Good Life Project - Owned By Your Phone? It’s Complicated.

Episode Date: October 18, 2015

Ever wonder what your mobile device is really doing to your relationships, your happiness...your life?Today's guest, famed MIT Professor, bestselling author and researcher on how technology affects the human condition, Sherry Turkle, has been studying questions like this for decades.In her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, she looks at what phones and the technology that rides inside them are doing not just for us, but to us.What she reveals is beyond scary.Put your cell phone on the table when you're with someone else, she offers, you've just destroyed the possibility of deep conversation. Without even realizing it, everything gets superficial. You don't go deeper, because you want to be able to scratch the near-addictive phone-checking itch. And that's okay when the convo is light, but not when it gets real.We also talk about how apps and texting are destroying empathy and solitude and making it harder and harder to actually know ourselves and develop real relationships. We explore the "I share, therefore I am" ethos and how technology is profoundly altering the dating scene. We talk about what computers and mobile devices do to classrooms and learning, seeing how some professors who at first welcomed them are now banning them and why. Turkle offers:"Technology doesn't just change what we do, it changes who we are."We need to understand how, then leverage it to work with, rather than against us.In the end, Sherry isn't anti-technology, she'll tell you. She's pro-conversation.This conversation led me to immediately change how I use my cell phone and think about the model I'm creating for my daughter. It was also a reminder of why I record these conversations, with rare exception, in-person, rather than remotely. Because it changes the conversation and the depth of the relationship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. That solitude is the most important developmental achievement of childhood. Sherry Turkle has been researching the intersection between technology and humanity for a really long time. She's really turned her focus now towards that little device that most of us hold in our hand for way too much of the day and how it's affecting us. You know, how does technology, especially our phones or smartphones, what's it actually doing to us and for us?

And instead of arguing that, you know, we should just give up or walk away from technology, she kind of makes the point that this is a part of our life. It's part of our future. But we really need to understand what this is doing to us, how it's affecting empathy, how it's affecting conversation, how it's affecting the way that we interact with the world and get what we need from the world. That's the conversation that I'm having with Sherry Turkle in this week's episode. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. I'm really excited to just be able to spend some time with you. I've actually been following your work for a number of years now, so your latest just sort of really brought me

deeper into your work, which was new to me over the last three or four years. But this has been your life's work for a long time now. Yes. Yes, it has been my life's work. I didn't realize it was my life's work when I started it, but I have become really deeply engrossed in this unfolding story of how digital technology doesn't just change what we do. It changes who we are. And as the technologies have changed, the effects on who we are have changed as well. And I've changed my mind about some things too. So it's an evolving story.

Yeah. Have you found a sense of acceleration in the evolution over, I don't know, the last five, ten years? Or do you think it's really just sort of a linear? Well, I think there has been a sense of acceleration but I think more profoundly for me, there's been a change in the nature of two aspects of the technology

which have kind of turned me from cyber diva in a way to cyber critic or at least someone who's saying, you know, whoa, let's just start a conversation about, you know, where we want this technology to go. I mean, I was on the cover of Wired magazine. I was once the kind of darling of the didgeridoo for talking about how I think that I was on the cover of Wired for trying to open a conversation

about how technology offers new identity possibilities and how that's a good thing. And it is a good thing. But two technologies have, I think, begun to trouble me. And those technologies have accelerated and really are a change in kind. And the first technology is that we've developed technology that's always on and always on us. And that's new. It used to be you would go to your computer and do something. And that thing might be pornography or that thing might be educational.

But it was quite distinct that you were going to your computer to do something. And then you could talk about that something. Now the blurring of the line between who we are and what our devices are is really blurred. And so that means that if you're at dinner and you pull out your phone and you take your eyes off your conversational partner, you take the eyes off your child who's at dinner with you, you don't even notice that anymore because you feel your phone is kind of a part of you. But you have taken your eyes off your child. You have broken the conversation. And we're starting to become inattentive to that. And reclaiming conversation is in large measure about starting to pay greater attention to each

other. And so that's the change. And then the second change, which I didn't see coming until recently is the degree to which we are ready to talk to machines that pretend they have empathy, feelings, you know, a doll that says, hi, I'm Barbie. I have a sister. Do you have a sister? I'm mad at my sister. Are you mad at your sister? Let's talk. In other words, a doll that pretends to have not only feelings but empathy, a kind of pretend empathy from which a child cannot learn empathy. And this is, you know, I really hear, my attitude towards this kind of stuff is, you know, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,

how did you like the play? I mean, there is no, as a psychologist, there is no redeeming social value in this kind of object because it's getting us into pretend relationships from which we cannot learn empathy. So I see an assault on empathy in this particular kind of new object. So I'm less concerned about acceleration than I am with type of technology and new type of challenge to us as people. So let's deconstruct that a little bit. Let's dive into it. And the word empathy is something that comes up almost relentlessly in your work these days, and for good reason. So take me a little bit deeper into some of the patterns that

