I was asked to give a presentation on a social issue at our foundation’s
interview. I was confused on what issue should I talk about. ‘Talk about
poverty, gender equality, sanitation and a lot,’ suggested my friends.
I was aware of the issues but never had a proper understanding on those
issues. I chose, ‘the need of conversations in technological space.’
‘Is it a social issue?’ asked my friends.
“Any issue that troubles a lot of people can be a social issue,” I
maintained.
I gave a presentation on the same. I shared on how conversations are
important, how the technology is hindering the process.
Reading this book, “Reclaiming Conversation,” I acknowledge the power of
talk in a digital age and reinstate how there is a need of conversation amidst
technological space.
An excerpt that hooked me on to the book:
Ava Reade, the dean of the school, says that she rarely intervenes in
student social arrangements, but recently she had to. A seventh grader tried to
exclude a classmate from a school social event. Reade called the remiss seventh
grader into her office and asked why it happened. The girl did not have much to
say:
The seventh grader was almost robotic in her response. She said, "I
don't have feelings about this." She could not read the signals that
the other student was hurt. These kids are not cruel. But they are not
emotionally developed.
Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds. The way
they exclude one another is the way eight-year-olds would play. They don’t seem
able to put themselves in the place of other children. They say to other
students: "You can't play with us."
They are not developing that way of
relating where they listen and learn how to look each other and hear each
other.
********
Children are making acquaintances, but their connections seem
superficial.
We are being uncomfortable being alone.
Our conversations are substituted with a lot of connections.
The technological space we are into is hindering us to make
friendships. These days, we do not make friends but add friends in social
media.
We talk a lot. Through mail, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, memes,
stickers, and whatnot.
Aren’t we
talking? Aren’t we connected?
“Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection,
add up to one big gulp of real conversation?”
asked Stephen Colbert, actor, and comedian.
The author says, “No.”
NOTES:
This book is an
examination of interpersonal and intrapersonal communications. Sherry Turkle
cites Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, “I had three chairs in my house; one for
solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
This book is
also divided into three parts:
Single chair for
intrapersonal communication,
Two chairs
concerning the importance of conversations in friendships, families, and
romances,
Three chairs for
interpersonal communication such as in school, work, and politics.
Turkle gathered
data from schools, companies, families, and articulated her research and
expertise in how we are sacrificing our conversation for a mere connection.
What has replaced
our conversations?
Digital communication.
“In the past twenty
years we have seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for
empathy among college
students, most of it within the past ten years. It is a trend that researchers
link to the new presence of digital communications.”
“Online
communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation.
If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control.
And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can
edit and retouch.”
With this editing and
retouching our communications, we are into this Goldilocks effect:
We cannot
get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance- not
too close, not too far, just right.
With this constant
connection, we celebrate technology. “Technology enchants. It makes us
forget what we know about life.”
“We slip into
thinking that always being connected is going to makes us less lonely. But we
are at risk because it is actually the reverse. If we are unable to be alone,
we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they
will only know how to be lonely.”
These days we spend
more time on phone rather than with individuals. We spend more time on social
media rather than in person. Even people
are interested to know stories through social media than in-person. Our social
media presence has become a compulsive performance.
“I spend my time
online wanting to be seen as witty, intelligent, involved, and having the right
ironic distance from everything. Self-reflection should be more about, well,
who I am, warts and all, how I really see myself. I worry that I'm giving up
the responsibility for who I am to how other people see me. I'm not being
rigorous about knowing my own mind, my own thoughts. You get lost in your
performance. On Twitter, on Facebook, I'm geared toward showing my best self,
showing me to be invulnerable or with as little vulnerability as possible.”
It’s easy to text, I
am sorry but, it takes a lot to apologize in person.
“The text "I'm
sorry" means, on the one hand, "I no longer want to have tension with
you; let's be okay," and at the same time says, "I'm not going to be
next to you while you go through your feelings, just let me know when our
troubles are over."
What’s the problem
with digital communication?
“Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance.
When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we
ramp up the volume and velocity of our online connections, we want immediate
answers. To get them, we ask simpler questions; we dumb down our
communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to
a life of constant interruption.”
One Chair: SOLITUDE
& SELF REFLECTION
“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
It is important to be
in solitude.
“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 cannot 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.”
There are so many mediums taking away our solitude. We have our phones,
Facebook, gadgets not, letting us to be ‘ourselves.’
We cannot develop the
capacity for solitude if we don’t have the experience of being “bored” and then
turning with-in rather than to a screen.
The strayed
Self-Reflection:
We are relying on the
numbers and narratives to reflect on ourselves. Today, we are quantifying our
life and becoming an algorithmic self.
“The psycho
analytic self looks to history as it leaves traces in language; the algorithmic
self to what it can track as data points in a time series.”
We contend in the
number of likes and the views. Reflections based on these numbers and
narratives is another whole performance we are performing, running away to be
ourselves.
TWO CHAIRS:
FAMILY, FRIENDSHIP, ROMANCE.
The culture of
conversations in families have changed to group chats, text messages and emails. “Whenever there’s an important thing my dad
wants to discuss, he discusses through the mail.” shared my friend. I could not
realize why the conversation was substituted by mail but, I realized we are
comfortable to stay behind the screen rather than speak face-face.
Conversations helps us
to listen to each other attentively. Adults are failing to teach how to talk to
children.
With various
anecdotes, author shared how the family relations are turning shallow and
people are unable to be vulnerable and expressive.
“Instead of
settling down and figuring out what to say to his daughter, it is easier for the
father to show love by taking pictures and posting them to the network.”
It’s easy to share a
picture with corny caption than to talk to the person and share how much do
they mean to them. It’s easy to tag the person on social media and tell the
world about the person rather than sharing with the person herself.
“A good friend
should keep you off your phone when you are together.”
Whenever we meet our
friends, how often we try to stay away from the phone and give our full attention.
How often we check our phones for emails, updates?
The new age of friendship
are made over social media and the connections are also been done over the
virtual medium.
People appreciate a
talk over social media rather than in-person because the social media works on
our reward loop and keep us high, whereas in-person conversation demands our
attention and empathy.
The reason why we are
empathetic over social media but do not care in reality is because the way we
have created double selves in life. Social media is a performance and in real,
we gotta live. Because of social media
performance, we are forgetting to be empathetic in real.
With such apathy and
no interest in others, what kind of friendships are being made?
The empathy gap is being
built a lot in children. Shall we shun away from technology? No. Let’s accept
that we are vulnerable and start the dialogue to change the way our
technological devices are made
Having such troubled
situations in making friendships, it’s obvious to imagine how terrible are we
in romancing with the help of gadgets.\
Three Chairs: EDUCATION, WORK
Conversation plays an important role in learning. Taking the MOOC as an
example, author shared the importance of conversation. We are celebrating
online education now. In the west, with
an experience of online education for long time, the educators and teachers are
calling out to find a middle line for traditional classrooms and online
education.
Even I was celebrating the distance online education from prestigious universities.
But, the traditional classrooms and the discussions tab on our desktop can never
be the same.
A study has shown how a combination of online and offline education can be
effective.
Regarding conversations
at work, we can reflect on questions, “how often do we reach our phone in the
meetings? How often do we prefer text when we can talk?
There is a lot ‘conversation’
can help us to be empathetic, understanding and maintain healthy relations.
It’s highly
recommended. This book is about what stops us from taking conversations.