Reclaiming Conversation (8 page)

I
explore the flight from conversation in digital culture by looking at big questions and small details. I begin with the conversations of solitude, romance, friendship, and family life and end with our desire to chat with robots. I report on the current state of conversation in schools, universities, and corporations, looking at children as they develop and adults as they love, learn, and work. In every case, I describe our vulnerability to settling for mere connection—why it tempts—and I make the case for reclaiming the richness of conversation.

Reclaiming conversation won't be easy. We resist: It sometimes seems that we want to be taken away from the conversations that count. So I go to meetings where laptops are open and phones turned on. Yet the participants admit that constant interruptions are interfering with group work. When I ask the participants why they all continue to bring their devices to meetings, they say, “For emergencies.” I inquire further, and they admit that it's not so much about emergencies—they're bored, or they see an opportunity to double down on their emails. And other reasons come up: Some feel so much pressure to outsmart their peers that when they feel they can't, they turn to their phones, pretending to do something else more “urgent” than anything that could be going on in
the meeting. And sometimes the idea of “emergencies” on their phones is a strategy to step away from each other and their differences, to defer them for another day, another meeting.

And sometimes, I am told, they actively want to avoid the spontaneity of conversation. The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright. A college senior doesn't go to his professors' office hours. He will correspond with his teachers only through email. The student explains that if he sees his professors in person, he could get something “wrong.” Ever since ninth grade, when his preparations to go to an Ivy League college began in earnest, he and his parents have worked on his getting everything “right.” If he wasn't getting enough playing time on a team, his father went in to see the coach. When his College Board scores weren't high enough, he had personal tutors. He had no interest in science, but his high school guidance counselor decided that a summer program in neurobiology was what he needed to round out his college application. Now he is three years through that Ivy education and hoping for law school. He is still trying to get things right. “When you talk in person,” he says, “you are likely to make a slip.”

He thinks his no-office-hours policy is a reasonable strategy. He tells me that our culture has “zero tolerance” for making mistakes. If politicians make “slips,” it haunts them throughout their careers. And usually they make these mistakes while they are talking. He says, “I feel as though everyone in my generation wants to write things out—I certainly do—because then I can check it over and make sure it is okay. I don't want to say a wrong thing.”

Studying conversation today brings forth many comments like these. They encourage a fresh look at our cultural expectations of getting everything “right.” And a fresh look at what we accomplish when we communicate perfection as a value to our children. Studying conversation suggests that it is time to rediscover an interest in the spontaneous. It suggests that it is time to rediscover an interest in the points of view of those with whom we disagree. And it suggests that we slow down enough to listen to them, one at a time.

These are not easy assignments. But I am hopeful about our moment. Some of the most “plugged in” people in America find conversation blocked and struggle for ways to reclaim it. Corporations devise strategies for workplace teams built on face-to-face meetings. They ask employees to take a break and not check their email after business hours. Or they insist that employees
take a “smartphone-free” night
during the business week. One CEO sets up pre-workday breakfasts where there are no phones or scheduled meetings. Others begin the day with technology-free “stand-up meetings.” There are new corporate programs for emotional self-help in an age of overconnection: I meet executives on technology “time-outs,”
Sabbaths, and sabbaticals
.

Even Silicon Valley parents who work for social media companies tell me that they send their children to technology-free schools in the hope that this will give their children greater emotional and intellectual range. Many were surprised to learn that Steve Jobs did not encourage his own children's use of iPads or iPhones. His biographer reports that in Jobs's family, the focus was on conversation: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things.
No one ever pulled out an iPad
or computer.” Our technological mandarins don't always live the life they build for others. They go to vacation spots deemed “device-free” (that don't allow phones, tablets, or laptops). This means that America has curious new digital divides. In our use of media, there are the haves and have-nots. And then there are those who have-so-much-that-they-know-when-to-put-it-away.

Sometimes people sense that there is a flight from conversation but want technology to restore it for them. When I give talks about the importance of conversation for young children, sometimes teachers in the audience will come up at the end of my presentation to say that they wholeheartedly agree (“Kids can't talk anymore”) but go on to tell me how they are using messaging on the iPad to try to increase student sociability. Apps for sociability may increase sociability on apps; what children are missing, however, is an ease with each other face-to-face, the context in which empathy is born. Indeed, empathy, too, will have its
own technologies: The researcher who found a 40 percent decrease in empathy in college students over the past twenty years has begun to develop apps for smartphones to
encourage empathic habits
.

Clearly, her finding about the decrease in empathy did not feel like something she wanted to accept. It felt like something that called for action. But does a decrease in teenage empathy suggest the need for an empathy app? Or does it suggest that we make more time to talk to teenagers?

Sometimes it seems easier to invent a new technology than to start a conversation.

Every new technology offers an opportunity to ask if it serves our human purposes. From there begins the work of making technology better serve these purposes. It took generations to get nutrition labels on food; it took generations to get speed limits on roads and seat belts and air bags into cars. But food and transportation technology are safer because all of these are now in place. In the case of communications technology, we have just begun.