you see emerging around this sort of constant on and constant on our body connection with technology and how that is playing with our ability to either develop or stunt the development of empathy. Yeah, well, if you have your phone with you, and you're at dinner with a friend, lunch with a friend, and you put your phone on the table, all the research studies show that that will change what you will talk about because the conversation will get lighter. On things where you wouldn't mind being interrupted, You won't really talk about anything of consequence. And not only that, you will feel less connected and less emotionally invested in the conversation. And what's driving that? What's driving that is that phone's on the table,

and even a silent phone disconnects us. Even a phone where it's visibly turned off will have this effect. Because it kind of makes sense if you just step back and say, okay, the phone is there as a marker that this conversation could be interrupted. So you're wearing a sign saying, you're not important enough to me to take the time to have an uninterrupted conversation. And we're sort of wearing that sign. We're kind of walking around the world wearing that sign to each other almost all the time. Now, that is, you know, for me, that's one of the key experiments that really we need to pay attention to. And when that experiment is repeated, and the phone isn't put on the table between two conversational partners,

but is put in the periphery of their vision, the effect is the same. You still get this degradation of conversation and you still get this, this other person isn't as important to me. I don't really care as much about this conversation. So just literally knowing that it's in the presence of a conversation where it's reachable and that alone changes the nature and the depth of the conversation. So when parents bring their phones to breakfast and dinner, they're saying that to their kids. When you take a walk with your kid to the grocery store and they see that you need to bring your phone along. Children tell me that they cannot remember a time when they were alone with their father, let's say, and he didn't have a phone.

A child has never had an experience of taking a walk with a parent where they felt alone, alone with the parent and available for an uninterrupted conversation. It's an extraordinary thing. One of the most poignant interviews I did was with a dad who had an 11-year-old, I'm trying to actually remember the ages of the two sisters, but I think he had an 11-year-old daughter, and he had a two-year-old now. And he talks about how when the 11-year-old was a baby, he used to give her baths. And he remembers fondly how he used to talk to her in the bathtub and sort of play with her little toys. My daughter used to call her her guys, you know, and sing to her and, you know, just talk to her. And how now with his two-year-old, he sits in the bathroom when she takes a bath. She's not at risk, not worried about her drowning, but he does this mail on his phone.

And he says, you know, I hate this, but he does it anyway. So the question for me is we know we hate it. We know that it's destructive, and maybe we don't know the level. I mean, some of the research that you've done and that you shine the light on really brings it home. But even without that, deep down, we know. We know it's just, like you said, this man said, I hate that. I do it. Yeah.

What's making us continue to do it? I mean, is it literally like an addiction to the sort of intermittent reinforcement of what's actually going on there that makes us almost feel like we're going to shake if we don't do it. Well, you know, one of my favorite statistics is that 89% of people say that at their last social encounter, they took out a phone. And 82% say that it degraded the level of the conversation. So, I mean, to the point that we're doing something that we know on a very wide scale is sort of not good in some way. But it feels good because we're being given a kind of constant stimulation,

a kind of constant multitasking that our brain actually loves. We're wired to respond positively to kind of the feed, to being given multiple inputs. And I prefer not to think of it as addiction because if you're addicted to something, there's only one choice for you. You have to, you know, stop taking heroin. I mean, you don't have 50. You know, you're going to die.

Whereas the way I think of this is that the technology is a technical term. It's called technology affordances and human vulnerability. We are vulnerable to this technology. We are very vulnerable to this technology. But we don't have to go cold turkey. We have to admit our vulnerability. And we have to design both the technology and the social situations we build around how we use it to stare down our vulnerability and assert our human values. So if you know that you're vulnerable to this technology and you're

about to go into giving your kid a bath, stop and leave the phone out of the bathroom and say, brother, you know, it might feel good to do some email now, but I really want to protect this time to have a moment with my daughter or my son. And bath time is that perfect moment. And a lot's going on in that quiet time in the bath. It is a conversational moment, but it's also how we teach children the capacity for solitude to just sit with them quietly and let them sit quietly and be able to experience the capacity to just play in kind of quiet. We learn the capacity for solitude by being alone with someone sitting next to us. Yeah.

So we really need to model it. We need to model it. But it's so interesting because at first glance, we're both parents. I have a teenager. You know, I see kids growing up in a profoundly different world than I grew up in, in terms of the exposure to on the body, always on technology. And I grew up in a world where I was sort of like a very artsy kid and I really enjoy solitude and I'm comfortable walking in the woods, uncomfortable going down to the beach. And even though I'm surrounded by technology on a daily basis now, I still really, I yearn for solitude and, and I have the ability to turn it off. And I think my sense

is that we're really losing an understanding of why solitude matters in the first place also. Can you sort of talk to that a little bit? Yes. Well, the sum up point is that if you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. That solitude is the most important developmental achievement of childhood. And here's why. That if you know how to be alone, if you have the capacity for solitude, that means that you come to relationships with other people ready to see them for who they are, ready to appreciate who they are, because on some level, you have a sense of who you are. And so in your contact with them, you're not trying to turn them into who you need them to be. You're actually able to see who they

are. And that means you can have real relationships. Now, if you're not able to be alone, if you need to be constantly reaching out to other people to kind of sustain your fragile self, you're making people into sort of little machines to sustain you. you really can't see them. The capacity for real conversation and real relationship depends on your capacity for solitude. So you really can't do away with the capacity for solitude and say, oh, I'll just get my, you know, I don't need that. I'm just on the social network. I don't need that. It's not sort of something that you can do without. Or you will always be someone who's looking to other people to find out who you are. And we shun people like that.

