Are we hopelessly hooked on digital media? People like me, who have cell phones but seldom use them but check email and rely on the internet daily, are not; but all around me I see people obsessed with their smartphones.
Americans spend about five hours a day on their digital media, most of it on mobile devices. Students at Baylor University, according to one survey, said they spent ten hours a day using their cell phones, but that number may be low.
On average, Americans check their phones 221 times a day; and a Gallop Poll last year reported that people checked their phones less often than their friends.
The data comes courtesy of a review-article by Jacob Weisberg (in the New York Review of Books) on the latest book by Sherry Turkle, the MIT researcher who has been studying the psychological effect of social media on behavior, including conversation.
Reclaiming Conversation (Turkle's important book is not anti-technology but presents a wake-up call to the 21st century, contending that the communications revolution of the past two decades has degraded the quality of human relationships. We all know about parents distracted from their children or people driving while texting or eating dinner with the smart phone replacing live talk. I remember teaching a college literature class where, as if to avoid eye contact with me, most of the students were looking at their laptops, perhaps checking emails or material unrelated to the discussion. We were in separate worlds.
The effect of the smart phone on dating is one of the many areas of concern to researchers like Turkle: how can young people develop a relationship if they are mainly absorbed in the messages and music of their cell phones? If they feel disengaged from busy parents and teachers, they might also be alienated from friends and partners--and from solitude.
As Jonathan Franzen has written (in a piece praising the work of Turkle), conversation requires solitude because "in solitude we learn to think for ourselves and develop a stable sense of self, which is essential for taking other people as they are."
So the issues raised by the addiction to digital media are serious: a loss of solitude, of empathy, of self-reflection, of genuine relationships. I was shocked to read in the Weisberg review that many young people never speak to one another on smart phones: they prefer to type text messages.
How sad that fear dominates communication, hampering interpersonal connections. People walking down the street prefer to look at their smartphones, thus avoiding eye contact with others and feeling safer, presumably. Are they so fearful of human interaction--or so bored--that they need the constant reassurance or stimulation of their ever-present mobile devices?
Seventy percent of those under age 25 contacted by the Pew survey said that cell phones make them feel freer, and fifty percent said they use their phones to avoid contact with others. I would think they would not feel freer but enslaved. I worry that their inner lives, lacking time for empathy and unable to be present to others--to listen--will never develop in a mature way.
No doubt it's too early to draw too many firm conclusions from the current technological revolution, but the danger signs are clear.
Franzen, who calls Twitter irresponsible, echoes Turkle's thesis that it's time to act like adults and put technology in its place. This means that the devices we create are at our service; we do not serve them. And that people of any age must make time to be alone, to be personal, to be human: that is, to be fully present to those around us.
Showing posts with label Sherry Turkle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sherry Turkle. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Monday, October 26, 2015
Listening and Conversing
My wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, has an interesting insight on the relation of reading and listening. As an inveterate reader of fiction from early childhood, then an English major, she found when, as an adult, she worked as a counselor, that the skill she had acquired over the years in paying close attention to the flow of a narrative helped her greatly as she listened to clients and their stories.
In reading fiction, we put our own "issues" aside for a while and let ourselves be absorbed in discerning the motivation of the characters we encounter: we lose ourselves, as it were, as we pay attention--the key point here--to what the characters say and do and to why they do it. So reading novels becomes not only an exercise in interiority but an essential skill in dealing with people.
So often, it seems to me, people meet and fail to connect at a deeper level. I notice this quite often with most of the people I know: we meet at a restaurant, and although they might show perfunctory interest in what I am doing, their focus in on themselves; and when I do talk about my life or activities, they fail to pay close attention; they seem distracted, unaccustomed to following the short narrative I am unfolding, perhaps because they are mainly concerned with their own ideas.
As a result, the encounter is superficial, and I come away unappreciated. I know several people who, after more than twenty years of seeing me, never really get to know me because they fail to pay attention. They don't know how to listen as well as talk, how to ask questions to further the conversation.
In fact, there is often no conversation or mutual exchange at all, merely an exchange of information, which can be pleasant but forgettable. We have not nourished each other.
It seems from my observations of the British royal family (and other such celebrities) that they have mastered the art of the polite question, putting people at ease with a series of questions while providing no answers of their own. The result is not a real conversation, but the technique of asking questions of the other is a skill seldom practiced, in my experience, when people get together.
If reading fiction provides essential background to following someone's story during a conversation, then it seems to me that asking a few questions is not a matter of politeness but a basic part of what it is to converse.
