as Natalie, you are talking about a relationship that has ended, you could find yourself talking details: how each party in the relationship might have contributed to its demise. How the
other
person might be feeling.

If you confine yourself to consolation texts, you don't really have to take that chance. You are in a position to get solace and safety in numbers. If you don't like where things are going in any exchange, it is relatively easy to end it. But sticking with the consolation texts means you lose out on what the conversations of friendship can provide—not only solace, but a deeper understanding of yourself. And of your friend.

Of course, just as some conversations disappear, new ones appear. Just as you can make a friend feel invisible by going to your phone, you can make that same friend feel more important by
not
going to your phone. So, the existence of mobile phones has invented a new kind of privileged conversation. These are conversations with friends that are elevated when both participants know they are getting text messages and both choose to ignore their phones. After she recounts her dispiriting experience with Natalie, Haley describes this heady experience: “So you know that you are both getting texts but you are ignoring them and thereby elevating the importance of the conversation that you are having. You show each other that you're into it because you are both blowing up with texts. . . . Ignoring a text for me means a lot to me.”

Arjun, a college senior, gave me another way to view why people turn away from a friend and to a phone. For him, the phone not only serves up comforting friends; it is a new kind of friend in itself. The phone itself is a source of solace.

Intellectually, I know that it's the people on the phone who keep me company. So when I go to check my messages, I am technically going to check for which people reached out to me. But let's say I see there are no new messages. Then I just start to check things—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the familiar places to me. Now, it's just the phone that is a comfort. The phone that is the friend.

W
e let phones disrupt the conversations of friendship in several ways: By having our phones out,
we keep conversations light
and we are less connected to each other in the conversations we do have. And we rarely talk to friends about how we feel when they turn away from us to their phones. This behavior has become a new normal. But behavior declared “normal”
can still sting
.

This is Richard, forty-eight, on what he misses when he visits his college roommate Bob. This happens about twice a year, every time that his work takes him to Washington, D.C.

I keep remembering what it used to be like before [cell] phones. We used to talk. I don't know. One thing would lead to another. Sometimes we would get into pretty serious conversations about books we had read, people we knew, our marriages. Now, he has his phone and he just idly will look at it from time to time. If I said, “I have something really important to talk about,” I know Bob would put down the phone.

But Richard doesn't say that. He doesn't challenge his friend. “It seems so basic to him, to hold his phone,” he says. Richard has accepted the new way their visits will work.

Not everyone is resigned. I interview a group of good friends in their late twenties, most of whom are still working in their first jobs. When I tell them I am writing a book about conversation, their thoughts turn to
the conversations they are
not
having. What follows is something I rarely hear: friends calling out friends because of the time they spend on their phones. I attribute this unusual conversation to their degree of intimacy. So Maria accuses her best friend, Rose, of “hiding behind her phone.” Maria says that Rose and her boyfriend “are the worst two cell phone people I have ever met.” Maria says that when you're with them, it's tough to have a conversation.

You two just text constantly, check your phones constantly, like you are always on it. Sometimes I'll just go crazy because I can't stand how long your boyfriend stares at the phone. And sometimes I feel that way when I'm with you—because you're, like, text, text, text. And I'm, like, “Are you listening to me? I'm trying to talk to you!”

The tone of sharp disappointment in this conversation helps me understand why friends don't often ask other friends to put down their phones. Raising the topic is a minefield.