I mean, you know, of course, to a certain degree, we always, I mean, I don't want to make this a kind of, you know, complete black and white thing. Everyone, even people who are really good at solitude are always in social relationships, always kind of fine tuning who we know is kind of shadowing us to figure out who they are, we don't like it. That's not the kind of people we want to be with. We want to be with people who have a sort of sense of their center and who we know have something to give us. So the capacity for solitude is very, very important. And if you're constantly being bombarded with the feed, and if you're constantly in a culture where the rule is I share, therefore I am, you're not really going to be developing that capacity. Yeah.

So it's almost like you become, you never develop a real understanding of self. I mean, on one level. And then, so you look to others to almost help define who you are by your interaction with them, which also makes you kind of like lifelong dependent on their continuing definition of who you are and never just like owning it from the inside out. And to a certain extent, I mean, again, you don't want to portray this in such black and white that you make people into who they could never be. I mean, everyone is always sort of fine tuning. Yeah, of course. I come in here and I pick up signals from you as to, you know, what your interests are. And I, you know, we and you pick up signals for me. And I mean,

you know, social life and being a person is learning how to pick up those signals and to be with each other in a way where we're with each other in this kind of delicate dance. But I don't become, you know, a different me, a chameleon, because I've met you. And there's something about the culture of likes online, you know, where you really go online in order to get those likes. You know, sometimes I call it the world of I share, therefore I am. That that is the sort of psychological state of the online life that encourages not a looking within, but a continual looking without. Yeah. And I guess part of that also is that, like you said, if you don't have some really strong

sense of self, it makes it so that you don't create the space to then truly see others and experience them as they are, because you're just constantly looking for them to define you rather than you just saying like, I'm good. Let me see you. Yes. Let's like, let's actually have a real conversation where I can bring myself to the conversation.

You can bring yourself and we can have something a little bit more authentic. You're not capable of it. Right. I mean, you could want it, but you can't do it. Yeah. And it's,

it's not, it's not good. And, you know, you see this with kids who are not able to, you know, who, who are not able to do it, who are just looking to be liked, and you want to give them the experiences that they need

to develop who they are and then to come to other people with some sense of who they are. And they cannot get that if they just are online. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. One of the reasons why we're sitting here today, instead of doing this over Skype or something else is that I always, my preference, I think maybe in hundreds of conversations, I've done one or two remotely, just because circumstances wouldn't allow anything other. But the reason I do it is because when I'm face to face with somebody, like you were saying, the social cues, the energy in the room, there's a conversation that happens beyond the words that tumble forth, that to me

is so much more interesting and nuanced. You know, I can see what's going on. I feel like I lose so much of that if it's remote. And then when you take that, and then you go a step further and you remove voice and vocal intonation and rhythm and cadence, and it's just letters on a screen, it's that much less nuance. You get that much less information. Yeah, it really concerns me. Well, what concern, I mean, the thing of concern is not that we, you know, one of my favorite in reclaiming conversation is this one guy who says to me when I say, well, you know, why this flight from conversation? Why find ways around conversation?

And he says, conversation, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say. And, you know. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say. And, you know, there's fear of synchronicity. And what he's basically saying is that you see me here. So you see, you know, you kind of see me warts and all. You see when I have to pause and I have to think and, you know, I'm not, I'm not, like, I don't have the answer, like, right away. You know, I kind of attempt to take a moment. It's like a real vulnerable, fo a conversation. In my students who don't want to come to office hours, but who want to email me and who want me to email them back. And I say to them, why? I mean, here I teach at MIT.

They're spending so much money. They have direct access. They have direct access. I mean, I guess there are some faculty who don't see their students. But I mean, I really, you know, you ask to see me if you're in my class, you will, you know compose a perfect email to me, and they believe that I will be able to write them back the email that will most exactly correspond to their question. So they have this fantasy that what we're about,

what this interaction is about, is a transaction. And perfection, too, like an efficiency. An efficient transaction that they will get the perfect question that exemplifies their point of view, and I will give them back the most value. And when I think back, I mean, how to tell them, first of all, you know, what pressure on me, I'm trying to sit there giving the perfect email for the transaction, but even leaving that aside, how to tell them that when I was in their position in college, what made the most, the reason that I'm here today talking to you, the reason that

I've written this book and so many other books, the reason that I love knowledge is because there were people who were mentors who sat and talked to me, who made me feel that I was worth talking to, who made me feel that my ideas were valuable, who, when I had a stupid idea, said, you know, that idea, let's see if together we can make it better, who made me feel they were on my side, that I wasn't alone, I mean, that I was valuable, that I wasn't alone, that if an idea wasn't crafted right, it could be made better. How am I going to give that to a student in an email? So that's not a transaction.

