Reclaiming Conversation (52 page)

you will also activate “full tracking”:
Patrick Tucker, “If You Do This, the NSA Will Spy on You,”
Defense One,
July 7, 2014, http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/if-you-do-nsa-will-spy-you/88054/?oref=d-topstory. See also Sean Gallagher, “The NSA Thinks Linux Journal Is an ‘Extremist Forum'?”
ArsTechnica
, July 3, 2014, http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/the-nsa-thinks-linux-journal-is-an-extremist-forum/.

manipulation of votes by social media:
Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,”
New Republic
, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

to see if this changed their moods:
Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-
Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–90, doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111. For comprehensive coverage of this story, see “Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,”
The Atlantic
, June 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648.

knows a lot more about them:
During an April 2015 interview with Edward Snowden, the comedian and TV host John Oliver pursued an “objects to think with” strategy. He told Snowden that Americans have a hard time relating directly to the idea that the government has the ability to listen to their phone calls but care deeply if the government has the right to look at photographs of their private parts that they post online or send as a JPEG file attached to an email or text. The comedian had come to the interview with a photograph of his genitals that now resided online. Snowden was then asked which surveillance programs would give the government legal cover to look at Oliver's naked self. “John Oliver Interviews Edward Snowden,”
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,
HBO, April 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M.

“The way to deal is to just be good”:
Talking about using Google services that will monitor your home, Eric Schmidt's position was “If you don't like it, don't use it.” 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. Eric Schmidt made his first remark about controlling individual behavior rather than worrying about controlling privacy to CNBC. The video is available at Ryan Tate, “Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People,”
Gawker
, December 4, 2009, http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets -are-for-filthypeople. An earlier and much-quoted variant of this sentiment was voiced by Scott McNealy, then-CEO of Sun Microsystems, when he said at a press event for a launch of its Jini technology in 1999, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” The incident was widely reported. See, for example, Sally Sprenger, “Sun on Privacy: Get Over It,”
Wired
, January 26, 1999. http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538.

this conversation about technology, privacy, and democracy:
I first made this argument in
Alone Together.
Over time, I believe it has taken on greater urgency. Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together:
Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2011).

THE NICK OF TIME

“
what we refuse to destroy
”:
John Sawhill, cited in E. O. Wilson,
The Future of Life
(New York: Knopf, 2002), vi.

pushed his chairs to its far corners:
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1854]), 141.

begin to recover their empathic
capacity:
Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, Jordan Morris, et al., “Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotional Cues,”
Computers in Human Behavior
39 (2014): 387–92, doi: 0.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036.

they atrophy if not exercised:
Clifford Nass, “Is Facebook Stunting Your Child's Growth?,”
Pacific Standard,
April 23, 2012.

A first step is to slow down:
For one example of writing on this theme, see David Levy, “No Time to Think: Reflections on Information Technology and Contemplative Scholarship,”
Ethics and Information Technology
9, no. 4 (2007): 237–49, doi:10.1007/s10676-007-9142-6.

a mechanical “Memex” would free us:
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”
Atlantic Monthly
, July 1945, 101–6, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881.

to return to the spirit of Bush's original idea:
On this point, Arianna Huffington has encouraged and supported the conversation. See Arianna Huffington,
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
(New York: Harmony, 2014).

to encourage thought, talk, and new ideas:
“Go Inside Google Garage, the Collaborative Workspace That Thrives on Crazy, Collaborative Ideas,”
Fast Company
(video), http://www.fastcompany.com/3017509/work-smart/look-inside-google-garage-the-collaborative-workspace-that-thrives-on-crazy-creat.

they fear their followers will disagree:
The study also showed, surprisingly, that social media users were also less willing than nonusers to discuss their views offline. Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence,'” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence. I have noted that a new study by Facebook scientists, published in
Science
, challenges the strength of this effect. Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,”
Science
, May 2, 2015. doi:10.1126/science.aaa1160.

who do not share their views:
Rebecca Ellen Turkle Willard, “The Irrelevant Opposition: Reference Groups in the Formation of Political Attitudes Among Partisan College Students” (undergraduate dissertation, Harvard College, 2014).

Even a small amount of common ground can nurture a conversation:
And to nurture conversation, it would help to break the habit of bringing data sets to the table as a substitute for discussing the substance of issues. More than ever, data can deceive. We have so much data now that we can do correlational studies that support every and any position. Famously, recent correlational studies linked intelligence to a love of curly fries. What this correlation lacked—and this is “Big Data's” threat to reasoned conversation—is a rationale, a hypothesis, a theory. It showed only that with enough data you can show anything. Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences
110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110.

grew up with phones in hand:
Howard Gardner and Katie Davis,
The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

require eye contact for emotional stability and social fluency:
For example, Atushi Senju and Mark H. Johnson, “The Eye Contact Effect: Mechanisms and Development,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
13, no. 3 (January 3, 2009): 127–34, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.11.009, and Laura Pönkänen, Annemari Alhoniemi, Jukka M. Leppänen, et al., “Does It Make a Difference If I Have Eye Contact with You or with Your Picture? An ERP Study,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
6, no. 4 (September 1, 2011): 486–94, doi:10.1093/scan/nsq068.

