Many of my daily conversations don’t involve eye contact.

My roommate texts me from a

neighboring bedroom. My boss sends me an instant message from a few feet away.
Sometimes, the substitution of face-to-face talk for words on a screen makes me uneasy. Yet
other days, it slips past unnoticed, and I too reach for a keyboard instead of finding someone’s
gaze.
 In today’s New York Times post Sherry Turkle talks about the value of conversation
AND solitude and the limitations of digital connection. It’s a difficult piece to read, not for
its overfocus on context/stories/facts or for its technical language, it lacks both, but for
the way it which it will polarize the reader. You probably know already whether you will
like it. She critiques the new technologies of connection for both cheapening
conversation and eliminating solitude. In this piece I’m going to try and unravel one of
these arguments from the whole and address the way that Turkle hearkens back to an
imaginary past where people had long, meaningful conversations with each other about
what was important to them… she creates a simulacrum.

The unravelling – solitude good, but not relevant

The points that are made in the article about solitude are very compelling. I think she’s
entirely right about the slow dying of solitude, and the need for free thinking space. I
think that I as a person and as a parent need to model the value of alone time, of
thinking time, of device free time. This is not new, the radio and the TV have started this
process… and my Galaxy SII has continued it. All true. It is not, however, either the title
or the direction of the article. It is an entirely separate stream of very reasonable
arguments that seem, at first, to support her main thesis… That conversation is being
turned away from, when in fact it has nothing to do with it.

So. Out with the solitude arguments. The author’s long walks on the beach and her
advice to take free quiet alone time is well noted and not relevant to the argument.

To conversation

The piece is difficult in that it claims a great deal of research (presented in Alone
Together) but cherry picks out a few anecdotal examples meant to illustrate her points.
This confuses things, as it seems to draw on the history of research… where one would
expect someone trying to see the whole story, and yet we only hear of the examples of
people connecting superficially.

1. A boy who wants dating advice from a computer, because it has more data to work with
2. a nursing home resident who is comforted by a mechanical seal
3. another 16 year old hoping to learn how to have real conversations some day
4. a business person sitting down with all their technology and putting on headphones

These are all visceral examples… we see the future of relationships ruined, a poor old
lady in a nursing home deceived, and, most importantly, the end of conversation. The
idea, one supposes, is that we are replacing the excellence and ‘good for you’ challenge
of the messy face2face conversation between humans with other fill ins. I will leave
aside those of you who take comfort in music, dogs, cats, chocolate and the thousands
of other things we use to comfort ourselves and let you all defend your non-human ways
of connecting. I want to look at how she describes what conversation ‘used to be’… or
at least, what it can be.
What turkle says about conversation
With each of these quotes, we are left to understand that these are the kinds of
conversation that our two young people, our nursing home resident, our business
person and ourselves will be having.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.

Face-2-face conversation mostly doesn’t and never has unfolded slowly. It teaches
power. In many conversations people express their own personal power over each
other, whether it be in their right to speak, to speak first, to control the direction of
conversation and it’s content. Equally true i would say. There are a very few people with
whom i EVER have slow patient conversations with. I have met some of them online
and never in person. My partner is one of them. They are rare and beautiful… but not
common. I leave it to you to tell me if they were EVER common.

Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000

Facebook friends except connect.
Self-reflection requires confidence (and maybe trust). It requires the courage to look
deeply into yourself and see the good and well as the bad. To think about it and share it
is difficult. Connected, probably, to her points about solitude but not about conversation.
Blogging has been doing self-reflection very well… for years. I share my self-reflections
as many other people do with my blog through twitter or Facebook.

If there were anything challenging about social media its the massive amount of self-
reflection that i see… sometimes i have to turn it off being overloaded with it. Finding
self-reflection in face2face conversation can be very difficult… I’ve collected some very,
very good friends over my life, and that’s one of the things that I look for. It is hard…
and again, not that common.