That's a relationship. So they're missing the value of me because they won't come in for a conversation. So this is why I wrote the book. I want people to focus again. It's not that I want them to give up their phones or put down their laptops or tablets. I just want them to focus again on the value of face-to-face talk. I mean, you don't have to give it up in order to fully enjoy your laptop. It's not an either-or thing. But some relationships are just not maximized by digital interchange. And let me tell you, the relationship you have with your faculty member is really flattened out if you try to have that

on a screen. I really feel strongly about this. Students, come to see me. And it's also, you know, it's like it also kills, it kills the possibility for serendipitous discovery. Because if somebody was just sitting in your office with you and you're kicking around an idea or they have a question, you may end up going off on a tangent that would never have been in the realm of discovery had it just been this really crafted, transactional, focused email exchange. Whereas if you're actually sitting there, you're like, well, what about this? What about this? And when I was thinking about podcasting, I spent an afternoon walking around the Met in New York with somebody who was kind of a legend in the public radio production. And she had created this really amazing franchise.

And I was telling her I was interested in radio and public radio. And she said, why? And I said, well, the reach. And because I was there in front of her, I saw something change in her face. I said, what am I missing? She's like, the reach is interesting, but the real power of radio is the intimacy. And boom, like it clicked. But the reason that whole thing happened

was because I was in front of her and I saw her face change. And I responded and I asked a question because of what I saw on her face. And all of a sudden I got what I was about to do over the next X years on a completely different level. And my guess is that never would have happened had we just traded texts or emails. And it's like, so many of the greatest things that have happened in my life or in the business world and personal happened, they weren't planned, they weren't crafted. That's such a great story. That story would have made it into my book. Actually, what it made me think of was one of the young women I interviewed talked about the rule of seven. Yeah.

So the rule of seven is that it takes seven minutes. And she just got this out of her head. Her rule of seven was it takes seven minutes to find out whether something interesting is going to happen in a conversation. And those seven minutes, she said, are often very boring because it's just going back. I mean, they're not necessarily riveting, not as riveting as the repartee online where everybody's always trying to be witty.

But it takes those seven minutes. You have to put in your seven minutes to see whether the conversation could go someplace. And she says she's not willing most often to put in those seven minutes. Oh, God. And that was such a, but she realized, she realized. But that's truth on the ground these days. That's truth on the ground.

She realized, but it was a very interesting interview because she kind of realized, she knew the rule of seven. And she admitted that, whoa, she just wasn't willing to put in that time and that that was kind of, that's kind of the truth. That's exactly, that was the truth on the ground. So when you were walking around the museum, you know, there you are. You're willing to put in a lot of time. You're willing to say something say something to take another turn. And we all have to get back to following the rule of seven and the rule of 14 and the rule of 28 and maybe more and give ourselves a little bit of time to get to know people.

We're so into the feed and into the speed. And obviously, we think we're in a big hurry now. But that's why I think that I take a lot of hope from the fact that people are so into meditating and yoga and these technologies of slowing down. Because I think we're trying to tell ourselves that something is amiss. And so we reach for mindfulness. We reach for yoga. we reach for different things. But I think that what we're reaching for is some way to slow ourselves down. I think we're reaching for stillness.

And find some kind of, it's not just solitude, but it's also a kind of slowing down with each other. And I'm calling it conversation, the kind of conversation where you take a false turn and you take a false start. And you don't think of that as a waste of time, but letting things develop. One person I interviewed said, you know, I said, well, what happens in a lull in the conversation? And he looked at me like he didn't know what I was talking about. And I said, well, you know, when a conversation, like a quiet moment. And he basically said, oh, well, that wouldn't happen.

I would go to my phone and I'd just check my Facebook. And so, you know, his experiences of a conversation with no lulls. And I remember when I was editing the book, one of the readers said, well, that sounds like, you know, that sounds like it couldn't, was that really what he said? That was really, I went back to the transcript. That was really what he said. The notion of a conversation with no lulls. And there it is in the book, just like that, just like what he said, a conversation, the model that you will have a conversation with no lulls. But again, you know, it's in the lulls that we discover who we are. Yeah, I mean, it almost like it feels like, you know,

the notion of errorless learning to me. It's in the errors where we make our big discoveries. Also, it's in the silences. I mean, I guess I'm psychoanalytically trained, so I'm tuned to this, but what it's in the silences, when somebody goes silent, if you are interested in empathy, you say to yourself, well, why is that person silent? You learn so much. You know, the reason you want somebody in the studio is when somebody's face goes blank.

Well, why did their face go blank? Why did I ask? And I just, to me, it's always been the more valuable information comes from what's not being said. It comes from all the ways that you're communicating, which actually has an interesting tie-in to your work also because there's a deliberate way to stop saying things, which ends up being sort of like a snub. We've seen it in the media called ghosting.

But you can essentially vanish from the conversation. And in the world of technology and phones and texting and all this stuff, that has a very specific meaning. So it's almost like when you choose to step out, it's not like you just need to pause. You need a little stillness, a little space, a little solitude. People immediately freak out. Well, this is something I discuss in detail in the romance chapter.

