When you go out to dinner, do you keep your phone by the side of your plate?
When you’re alone, do you browse through Facebook and Twitter, unable to put down your device?
According to Sherry Turkle, we’re more connected than ever, but we’re not really making a connection. Our lack of conversation is hurting our interactions, our work, and our quality of life. Turkle joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio to discuss our device dependence debacle, and her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age.
First of all, what is “phubbing?”
TURKLE: ‘Phubbing’ is the skill that my students tell me they learn in middle school, because they want to be able to text in their classes. I want to be able to make eye contact with you, but I am texting under my desk. Eighty-nine percent of Americans say that in their last social interaction, they actually referred to a phone during a social encounter, and 82 percent say it deteriorated the conversation. If you ‘phub’ you can kind of get around that by not letting people know what you’re doing.
Would you say that our smartphone obsession is ruining everything?
TURKLE: That’s too broad. Your phone is fine… one of the people I interviewed told me, our phones are fine, our texting is fine, it’s what they’re doing to our in-person conversations that’s the problem. They’re destroying our capacity for empathy, they’re interfering with it, they’re undermining it. If I take out a phone and I put it on the table between us, it changes the nature of the conversation we have, it makes it more trivial because we might be constantly interrupted, and it lowers our empathic connection. Both of these things make a lot of common sense, but we don’t live a life that takes account of that fact. That’s what our phones are doing, but if we don’t take our phones out while we’re with each other in face to face interaction, that’s not going to happen. The point is not to get rid of your phone, it’s to put it in its place, in your work life, in your family life, in your intimate life, and we can do that.
But your position is that even when we’re alone, we should put down our phones?
TURKLE: You have to give yourself some time without your phone in solitude. Because solitude, the capacity for solitude, built up in childhood and developed throughout adolescence, is necessary in order for us to come to conversation with something to say that’s authentically ours and also for us to be able to listen to other people and really be able to see who they are, rather than kind of project on to them who we need them or want them to be. We all kind of instinctively shun people who don’t have the capacity to be alone, because we know that they’re going to sort of glom on to us and need us in a way that’s not healthy.
How does this affect our lives?
There is this key study…if you’re out to lunch with an intimate, and there’s that phone on the table, it will make the conversation on less significant things, and it will deteriorate your empathic connection. Then they did that same study putting the phone in the periphery of your vision, and it had the same results. Putting the phone out of sight when you’re in a conversation that counts just starts to make sense, certainly when you’re with your kids. You don’t want that phone out. I’ve met so many children who said they had never had the experience of having a meal with their parents when the phone wasn’t out. They had never walked to the corner store with their parents where the phone wasn’t out, and the excuse was, ‘there might be an emergency.’
To hear more from the interview, click on the audio link above.
Sherry Turkle has spent the last 30 years studying the psychology of people's relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the author five books and three edited collections, including a trilogy of three landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen and most recently, Alone Together. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, she is a featured media commentator. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