In every encounter, we need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes face-to-face conversation is not the right tool for a particular job. But having the whole person before you is reliably the best way to begin. It gives you the most information to decide which communication tools you need as you move forward. But what I've found is that once people have texting, chat, and email available, they stick with them even when they suspect that these are not the right tools for the job. Why? They are convenient. They make us feel in control. But
when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable
and less in control, our relationships, creativity, and productivity thrive.

We are at a crossroads: So many people say they have no time to talk, really talk, but all the time in the world, day and night, to connect. When a moment of boredom arises, we have become accustomed to making it go away by searching for something—sometimes
anything
—on our phones. The next step is to take the same moment and respond by searching within ourselves. To do this, we have to cultivate the self as a resource. Beginning with the capacity for solitude.

I Share, Therefore I Am

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That's just
being a person
.

—LOUIS C.K., ACTOR AND COMEDIAN

I
n 2013, Louis C.K. brought the necessity for solitude, especially for children, to a late-night television audience. He began by telling Conan O'Brien how he explains to his two daughters why they can't have cell phones. He set the stage by making clear that when it comes to his children, he takes the long view: “I'm not raising the children. I'm raising the grown-ups that they're going to be.” For him, phones are “toxic, especially for kids.”

They don't look at people when they talk to them. And they don't build the empathy. You know, kids are mean. And it's because they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, “You're fat.” And then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, “Ooh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that.” . . . But when they write “You're fat,” then they just go, “Mmm, that was fun. I like that.” . . .

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That's just being a person. . . . Because underneath everything
in your life there is that thing, that empty, forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and you're alone. It's down there. And sometimes when things clear away and you're not watching and you're in your car and you start going, Ooh, here it comes that I'm alone, like it starts to visit on you just like this sadness. Life is tremendously sad. . . . That's why we text and drive. Pretty much 100 percent of people driving are texting. And they're killing and murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking their life and ruining another because they don't want to be alone for a second. . . . I was alone in my car and a Bruce Springsteen song came on . . . and I heard it and it gave me a kind of fall, back-to-school-depression feeling and it made me feel really sad and so I went, “Okay, I'm getting really sad,” so I had to get the phone and write “Hi” to, like, fifty people. . . . Anyway, I started to get that sad feeling and reached for the phone and then I said, “You know what: Don't. Just be sad. Just stand in the way of it and let it hit you like a truck.”

So I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much and it was beautiful. . . . Sadness is poetic. . . . You are lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings because when you let yourself have sad feelings your body has like antibodies that come rushing in to meet the sad feelings. But because we don't want that first feeling of sad, we push it away with our phones. So you never feel completely happy or completely sad. You just feel kind of satisfied with your products. And then . . . you die.

So that's why I
don't want to get a phone for my kids
.

S
olitude doesn't necessarily mean a lack of activity. You know you are experiencing solitude when what you are doing brings you back to yourself. The writer Susan Cain has persuasively argued that solitude is
important for introverts
and that introverts are a significant number
among us. Louis C.K. provides poetic support for an even broader argument. Solitude is important for everyone, including the most extroverted people. It's the time you become familiar and comfortable with yourself. And developing the capacity for solitude is one of the most important tasks of childhood, every childhood.

It's the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don't need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy. And this is why solitude marks the beginning of conversation's virtuous circle. If you are comfortable with yourself, you can put yourself in someone else's place.

In his soliloquy on solitude, Louis C.K. raises a concern that lies beneath the surface of so many anxious conversations about children and technology. What if children are so absorbed in their phones that the alchemy of solitude and the capacity for empathy doesn't take place? Without empathy, the comedian points out, we don't understand the impact we have when we bully others because we don't see them as people like ourselves.

Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience. It is only when we are alone with our thoughts—not reacting to external stimuli—that we engage that part of the brain's basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past. This is the “
default mode network
.” So, without solitude, we can't construct a stable sense of self. Yet children who grow up digital have always had something external to respond to. When they go online, their minds are not wandering but rather are captured and divided.

These days, we may mistake time on the net for solitude. It isn't. In fact, solitude is challenged by our habit of turning to our screens rather than inward. And it is challenged by our
culture of continual sharing
. People who grew up with social media will often say that they don't feel like themselves; indeed, they sometimes can't
feel
themselves, unless they
are posting, messaging, or texting. Sometimes people say that they need to share a thought or feeling in order to think it, feel it. This is the sensibility of “I share, therefore I am.” Or otherwise put: “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

With this sensibility we risk
building a false self
, based on performances we think others will enjoy. In Thoreau's terms,
we live too “thickly
,” responding to the world around rather than first learning to know ourselves.

In recent years, psychologists have learned more about how creative ideas come from the
reveries of solitude
. When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive. For some, this goes against cultural expectations. American culture
tends to worship sociality
. We have
wanted
to believe that we are our most creative during “brainstorming” and “groupthink” sessions. But this turns out not to be the case. New ideas are more likely to emerge from
people thinking on their own
. Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations.