I call it the nothing, the nothing gambit. Which that chapter, by the way, freaked me out. I've been married a long time, and I was dating long before any of this was a reality. And I was reading it, and I was like, oh, my God. Is this really what happens now? So the nothing gambit is you are in a conversation and then nothing. You text somebody and then nothing. And it's not like saying goodbye. And it's not like it's just quite, quite you know it's not like nobody ever said goodbye

anymore it's not like anybody you know people weren't dropped or dumped or you know but it's very odd you know so it isn't as though there's nothing new under the sun in some ways because it's not as though people were never dropped abruptly or somebody didn't call back or so that i mean it's not but it is the people people who talk about it at length, it came up so much in interviewing people about romance today. What comes up as unique is that texting is a conversation or everybody's insisting to me that texting is a conversation. And it's as though you say something to, and I just stare at you. And you're like, doesn't she know we're here together in a room and I just said something to her? Like, doesn't, what, and you're like nonplussed.

And your sense of, well, what am I supposed to do next? Yeah. It's kind of anxiety-provoking. Or if I said something to you, and you just kind of walked out, well, I don't know, I'd have to pack up my things and leave. So this ghosting or the nothing response is quite anxiety-provoking, and people now do it all the time, but not just in romance, in anything online. People just feel free to leave.

Yeah, I thought it was so interesting how you described, I think it was one of the scenarios where that happened, and it's sort of like, I think you were talking to teenagers, and they said, like, the response is not to, you know, then say, hey, why didn't you, you know? It's like, that's the worst thing you could do, because then you're, like, perceived as, well, you're stalking. You know, the response was more like, hey, why didn't you? It's like that's the worst thing you could do because then you're perceived as, well, you're stalking. The response was more like, well, let me get really publicly active in other platforms

so that they see that it doesn't bother me and I'm having a great time, which, again, is not a new behavior just in terms of somebody wants to dump me or they don't want me, I'm going to go show them I'm really popular and I don't need them. No, but what's new about it is that you have this new forum where you actually can immediately be online and be doing all this stuff and active. I mean, it's just so false and so shareable and tweetable and you're, you know, tweeting every movie you saw and you're taking selfies with your friends and pictures of your food. Yeah, you can fabricate it very quickly. You're fabricating a whole life and all of a sudden your food is the best food and you're baking things. And I mean, the good things.

So it's definitely a complicated world out there yeah we were talking before about um to your listeners before we started taping we were we were talking about the new rules and i made the point that instead of thinking so much about what the new rules are i think we should think about what rules would be good for us. People are always asking me, well, as an ethnographer of this world, what are the new rules and what are the new rules? And I'm really more concerned about saying every technology asks us to think about what our values are and what is this technology? When we hold this technology up to our human values, what are our values are and what is this technology, you know, when we hold this technology

up to our human values, what are our values, you know, and particularly in the areas of privacy, in the areas of accountability, in the areas of transparency and politics and human relationships and how we raise our kids. I mean, so many areas of life. Instead of thinking, well, what are the new rules? We've had enough experience now with this technology to say, well, what rules would we like there to be? So I don't want to say, well, the new rules are that, I mean, I don't want to say the new rules are that parents can text during breakfast and dinner and not

talk to their kids. I want to say, no, no, what kind of way of being in a family dinner would make sense if you want to raise children who are caring and competent in social skills and empathic? Not saying, well, what's the percentage of parents who text at dinner? Because that's the habits that we've gotten into that we need to adjust for. In my book, I say it's time to make the corrections. It's not time to figure out what our new social mores are. I think we can pull up our socks. Yeah, I mean, it's a look back at the questions that come way before that, you know, what do we

value? And just how does that relate to the way the technology is changing and what it's giving us, but also at the same time, potentially taking from us? Yeah. I mean, I think this technology has really changed our behavior in really interesting ways. And it's an opportunity. I see this as an opportunity to say, okay, what are our core values? When people say, oh, this book is so anti-technology, I just keep saying, no, it's just very pro-conversation. And then I try to say why conversation is important. And if you think it's important, well, then what do you have to, how do you have to live to keep it important and to keep it doing its job? Because conversation can't do its job if you're looking down at your phone. I mean, that's basically the reality.

I think we've talked about it, but I actually want to double back on this for a second. When you say conversation do its job, in your mind, what is the fundamental job of conversation? The work of conversation, basically, number one, is to teach empathic capacity. Teach the ability to know the other, comprehend the other, and through that, you gain greater capacity to know the self. So I talk about a virtuous circle, that in conversation with others, you learn about them, but by talking to other people, you enhance your own capacity for inner dialogue. And if that, actually in the book,

I use Thoreau and his image of three chairs, that he has three chairs in his cabin, one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. And he talks about the relationship between these three chairs and how they work together, that you need solitude for friendship and you need both of those to be able to participate in the social world. And you need participation in the social world to be able to have room for friendship. I mean, we're human beings in society who need solitude, who need friendship. It all works together. But conversation is the thread that holds all of this together. But if I had to put it most simply, the current assault on empathy comes from our trying to be on our phones when we're together. I talk about this set of interviews I did with college students who kept talking to me about the rule of three.

And there are rules of seven. There are rules of three. So the rule of three is that if you're at dinner with your friends, let's say there are six of you at dinner, you don't look down to your phone. Everybody has their phone. They assume everybody has their phone. And you don't look down to your phone unless three heads are up, kind of keeping the conversation up. So you don't look down unless three heads are up. But then you look down.