It can bring us back to ourselves and others:
This point was made when the author Sebastian Junger tried to find meaning in years of overseas combat with a group of veterans returned home. His choice was to take a long walk with them in order to share solitude in difficult, intimate conversations. They took a walk across America, “a 300-mile, 400-mile conversation about war, and how it affects you and why so many young men miss it when it's over.” Gisele Regato, “A 300 Mile Walk to Talk About War,” WNYC News, October 23, 2014, http://www.wnyc.org/story/300-mile-walk-talk-about-war.

walking was a kind of shared solitude:
Adam Gopnik writes about walking as a form of Western meditation and shared solitude in “Heaven's Gaits: What We Do When We Walk,”
The New Yorker,
September 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/maga zine/2014/09/01/heavens-gaits. The article reviews Frédéric Gros,
A Philosophy of Walking,
John Howe, trans. (New York: Verso, 2014 [2009]). Gros says, “for solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.”

Thoreau's comments on walking as a way to “shake off the village” are from a June 1, 1862, essay, “Walking,” originally published in
The Atlantic
. They are cited by Arianna Huffington in
Thrive
, 100. Huffington also cites Nilofer Merchant, a Silicon Valley executive who has walking meetings instead of meetings at her desk. There is no phone to distract. In Merchant's TED talk on walking, she calls it “walking the talk.” Nilofer Merchant, “Got a Meeting? Take a Walk,” TED mainstage, February 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/nilofer_merchant_got_a_meeting_take_a_walk?lan guage=en. In a
New York Times
article on walking, quoted by Huffington, Merchant expands: “What I love is that you're literally facing your problem or situation together when you walk side by side with someone. . . . I love that people can't be checking email or Twitter during walking meetings. You're awake to what's happening around you, your senses are heightened and you walk away with something office meetings rarely give you—a sense of joy.” David Hochman, “Hollywood's New Stars: Pedestrians,” August 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/fashion/hollywoods-new-stars-pedestrians.html?page wanted=1&_r=2.

we are very interested indeed:
One survey reports that only 35 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds
will say they are interested in privacy matters in regard to mobile communications, with those over forty years old showing only slightly greater interest. See “Can Data Become a New Currency?,”
Amdocs Survey
, 2013, http://www.amdocs.com/vision/documents/survey-highlights.pdf. But when people were surveyed about a
particular
surveillance activity—“Do you think the government should be able to monitor everyone's email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks?”—52 percent of respondents were against the practice. “Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-Terror Tactic,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 10, 2013, http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/06-10-13%20PRC%20WP%20Surveillance%20Release.pdf.

we don't know how to object:
Sara M. Watson, “Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization,”
The Atlantic
, June 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/data-doppelgangers-and-the-uncanny-valley-of-personalization/372780.

information we share with them:
Jack Balkin, “Information Fiduciaries in the Digital Age,”
Balkinization
(blog), Yale Law School, March 5, 2014, http://balkin.blogspot.com/2014/03/information-fiduciaries-in-digital-age.html, cited in Jonathan Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,”
New Republic
, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

we adapt to rules we actually object to:
One study showed a group of Facebook users how the service decides what does and does not show up on their newsfeed. More than half of the participants began the study unaware that their newsfeed was curated at all. They thought that everything their friends said would show up on the feed. They objected to the curation. But a follow-up showed that once people knew about the “objectionable” rules for curation, their idea of redress was to try to get the curation to work in their favor. They tried to second-guess Facebook. There are many ways to game the system: You can use brand names in your posts so that they get noticed. You can try to increase the number of posts from family members that show up in the newsfeed by remembering to always “like” family posts.

On this, see Christian Sandvig, Karrie G. Karahalios, and Cedric Langbort, “Uncovering Algorithms: Looking Inside the Facebook Newsfeed,” Berkman Luncheon Series, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, July 21, 2014. Full video available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2014/07/sandvigkarahalios. Also see Tarleton Gillespie, citing a personal communication with danah boyd in “The Relevance of Algorithms,”
Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society
, Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, eds. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).

“using parks and gardens as buffers against traffic”:
Evgeny Morozov, “Only Disconnect,”
The New Yorker
, October 28, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/only-disconnect-2.