![]() We know we have gotten into patterns that diminish us and haven’t decided how to take action. On the contrary, I sometimes think of it as a book about unhappy campers. “Reclaiming Conversation” is not a book of people happily pursuing a new way of life with a mobile technology. And he tells me, “I know this isn’t right.” Now he and his wife have a two-year old, and he tells me that when he gives her a bath, he makes sure the water isn’t too hot, and then he sits on the toilet seat and does mail on his iPhone. A father remembers giving his 11-year-old daughter baths when she was a baby and toddler, talking to her, and remembers this as a most fulfilling thing, something that deepened their bond. Indeed, you write that we “have embarked on a giant experiment in which our children are human subjects.” What are your concerns?Ī: We are doing things to our children that people sense are not right. There is a strong generational element to this issue, since children are growing up in a technological environment their parents did not experience. To the disconnections of our over-connected world, I argue that conversation is the talking cure. How does this happen? The campers talk to each other. In only five days in a sleepaway camp without their phones, empathy levels come back up. There is in fact a 40 percent decline in all the ways we know how to measure empathy among college students during the past twenty years. Or even more simply, experiments show that you can decrease the quality of a conversation and the degree of connection its participants feel toward each other by something as simple as putting a silenced phone on the table between them. The disruptive experience I’m trying to capture is that sense that we are so often only partially in a conversation: If you and I are having lunch, and I put up my hand and say, “Just give me a second, I just want to check my phone.” I argue that this new experience of being together, but also being elsewhere, is undermining our capacity to have the conversations that count. ![]() I would go further: This is what we have to learn how to do, because conversation is essential to our humanity - and to our creativity, our work, and our ability to be in families. We can enjoy and profit from mobile technology and not give up conversation. It’s not an anti-technology book it’s a pro-conversation book. “Reclaiming Conversation” is looking at what that means: Did people really mean it? Yes, and since it was so, the book became a call to action. People were telling me: I’d rather text than talk. “Alone Together” was a report on the state of the field as it was. How did you move from that to “Reclaiming Conversation,” which argues specifically that the erosion in our conversational abilities comes at a huge cost?Ī. Your previous book, “Alone Together” (2011), examined some of the isolating effects of technology. The book has been widely praised: In The New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote that “ Turkle’s argument derives its power from the breadth of her research and the acuity of her psychological insight.” MIT News recently spoke with Turkle about the book. Her new book, “Reclaiming Conversation,” contends that we need meaningful conversations in our families, classrooms, and workplaces, to help us develop self-knowledge, empathy, and intellectual skills. To Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, the decline in thoughtful face-to-face interaction constitutes an epidemic. Face it: Many conversations today involve distracted people looking at their phones, not their companions.
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