by a psychologist, author, and professor at M.I.T. named Sherry Turkle, who I have been following with interest. She is quite divergent from her colleagues in her views on technology and the dangers they are posing right now to humanity.
Some time ago, she was on the other side of the fence in praising the advances of technology, but now she is singing a quite different tune. She has been outspoken on the topic of why our technology is making us less human and is actually changing who we really are as people.
She has been featured on ABC, CBS, NPR, and TED talks as well. She by no means has the agreement of others in her field, but she continues her line of thinking with gusto, which is why I like her. Here's her piece:
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.
And so many people found this amazing. Like the
sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those
who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we
have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have
embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as
sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with
a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost
confidence that we will be there for one another?
WE expect more from technology and less from one
another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of
companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you
devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we
can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be
alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be
solved.
When people are alone, even for a few moments, they
fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure,
and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.
Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use
technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re
having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now
our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like
ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our
ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude,
we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though
we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile
selves.
We think constant connection will make us feel less
lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more
likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know
only how to be lonely.
I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it,
I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the
kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can
demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same
thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time
to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual
Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of
all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to
listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited
moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal
ourselves to one another.
I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for
decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago,
people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and
at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even
when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own
devices.
So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s
start the conversation.
Here's more from Sherry on this topic: http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/techself/
Six kids? Regardless of your profession, it’s impossible to be a good parent to six kids. Not enough hours in the day.
