Relearning How to Talk in the Age of Smartphone Addiction
Sherry Turkle studies how we relate to our devices, and thinks it’s high time we start talking to each other again.
Sherry Turkle, a
professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, has studied
our relationship with technology for decades. While some of her earlier works
highlighted the ways in which technology could help us construct
self-identities, her more recent writing warns that we are overinvesting in our
devices and underinvesting in ourselves and each other.
In Alone
Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,
published in 2011, Turkle explored the implications of replacing real intimacy
with digital connection. Her new book, Reclaiming
Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, continues that
thread. Turkle uses Thoreau’s three
chairs - one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for
society - as a framework, describing how our devices disrupt conversation and
healthy development at every stage.
When we turn to our phones constantly, we
deny ourselves the capacity for solitude and identity development. This, in
turn, blunts our ability to form healthy relationships. And vice versa: when we
text instead of talk, or look at our devices instead of each other, we diminish
our abilities to relate to other people as well as ourselves. Turkle ends the
book with a discussion of what it means that we have begun to relate to
machines as sentient beings when, in fact, they have no feelings, no
experiences, no empathy, no idea what it means to be human.
Turkle—a
psychoanalytically trained psychologist who founded and directs the MIT
Initiative on Technology and Self—is no Luddite. But she argues for
moderation, and for a deep look at how over-invested we’ve become in new
technology. She is also optimistic that we are at just the right moment for
this rceexamination, and for a return to conversation, reflection, and real
intimacy. Turkle and I began our phone conversation by hailing that old thing,
the landline.
Jessica Gross interviews Sherry Turkle
... One thing I’d like to
say that is very much on my mind is about the first responses to my book. There
seem to be two over-arching misunderstandings about technology and the
construction of self. One way that technology interferes with us is that we use
it when we are together, and so it interferes with our communication with each
other, which is the “alone together” argument I’ve made for years. And then
technology also interferes because we use it when we’re alone.
What people seem to be arguing in the early response to this book is that, in
this case, it shouldn’t be counted as interfering with our sociality, because
we’re just using it to fill in this kind interstitial time. You know, “Give it
a break, because that time was down time. It wasn’t social time.” They’re
saying, “Well, Turkle doesn’t understand that if you’re using technology when
you’re alone, it’s not interfering with sociality, it’s not interfering with
conversation.” But fundamentally, this book is making the argument that it is.
That solitude and conversation, time alone and time together, are fundamentally
linked.
Time alone is when we
create a self that will be prepared to be fully social. That is, a self that
will be able to know itself as individual enough to be able to be with other
people as an other. So saying that if people use technology when they’re alone,
it’s not taking away from social time, is not just missing my point, it’s
missing the point about how in fact a self is constituted. It’s not like this
is my invention. [Laughter]
And the second
misunderstanding came in another review of
the book, which said I don’t talk enough about apps that help us focus our
attention. I’m thinking, I want children to be able to focus their attention
because they are adults talking to them, not because there are apps buzzing to
remind them to get off their phones! I don’t talk about apps that will help us
focus our attention because I want us thinking about conversation as a way to
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