The limits of conversation is the subject of several books I have looked at, most recently Sherry Turkle's "Reclaiming Conversation." She provides abundant examples of people in our technological age who have "sacrificed conversation for mere connection." Her key question is: Does our passion for smart phones and other technology help us avoid genuine encounter? The answer seems self-evident.
Turkle makes the point that to grow and love and understand oneself and the world around us, we must converse, not merely send Tweets. She says that many college students she has met yearn for their friends to put down their cell phones long enough to really talk. They have learned in school to avoid seeing faculty during their office hours--too personal and embarrassing--in favor of email relationships, which are not real relationships at all.
The result of growing up without genuine conversation is a lack of empathy, the very thing that Lynn, a fine counselor and teacher, has mastered. No doubt she has spoiled me because most of the other people I talk to give monologues, as if unaware of that dialogue requires attentive listening.
The harmful effects of over-reliance on gadgets rather than face-to-face encounters are chilling to contemplate. Tweets and emails provide rewards, Turkle says, in their little bursts of information; and they more we feel such rewards, the more we tend to crave more such instant stimulation.
I don't see Turkle, or for that matter, Stephen Miller, whose book on conversation I wrote about here in 2013, defining the art of conversation in any real sense or relating it to listening, the kind of listening that requires patience and some humility as well as the experience of giving attention, a form of love, to another person.
To listen well takes maturity, skill, and the polite attention we need to follow another's unfolding narrative, with the reward being that we, too, will be listened to in the same way. This kind of personal exchange is becoming rarer in our speeded up world, where connections are more important to many people that genuine friendships and where conversations are rare. No wonder there is so much unhappiness.
In reading fiction, we put our own "issues" aside for a while and let ourselves be absorbed in discerning the motivation of the characters we encounter: we lose ourselves, as it were, as we pay attention--the key point here--to what the characters say and do and to why they do it. So reading novels becomes not only an exercise in interiority but an essential skill in dealing with people.
So often, it seems to me, people meet and fail to connect at a deeper level. I notice this quite often with most of the people I know: we meet at a restaurant, and although they might show perfunctory interest in what I am doing, their focus in on themselves; and when I do talk about my life or activities, they fail to pay close attention; they seem distracted, unaccustomed to following the short narrative I am unfolding, perhaps because they are mainly concerned with their own ideas.
As a result, the encounter is superficial, and I come away unappreciated. I know several people who, after more than twenty years of seeing me, never really get to know me because they fail to pay attention. They don't know how to listen as well as talk, how to ask questions to further the conversation.
In fact, there is often no conversation or mutual exchange at all, merely an exchange of information, which can be pleasant but forgettable. We have not nourished each other.
It seems from my observations of the British royal family (and other such celebrities) that they have mastered the art of the polite question, putting people at ease with a series of questions while providing no answers of their own. The result is not a real conversation, but the technique of asking questions of the other is a skill seldom practiced, in my experience, when people get together.
If reading fiction provides essential background to following someone's story during a conversation, then it seems to me that asking a few questions is not a matter of politeness but a basic part of what it is to converse.
The limits of conversation is the subject of several books I have looked at, most recently Sherry Turkle's "Reclaiming Conversation." She provides abundant examples of people in our technological age who have "sacrificed conversation for mere connection." Her key question is: Does our passion for smart phones and other technology help us avoid genuine encounter? The answer seems self-evident.
Turkle makes the point that to grow and love and understand oneself and the world around us, we must converse, not merely send Tweets. She says that many college students she has met yearn for their friends to put down their cell phones long enough to really talk. They have learned in school to avoid seeing faculty during their office hours--too personal and embarrassing--in favor of email relationships, which are not real relationships at all.
The result of growing up without genuine conversation is a lack of empathy, the very thing that Lynn, a fine counselor and teacher, has mastered. No doubt she has spoiled me because most of the other people I talk to give monologues, as if unaware of that dialogue requires attentive listening.
The harmful effects of over-reliance on gadgets rather than face-to-face encounters are chilling to contemplate. Tweets and emails provide rewards, Turkle says, in their little bursts of information; and they more we feel such rewards, the more we tend to crave more such instant stimulation.
I don't see Turkle, or for that matter, Stephen Miller, whose book on conversation I wrote about here in 2013, defining the art of conversation in any real sense or relating it to listening, the kind of listening that requires patience and some humility as well as the experience of giving attention, a form of love, to another person.
To listen well takes maturity, skill, and the polite attention we need to follow another's unfolding narrative, with the reward being that we, too, will be listened to in the same way. This kind of personal exchange is becoming rarer in our speeded up world, where connections are more important to many people that genuine friendships and where conversations are rare. No wonder there is so much unhappiness.
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