For several years now, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has been warning parents, educators, and a variety of people of the negative effects of technology on our interpersonal relationships. In her books, articles, and speeches, Turkle has applied scrupulous and rigorous methods of study to analyze how our forms of technology are changing the way we interact with one another in our schools, workplaces, and homes. Now, in a new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle continues to sound the alarm. She summarized some of her findings in an excerpt from her book, which recently appeared in a New York Times column, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.”
Although I have not yet read Turkle’s new book, I have read some other excerpts and have listened to her speak. What she has to say is unfortunately not surprising, but it is disconcerting. As you might expect, Turkle sees the omnipresence of our phones as eating away at the art of conversation. All too often, adults and children prefer to spend time talking with someone on their phone or looking something up, rather than engaging in a face-to-face conversation with the person right in front of them.
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| Yann Kebbi |
I know I am as guilty as the next person when a question comes up in a conversation, and I immediately begin “googling” the answer on my phone. Consequently, when Turkle recounted the following anecdote, it stung: “One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add ‘facts’ to their conversation. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘Stop Googling. I want to talk to you.’ ”
Perhaps even more disturbing is Turkle’s research into the decrease in empathy among adolescents as they substitute spending personal time with peers for time reading things on their phones or texting. In this New York Times essay, Turkle shares the following story:
“A few years ago, a private middle school asked me to consult with its faculty: Students were not developing friendships the way they used to. At a retreat, the dean described how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event. It’s an age-old problem, except that this time when the student was asked about her behavior, the dean reported that the girl didn’t have much to say: She was almost robotic in her response. She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt.
The dean went on: ‘Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like 8-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way 8-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children.’ ”
While there is a great deal of discussion around these topics, Turkle is one of the few who is actually measuring how our forms of technology are changing social dynamics and relational skills. As parents and educators, we owe it to our children to listen to what scientists like Turkle are saying and consider what we can do to help them. Turkle ends her essay by pointing out that as human beings, we are resilient, and we can change when needed. She even offers some suggestions on ways we can appreciate solitude and develop habits that will enable us to be strong in the face of the constant temptation to use our phones.
I hope you find the article helpful and thought-provoking, and I would welcome a conversation with you about it. However, let’s do it in person.
