Tag Archives: Sherry Turkle

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Tuning Out of Public Spaces

Positive situational awareness means someone knows what is going on around them.

There is a walker in front of my house that I see almost  every day. He is clearly diligent in getting some exercise. But here’s the thing: he walks, head down, staring at his right hand. Though he passes others in neighboring yards and on the narrow sidewalk, he seems mesmerized by the screen he is holding. I expect that eventually he will fly off the edge of the curb one day when gravity reminds him that multitasking can be dangerous.  Walking and reading at the same time are not really companionable activities. This pattern repeated on most pedestrian routes everywhere is a reminder of a minor violation of the social contract. Simply put, we should first notice others and acknowledge them: not every time and not all the time, but sometimes. The norm might be a verbal greeting, or at least a friendly glance.

What have we lost when it is no longer routine to affirm someone in their presence?  It’s a signal of something bigger that has been building for several decades.

This awareness of people passing within our personal space ties into the useful idea of “situational awareness,” which applies to everyone from airline pilots to close encounters on a sidewalk. Positive situational awareness requires that a person notice what is going on in the real world around them: perhaps noticing a pedestrian about to step in front of an oncoming car, a baby verging near the edge of a swimming pool,  or even a large boat about to crash into a quay.

We were not made to be mentally immobilized by our portable devices. Such is our fractured attention that we miss experiences where we might engage. I’ve told this story before: a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon through brush-covered flat prairie, suddenly coming upon the breathtaking gorges extending to valley floors too deep to see. This miraculous break in the landscape of the high desert can leave one speechless. I’ve seen first-time viewers break into tears at the awesome sight. Within a few feet of the sheer rim we noticed a family pulled over in their car.  They have apparently just arrived. The parents walk to a nearby precipice to take in the wonder of it all, but their children are still in the car watching a video.

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The relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters.

There is a bigger point here. We are still in the first generations of a tectonic shift in how humans interact. Roughly speaking, for thousands of years communication with others in our species was direct and unmediated. Human groups lived together and constructed social selves from daily experience. But especially after the birth of commercial radio in 1920, our relationships with each other began to rapidly change.

I’ve probably buried the lede here. But in the history of the species, the advent of radio is a key thershold that has helped initiate us into what is now the norm of trucated communication. For better or worse, it put listeners on just the receiving end of mediated messages. No need to react, respond, or acknowledge. A mediated message is filtered through some mechanical-electrical tool and often stripped of the nuances of face-to-face communication. True, books, letters and newspapers existed decades earlier. But in the west radio was more revolutionary than evolutionary. It was  the first widespread medium where a family could be in the same room, but left to the stimuli of an external source that isolates the consciousness. This relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters. In media analyst Sherry Turkle’s words, “we expect more from technology and less from each other.” And so we have a acquired a fairly recent incapacity. Media and even portable phones have retrained us to be more comfortable in our own heads. Like that walker I first mentioned, many of us seem to be more solitary souls, saving full and rich interaction only when it is necessary.

 

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Is Basic Conversational Fluency Atrophying?

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We are kidding ourselves if we believe “social media” substitutes for communication in a social world.

It seems that many of us are losing our will or abilities to sustain a genuine two-sided conversation. We now seem to be coaxed into being an audience for the rambles of acquaintances who are desperate for acknowledgment.  When did the idea of engaging in a true exchange with another become so problematic?   The experience is familiar: after an extended time with someone do we notice that we were little more than spectators to their thoughts and feelings.  Some have even mastered the kind of “no breath” ramble that discourages interruptions.

It has always been true that an evening with others might be hijacked by an acquaintance that needs to be heard. Whatever curiosity that could have once existed has been swamped by the conversational equivalent of a filibuster.

This kind of domination of what could be a genuine exchange can come from people in all age ranges. But my experience is that it is most pronounced among older adults who seem to exhibit of a person with fewer chances to have conversational partners. Dustin Hoffman gives us an example in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected )(2017).  His character, Harold, is a needy and aging sculptor, mostly in denial that he is no longer a hot in the fickle New York art scene. Baumbach has given Harold a bundle of declarations spoken into a void. Even his wife and adult children have tuned out.

It’s an old axiom in my field that opinion-giving is a common feature of the male communication style. But I see it more as becoming an equal-opportunity trait. With many exceptions, age seems to drain away interest in others. And so, conversations can devolve into long and unsolicited monologues: reports about what a person has been reading, commentaries or sermons offered but not invited, old stories retold, or the recitation of events in their extended families. Many seem to have forgotten how to share the conversational stage.  At the end of some of these longer performances it is easy to feel like a witness rather than a participant.

If it’s possible that advancing age makes us less willing to do the work of fully engaging with others, the other end of the life cycle poses its own challenges to the idea of genuine conversation. The primary cause seems to be increased self absorption, decreasing opportunities to listen to others with accuracy.

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As noted here before, 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, X, 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, self-contained and intentionally isolating. Many seem to be struggling to acquire the social intelligence needed to display empathy with others or exercise a degree of self-monitoring.

We are kidding ourselves if we believe the false equivalency that lets texting or “social media” substitute for living in the social world.

Turkle documents 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 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 grow up using their phones to text and messages, these studies may be describing losses they don't feel.

It’s worth remembering that forms of mediated communication are usually not additive, but reductive. Texts, e-mails, and even video games require various fundamentals of communication, but almost always take something away.  It may be immediacy.  It may be full interactivity or feedback. But the most consequential of all is a pale approximation of intimacy.

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