WE live in a technological
universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed
conversation for mere connection. At home, families sit together, texting and
reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and
shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students
tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with
someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years,
I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people
of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that
the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not
only what we do, but also who we are. We’ve become accustomed to a new way of
being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another,
and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize
our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we
value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to
the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Our colleagues want to go
to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some
this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as
we are constantly connected to one another. A businessman laments that
he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t
call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy
on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the
truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But
I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”
A 16-year-old boy who
relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday,
someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
In today’s workplace, young
people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing
earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech
start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our
own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior
partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates
lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And
then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks
into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet,
a quiet that does not ask to be broken.
In the silence of
connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people —
carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use
technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not
too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.
Texting and e-mail and
posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if
we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the
body. Not too much, not too little — just right. Human relationships are rich;
they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with
technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But
it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over
time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think
that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real
conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have
their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how
valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.
Connecting in sips may work
for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about
you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as
well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we
tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that
mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we
are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.
FACE-TO-FACE conversation
unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital
devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of
online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one
another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most
important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news.
Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d
by.”
And we use conversation
with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from
conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection.
These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have
little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in
conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook
friends except connect.
As we get used to being
shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost
willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the
future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides
to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program
instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in
its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital
assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more
like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.
During the years I have
spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often
heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps
explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each
provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all
reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about
us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to
be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.
One of the most haunting
experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots,
designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older
woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be
looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman
was comforted.