If three heads are up pursuing the conversation, you can look down at your phone. But what kind of conversations are happening in that kind of milieu where people are looking up and down in the skeletal conversation? They're superficial. And they're conversations in which people can kind of go, kind of come in and out in this kind of round robin. So they're basically conversations, again, where people can kind of go, kind of come in and out in this kind of round robin. So they're basically conversations, again, where people don't mind being interrupted. Conversations where not much is happening. Those are not the kinds of conversation where conversation is doing its work, of teaching empathy, of teaching connection to other people. Those are not the kinds of conversations where conversations is

is doing its work yeah and it really it makes me wonder what the long term and makes you wonder i know too where does this lead us if that becomes a prevailing mode of interaction between not just kids but you know this is adults now also this is adults now also, this is adults to kids, kids to adults, adults to each other. In a world where it seems like there has never been a greater need for empathy and compassion and understanding, if the way that we interact with other human beings is shifting at a really rapid pace into a mode that starts to strip empathy from the conversation, it freaks me out a little bit. Well, I'm optimistic.

Yeah. Because I think that we've had these devices for a very short time. You know, as you pointed out, things have accelerated. It's happened crazy fast. In the very beginning, I liken it to two young lovers who were so infatuated. They don't want to talk because they're afraid that talking will spoil the romance. It just came to me, that image. And now we've had them for a while, and, you know, we're not afraid somebody's going to take them away.

We know we're going to have these phones forever and things more than our phones and watches. And I mean, every, you know, nobody's going to take it away and leave you with your two-way wrist radio or whatever Dick Tracy thing. And I think we're just in a position to see, you know, I just found so many people who were not happy with how they were talking to their kids and not happy with, you know, real, you know, who just could begin to talk to me about their sense that they were not living the life they were most comfortable with. I think that, you know, it's a little bit like Rachel Carson's moment of the silent spring. I mean, I think we are at a moment of recognition.

And I think we're going to start talking about talk. And I don't think we're creatures who want to live without empathic connection. I so agree. And I think it circles back to what you were saying before about I'm a meditator. My day starts every day with a sitting practice and has for years and i also have a past life as a you so in a yoga center in new york city um and teach and our students weren't so much you know people who are you know ultra woo woo metaphysical there were a lot of people who were coming just from business,

you know, and just they were looking to find some stillness in their daily lives. My sense is that certainly the conversation around stilling practices has taken off in the last really three to five years. Yeah, I wonder if the sort of like constant elevated sense of always on that's being, you know, connected in some way to this personal technology is behind some of that, you know, without us really identifying it. Absolutely. I think in my mind, this mind, you know, the focus on mindfulness, the interest and even the corporate world for mindfulness programs and mindfulness practices is a gesture. It's like, what can we do? Oh, we'll put in a mindfulness program. This is not to say anything against them.

It's a good gesture. But what it's pointing to is a sense that something is amiss. Yeah, it's a deeper name. And even as people talk to me about this book, I mean, I think that, you know, five years ago, I wrote a book called Alone Together. It was about the experience, this new experience of being alone together. And when I wrote that book, it had a very good reception, but a lot of people wanted to fight with me. A lot of people, the first reaction was to want to fight with me. Oh, no. Oh, I don't. I love my phone. I mean, the zeitgeist was still, don't bother me. I love my

phone. I mean, you know, the zeitgeist was, oh, I love my phone. Five years. And now everybody really loves their phone. But I think that people are also aware that they're not, you know, people are having these experiences where our phones are, you know, our phones are really in the bathroom when we're bathing our kids. and we're missing our kids. They're at the game with us when our kids are complaining that we're not watching their game. We're doing our email when we're at their sports game. And in Reclaiming Conversation, I tell so many stories

of families who prefer to do their, you know, kind of have their fights, you know, their disagreements online instead of talking face to face because they think that will smooth out the conversation and they're missing, you know, what a good airing of differences does for a family. And I think people are starting to sense that a little bit too much phone, a little bit missing what conversation has to offer. So I think things are changing. I mean, I'm excited to see that at this moment of recognition

is really a moment of hope. For me, this moment of recognition is a moment of hope that we can have a conversation about conversation and its importance to us. I don't think we want our children to not develop empathy. And there's a 40% decline in empathy among college students in the past 20 years. Tied to technology? Well, most of the decline is in the past 10 years. So the researchers who did this meta-analysis... Right, there's a lot of correlation there. There's a lot of correlation there.

And I don't think we want that. I mean, we're just kind of starting to put this together, and I don't think we're content. Yeah, I can't argue with that. Another thing that comes to mind around it and around this sort of notion of the elimination of the time in between is that greatest solutions, the greatest ideas, the greatest innovations tend not to come when we're toiling to make them happen.

They come when we're toiling to make them happen, and then we create space. And within the window of that pause, the pieces of the puzzle, the pattern, falls into place, and that's when we run back to find something to write it down. And I wonder what happens when we leverage technology to eliminate the pause. I wonder sometimes, on the one hand, and again, neither of us are Luddites.

