When did the idea of a direct conversation with another become so problematic?
For those of us who study human communication, direct face to face conversation is usually the fundamental model for understanding all other forms. When two or more people are in the same space addressing each other, their exchanges are likely to contain all of the critical yardsticks for measuring successful interaction. These essential processes include awareness of the other, the potential for immediate and unfiltered reciprocity in an exchange, and access to all the visual and verbal feedback that comes with direct person-to-person contact. All other channels of communication—including the devices that extend the range of human connectivity—alter or diminish one or more of one of these processes. And though it may not seem like it, altering or reducing a conversational asset is a big deal.
Until the advent of widespread electric telegraphy in the 1850s direct communication with another in the same space has always anchored human communities. The very idea of a sociology of human relationships is mostly predicated on the expectation that we have direct and real-time access to each other.
Even so, the default model for understanding how we maintain our social nature is increasingly at odds with the ways we now live. What has changed most dramatically are the preferences of younger Americans who are less eager to seek out conversation as a problem-solving tool.
We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets “social media” substitute for living in the social world.
The most interesting research on this subject is from Sherry Turkle at M.I.T., who has been documenting the well-known drift of the young away from direct interaction to alternate channels that enlarge connectivity but diminish communication richness (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015). The platforms are well-known, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other forms. Under the misnomer of “connectivity,” changes in technology and adjustments to them are slowly schooling younger generations to prefer communication that is mediated and intentionally isolating. We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets “social media” substitute for living in the social world.
Turkle notes a wholesale flight away from direct conversation and toward electronic messaging. In the words of many of her interviewees, meeting directly with someone is “risky,” “too emotional,” “an interruption,” and “anxiety producing.” As a high school senior she interviewed observed, “What’s wrong with conversation? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation! It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you are going to say.”
Responses like these suggest a desire to escape the burdens of acquiring the essential rudiments of what psychologists sometimes call “social intelligence,” meaning the ability to navigate through many essential and unavoidable relationships that unfold in real time.
It has always been true that some conversations are difficult. But this kind of face-work is also the essential work of a complex adult life. As Turkle notes,
Many of the things we all struggle with in love and work can be helped by conversation. Without conversation, studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled. We are diminished, in retreat. But to generations that grew up using their phones to text and messages, these studies may be describing losses they don't feel. They didn't grow up with a lot of face-to-face talk.
Of course there is always a risk among the old to assume that progress has been overtaken by regression. To paraphrase the Oscar Hammerstein lyric from Oklahoma!, it’s easy to believe that “things have gone about as far as they can go.” Even so, it’s worth remembering that forms of mediated communication are usually not additive, but reductive. Texts, e-mails, and even video games start with various fundamentals of communication, but almost always take something away. It may be immediacy. It may be full interactivity. But the most consequential of all is a reduced intimacy that happens when humans are not in the same space breathing the same air.
The truth is that we don’t really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society as a whole.
–Paul Krugman
A number of indicators have come together in the last year to suggest that the optimism that has flowed from the American faith in a better future is drying up. Poll data from Pew and others confirm that about half of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Moreover, wage growth especially in the middle class has stalled. There’s even a vocal minority in the Congress that believes federalism is so broken that the best remedy is simply to shut the government down, at least until budget reforms are made. Add in the current presidential campaign with its apocalyptic rhetoric, and the cloud we are under looks ominous indeed.
To be sure, some of this rhetoric of despair is a common pattern for political challengers, especially if regaining the prize of the White House seems far from certain. Even so, the mood of gloom that permeates most of the corners of our public life seems broad and deep, typified by descriptions of current presidential actions in draconian language usually reserved for America’s Twentieth Century enemies: German Nazism and Soviet-style Communism.
Of special interest is new evidence from various sources indicating earlier-than-expected mortality for white middle-aged Americans in the center and southern tier of the United States. Citizens in the nation’s interior who are struggling to remain in the middle class are dying prematurely. Economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case recently reported that the death rates for whites 45 to 54 who never attended college increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2014. This rise is in contrast to rates in other ethnic categories that are slowly falling.
The immediate causes are suicide and the abuse of drugs and alcohol. The underlying causes are more intriguing and obscure.
The data has interested economists like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman because there seems to be a possible correlation with what he describes as the “harrowing out” of the middle class. Wages in all but the top sectors of the economy are flat. Corporate consolidations continue to squeeze out “excess” workers. And good paying industrial jobs have mostly gone away, replaced in some places by the kind of piecework and part-time employment offered by Uber, Wal-Mart, universities, and other “new economy” employers who want workers, but without providing the traditional benefits that come with full-time employment.
Finding true first causes for these rising mortality rates is a tricky business. But understanding the consequences in terms of how people register their opinions is far easier. Consider the word cloud at the top of this piece from the Gallup Organization. It represents common terms heard when Americans were asked several years ago to describe their government. To no one’s surprise pessimism reigns.
Similarly, blogger Sean Carroll’s own cloud of words commonly in the GOP represent their own unease about where the country is headed:
This generalized angst is now regularly on view at meetings such as the annual CPAC conference of movement conservatives. Ben Carson speaking in 2013 sounded as if the President of the United States was actually out to sabotage the durable roots of the republic.
Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.
Again, we would expect the party out of power to emphasize concerns and problems. But political rhetoric usually comes with some built-in optimism, as in Ronald Reagan’s constant reassurance that “America’s best days lie ahead.”
Beyond economic and political motivations for this reign of despair, I would add a secondary cause that has unleashed its own demons across the culture. Although I’ve straightened the arrows of causation somewhat for the sake of space, its clear that one condition that has changed in recent years is that under-occupied members of society are less able to keep the dispiriting dregs of human conduct at bay: a significant effect of media that contribute to a weakening of our faith in an ordered world.
Here’s what I mean. The presence of ubiquitous connectivity and growing hours of screen time means that we cannot easily do the gatekeeping that was more easily achieved when roots in the community were deeper and accessibility to the outside world was less constant. Think of 1980 before digital media, trolls and journalistic bottom-feeding. While media were once heralded for expanding our horizons, we now function in white-out conditions of over communication that obliterate them. Given all the bizarre forms of clickbait that pull us in, we now “live”–if that’s the word–everywhere and nowhere. To speak in older 20th Century terms, we no longer let ourselves stay very long in the secure “real time-space frame” of family, work and friends.
Endless evocations of the absurd have their effects. We spend more time with “virtual” friends, virtual news, and the attenuated grievances of those on the margins who are given their provocative moments to act out in front of a camera. All of this has weakened our anchors in the more nurturing world of direct interaction. A person who has planted him or herself in front of a computer for the requisite six hours knows all too well the feeling of creeping isolation that comes with the supposed benefits of hyper-connectivity.
We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets “social media” substitute for living in the social world.