When children grow up with time alone with their thoughts, they feel a certain ground under their feet. Their imaginations bring them comfort. If children always have something outside of themselves to respond to, they don't build up this resource. So it is not surprising that today young people become anxious if they are alone without a device. They are likely to say they are bored. From the youngest ages they have been diverted by structured play and the shiny objects of digital culture.

W
e have embarked on a giant experiment in which our children are the human subjects.

Breast-feeding mothers, fathers pushing strollers—their phones are rarely out of sight. New studies correlate the growing number of cell
phones and the
rise of playground accidents
because at the park, parents and caretakers are paying attention to phones.

In every culture, young children want the objects of grown-up desire. So our children tell us they want phones and tablets, and, if they can afford it, very few parents say no. In parental slang, giving a smartphone to quiet your toddler in the rear seat of the car is known as the “passback.”

In a moment of quiet, children have an alternative to turning within. And they are taken away from human faces and voices, because we let screens do jobs that people used to do—for example, reading to children and playing games with them. Checkers with your grandparents is an occasion to talk; checkers with a computer program is an occasion to strategize and perhaps be allowed to win. Screens serve up all kinds of educational, emotional, artistic, and erotic experiences, but they don't encourage solitude and they don't teach the richness of face-to-face conversation.

A fourteen-year-old girl sums up her feelings about spending an hour on Facebook: “Even if it is just seeing the ‘likes' on things I posted, I feel that I've accomplished something.” What has she accomplished? Time on Facebook makes a predictable outcome (if you post a likable photograph you will get “likes”) feel like an achievement. Online, we become accustomed to the idea of nearly guaranteed results, something that the ups and downs of solitude can't promise. And, of course, time with people can't promise it either.

When children have experience in conversation, they learn that practice never leads to perfect but that perfect isn't the point. But perfect can be the goal in a simulation—in a computer game, for example. If you are tutored by simulation, you may become fearful of not being in control even when control is not the point.

An eight-year-old boy is in a park, his back against a large tree. He is engrossed in his shiny object—a small tablet computer, a recent present. He plays a treasure-hunt game that connects him with a network of players all over the world. The boy bites his lip in concentration as his
fingers do their work. From the point of view of the other children in the park, the boy is carrying a D
O
N
OT
D
ISTURB
sign. His focus marks him as unavailable to join in a round of Frisbee, maybe, or a race to climb the monkey bars. This is not a day he will accept such an invitation, or make one himself. This is not a day he will learn to ask questions of other children or listen to their answers. And most of the adults at the park are staring at screens; the eight-year-old is connected in the game, but in the park, he is very much alone.

Yet unlike time in nature or with a book, where his mind might wander, the experience of his online game drives him back to the task at hand. He masters the rules of a virtual treasure hunt but doesn't get to hang by his knees on a jungle gym, contemplating the patterns in an upside-down winter sky.

Whereas screen activity tends to rev kids up, the concrete worlds of modeling clay, finger paints, and building blocks slow them down. The physicality of these materials—the sticky thickness of clay, the hard solidity of blocks—offers a very real resistance that gives children time to think, to use their imaginations, to make up their own worlds.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a specialist in adolescent development, wrote that children thrive when they are given
time and stillness
. The shiny objects of today's childhood demand time and interrupt stillness.

Of course, there are many ways to use the computer that encourage children to work creatively. One example is when children don't simply play computer games but learn to program so that they can
build their own games
. But when we expect to see children at screens, that becomes the new normal and we stop noticing the details. We stop noticing exactly what is on our children's screens. What we need to do is stop seeing child and screen as natural partners. Then, we can step back and notice what exactly is on those screens. Then, we can talk about what we want childhood to accomplish.

H
ow can the capacity for solitude be cultivated? With attention and respectful conversation.

Children develop the capacity for solitude in the presence of
an attentive other
. Consider the silences that fall when you take a young boy on a quiet walk in nature. The child comes to feel increasingly aware of what it is to be alone in nature, supported by being “with” someone who is introducing him to this experience. Gradually, the child takes walks alone. Or imagine a mother giving her two-year-old daughter a bath, allowing the girl's reverie with her bath toys as she makes up stories and learns to be alone with her thoughts, all the while knowing her mother is present and available to her. Gradually, the bath, taken alone, is a time when the child is comfortable with her imagination. Attachment enables solitude.

So we practice being “alone with”—and, if successful, end up with a self peopled by those who have mattered most. Hannah Arendt talks about the solitary person as free to keep himself company. He is not lonely, but always accompanied, “together with himself.” For Arendt, “All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the
dialogue of thought
.”

Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: “
Language
 . . . has created the word ‘loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude' to express the glory of being alone.”
Loneliness is painful
, emotionally and even physically, born from a “want of intimacy” when we need it most, in early childhood. Solitude—the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone—is built from successful human connection at just that time. But if we don't have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If
we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

Recently, I was working on my computer during a train ride from Boston to New York, passing through a snowy Connecticut landscape. I wouldn't have known this but for the fact that I looked up when I walked to the dining car to get a coffee. As I did, I noted that every other adult on the train was staring at a screen. We deny ourselves the benefits of solitude because we see the time it requires as a resource to exploit. Instead of using time alone to think (or not think), we think of filling it with digital connection.