We're not anti-technology. They're amazing, amazing leaps that technology allows us. But at the same time, on just like the basic way that the brain solves problems, where space is so critical to insight-based ideation and problem-solving that if we shorten the amount of space that we have available, I wonder sometimes what might that do long-term to our ability to solve the big problems, to innovate on the level that's really meaningful in the world. What you're asking me reminds me of what's called the reality effect,

which is that when great physicists teach, they learn to pretend to be thinking while they're teaching because they know that that's a more effective way to teach. So, for example, they make mistakes on the blackboard. They pause. They erase things. They redo the equation. So it's not that they really don't remember the equation, but they know that a great lecture, a great teaching experience, comes from students watching you think.

So it's called, in social sciences, it's called a reality effect. They're doing a performance in which they're trying to simulate the reality of thinking, which is about making mistakes and backtracking.

It just so happens that these are great physicists who wouldn't necessarily make a mistake on the chalkboard. And I think that that's what a great conversation is. It's not perfect. It does backtrack. It does have lulls. And what I got out of the interviews with the younger people I spoke with

was this intolerance for a lull. You know, almost where in this very funny interview, I had to kind of define a lull. It's like, okay, really? Stop talking for 10 seconds. Exactly. Sort of like, you know, it was sort of like, or one, or actually a couple, but there was one woman who was, remember the first time she talked about silence in a conversation as the boring bits. And it was such an interesting locution. It almost sounded British, you know, the boring. She wasn't British.

I mean, she just called it the boring bits. And I said, what are the boring bits? She says, well, you know, when things go silent, there's like, you know, just like she had no tolerance for that. Her expectation was that things would be like the feed under the crawl, under the news, you know, where you have the news being spoken and then you have the crawl underneath the news, that if you weren't excited by what's on the TV, you could always read the news under the TV.

The boring bits were not necessary in a conversation. And how does she get that crawl? How does she make sure that her life always has something interesting to go to? Is that when she's with her friends, she also has her phone. It's so interesting as you're saying that. One of the things that I learned about doing this job that I love to do is that without fail, and I didn't discover this myself. I was studying all these interviewers and trying to find out, okay, I had to just have an interesting conversation. And I can't remember who it was. Somebody very

famous said, and I don't follow this rule most of the time, but there are times where I really try to. It's your rule of three. Yeah, exactly. It's like the opposite of the rule of three. But they said essentially, count one, two, three after a guest finishes what they have to say before you say anything or answer another question. Because within that space, people tend to be so uncomfortable with the lull that they'll feel the need to fill it. And they'll fill it with something

which is completely unplanned because this is the spontaneous part of it. And that's the stuff. And so every once in a while, I remember to do that. It is amazing how true that is. I can't tell you how many tangents have, you know, I've gone down, which become these beautiful pathways and stories and moments of illumination and discovery and connection simply because I just breathe for a minute. What was interesting to me is also three minutes isn't terminally long for most people. It's usually like a little bit more than a second or so. And there's an urge to just have to fill space. And the conversations that emerge from that are

just so often the best part of the conversation. Was the advice to wait for three minutes? No, three seconds. I'm sorry, did I say three minutes? Oh, sorry, my bad. Yeah, that would be pretty brutal. I was gonna say that would be literally just three seconds. And so this is interesting, not just in the context of doing interviews, but just conversation. If you're at a dinner party, if you're at a meeting, if you're, you know, and you're really, you're curious about just inspiring, really conversation that's much more open and goes in directions that you never imagined. You know, if you just pause for an extra moment, my guess is it's become exponentially more unbearable for people to, you know, actually

be in that space now. Because it's interesting that you say that, you know, I, I recently I've had to read articles about myself, you know, I'm sort of like, I try and stay away from those when it comes to me. I really have no, I, you know, you don't get to do that until you write a book. You know, I don't write books that often, but, you know, so there's like this lag time and then all of a sudden I get to read articles about myself. And a number of them have said how I pause while I'm speaking.

And as though this is like a thing about me. And I think it must be true because all of these journalists seem to have ganged up and seem to find it a thing. But really, until I began to read these articles, I never really noticed that I was such a big pauser and they called me deliberator and

how I pause to think and I don't just think and I felt like writing was I'm thinking, I'm just thinking. But I've really noticed that it's become sort of a thing to say about me that I pause and think in between.

And I guess I must have a kind of lag time that's quite unique or something. But really, I've just been noticing. But I do, I guess. And I guess I come from a family where people did sort of take a breath and was okay to give it a little, give it a little think. A family of pausers. Well, no, just to sort of think and not respond and not just be immediately there with your answer and just kind of think. But it's very interesting how much that's been commented on.

I've decided not to be self-conscious about it. I hope it doesn't make for very bad radio. I'm sure it doesn't make for very bad radio. I'm sure it doesn't. One of the other things I actually wanted to bring into the conversation is your conversation and your exploration of how technology affects attention in the classroom. And there's, I guess, hypertension or hyperfocus and multitasking. And this is a personal inquiry because, like I said, I'm the father of a teen. And we've had this conversation with other parents. Like, okay, if the kids are hanging out and simultaneously there's Snapchat and texting and Skype open.