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.” ” Have we so
lost confidence that we will be there for one another?”
This is used as an explanation for why people turn to social media… that they need to
find someone to connect with. Certainly in our case, baby-loss was one of those things.
If it hasn’t happened to you, it is very difficult to listen to someone else talk about it.
People find like-experienced people through social media… they connect, and share.
It’s good. Finding someone who can talk to you, who can listen to you is very important.
And easier if you have a wider network. I have seen sad tweets from friends, and called
them to setup some time to talk… or at least called them just to talk. Social media is
part of my life… on and offline line.
When was this point in the past when we HAD confidence in each other? I can’t
imagine. Was there some magical past when we could look next door, when we needed
someone to comfort us, and someone was available to listen to us? Not in my past.

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.
Absolutely. But this isn’t because of texts or emails or facebook… it’s because of life.
ANd has ALWAYS been because of life.

The simulacra
Sherry Turkle has been at this for a long time. She has a cutting eye for seeing the in-
between space of how technology influence our own lives. In this new york times piece
she does an excellent job arguing for solitude. I yearn for it… and agree with her. When
she turns to conversation, she loses me entirely. She has either had a uniquely perfect
life filled with excellent and constantly available friends, or she has not been honest with
herself. She is hearkening back to a past that never existed. Creating an image of
perfection, of utopia, before the present time. Baudrillard called this a simulacra. One of
the famous examples is ‘main-street’ USA at Disney. A perfect past, from the 50’s,
where everyone was friendly, where yards were clean, people had job and all was
happy. And a past, obviously, where everyone had profound, slow, supportive
conversations with each other. But only at Disney.

Sherry.Tell me how this connection is like what you describe. The technology can make
this happen, and it can allow us to be fantastically superficial. Just like everything.
Turning off the computer does not equal ‘better’ conversation.
 Sherry Turkle criticizes the amount of dependence this generation has on technology.
While this is obviously true, I feel that it should not be criticized, but praised and enhanced. It is
not the fault of digital natives that technology has been everywhere throughout the entirety of
their lifetimes. Children are now brought up on iPad apps, and even cell phones. Of course as
they grow older technology is going to be an integral and inevitable part of their lives. Instead of
criticizing this new lifestyle, people of older generations should embrace and involve themselves
in this new era of change and prosperity. Technology has made such wildly significant
progression in the health, happiness, and convenience of the human race. Of course there are
the outlier stories of the downsides of technology, but those will inevitably occur due to the vast
and free nature of technology.
Take for example my older brother, a recent college graduate, who has just landed a job in New
York City-except not really. Though the company has headquarters in New York City, he always
works from home. This prevents wasting time commuting an hour and a half to another state
everyday, and costs of transportation. Everything that my brother does is via the computer. The
only way that he has met some of his coworkers and bosses is through video chat. This goes to
prove that replacing “real conversation” with technology is not just a thing of the younger
generations. Everybody is doing it! I do not see the replacement of face-to-face conversation as
a cop out or something that has slowly begun to happen as a result of lack of communication.
Talking via social media, video chat, and online messaging is just convenient. Also, as long as it
continues to happen there will be no need for children to learn how to communicate face-to-face
as often as they would have a few decades ago.
The last point of Sherry Turkle’s that I would like to reflect and respectably disagree with is that
of, “Most of all, we need to remember…to listen to one another, even 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.” Though I can see how this statement does apply to real life,
the contrary is also true. During my last minutes with my best friend before he left for London for
three months, there were no words exchanged. As he got out of my car, all he said was “I’ll miss
you! Goodbye!” Then, I drove away down the road back to my house. As soon as I checked my
phone I was bombarded with messages from him saying many heartfelt things that he could not
have mustered the courage to say in person. My point in the end is that technology can also
bring people closer and actually give the opportunity to reveal yourself to another person even
more than in a traditional conversation.
Overall, I believe this is a changing generation, and that the use of technology should be
embraced as opposed to criticized.