Is that okay? No. Is that not okay? No, no. This is something on which actually the research is very clear, and as a parent you can speak with the voice of God, sort of the voice of authority, is that there is no such thing as multitasking. The brain doesn't know how.

So what all the studies show is that when we multitask, our competency decreases in every new task that we multitask. We add a new task and our competency decreases in every task that we're multitasking. But something very distressing happens when we add this new task, is that we think we're doing better at all the tasks. So there's a sad kind of vicious circle that every time we add a new task and multitask more, we think we're doing better and better, when in fact we're doing worse and worse. That's what the research shows. So every time you are doing your reading and history, there you have your high school student trying to read through a history text and they add texting and then they add snapchat and then they add twitter and then

they add facebook well they probably wouldn't add twitter but they'd add facebook every time they add a new device a new program a new thing their ability in every one of those things goes down. I mean, their attention goes down, their competency goes down. So, you know, it doesn't matter if what you're doing, sometimes we make a decision that we don't care. So, for example, if I'm updating a database, I don't care if while I'm updating my database, I'm also answering routine emails while I'm updating my database and swiping addresses. And, you know, if my, you know, if I'm answering routine emails about bills or something while I'm updating my database and I'm okay with my doing everything a little bit, you know, worse. And we make that decision all the time that we're willing to multitask and have the

convenience of multitasking, where I want to watch television while I'm doing all that. So I have television on, I'm updating my database, and I'm doing routine emails. That's a common choice. And so the fact that I'm getting a little less out of the television, I'm getting a little bit less efficient at the database updating, and my emails about the bills are not as eloquent, it's all good. But if you're doing something important, you have to choose a task. So Zadie Smith has a wonderful acknowledgement in her latest novel where she thanks a computer program called Freedom, an app that shuts down the Wi-Fi.

Which I use when I'm writing also. Well, exactly. It shuts down the Wi-Fi. And so there you are alone with yourself and your blank page. And you can't shop. You can't check your email. You can't, you know, there you are. And many writers, I mean, many people are using programs that essentially shut down their Wi-Fi.

Evgeny Morozov has a hysterical. He's a writer in the social studies of science and technology. It's hysterical, he's a writer in the social studies of science and technology, talks, it's hysterical, he talks about locking his router in a safe and giving his wife the key and throwing it away. I mean, it's just, he goes on and on. I mean, people know that they have to do one thing at a time when the chips are really down. So we know this. And again, it doesn't mean you can't multitask, you can't choose to multitask. If you've decided that the tasks you're doing really doesn't matter if you degrade your attention. Yeah.

I mean, what's interesting is that when we're doing it as adults, we can kind of make those deliberate decisions. But then when we're setting the tone or making the rules for our kids, there's also a social consequence to it also. Not that it's a validation, but one of the pushback will be, but everybody else is. There's a FOMO. There's a fear of missing out that is just fiercely pervasive among a certain generation. And it's almost like, you know, but life is happening around me when I'm doing this. And I think it's sort of like saying, going back to those questions we talked about in the beginning, saying, well, what ethos do you want to create? You know, what value set do you want to cultivate? Also, your original question is about the classroom. And there's been a big change in how faculty feel about the classroom and devices in the classroom. Because not that long ago, I did a poll of faculty and about devices in the classroom.

And most college faculty felt, I'm not a nanny. I don't want to be a babysitter. Whatever. And now, people have looked at the research. They've had experience. This is why I'm optimistic. They've looked at the research. They've had experience with these devices in classrooms. And they know, in one very dramatic study, you know, that one laptop open, and not only does the attention and the performance of that student degrade, but everybody sitting around them, it degrades as well. It's kind of like a ripple effect.

And in Reclaiming Conversation, I interview a wonderful law professor at Harvard named Carol Steiker, who talks about how when laptops came out, she just assumed that everybody would take notes on them and that would be cool and great. So she's at Harvard Law School and it all began great. She began to discover that students taking notes on laptops, they tried to do a transcription of the class because you can almost transcribe the class. And then she would be like saying when she would sort of ask somebody a and then she would be like saying um when she would sort of ask somebody a question they would be like annoyed that she'd interrupted their transcription so it was it was kind of like she had turned her class

into court stenographers because they were all trying to do a transcription of her class and then one student of the final story she told me was that one student was ill, and the students were really great, and they'd sort of all tried to divide the labor, and each day another student would take notes for that student. And I think she was in the hospital for about two weeks. And one day a student comes up to her and said, you know, Professor Steiker, I'd love to have your notes because I lost power on my laptop today. I wasn't able to take notes. And Carol said to her, well, why didn't you take notes with pencil and paper. And she says that the student looked at her as though this question

was, I mean, it was from the land of the inconceivable. It was from the land of the inconceivable. And what Carol Steiker realized was that the capacity that she was interested in was the capacity to be in a conversation in class and then distill the essential in a note, not to transcribe a class. And that this student did not have that capacity. She only could sort of try to write down everything that happened. And that she was doing her students no favors by letting laptops be, you know, by bringing laptops into class. And so here's an example of why I'm optimistic,

is that multitasking in class, you know, taking notes on laptops, these are things where I feel you see a profession in flux, my profession, and you see a lot of faculty saying, didn't work out. You know, a lot of brilliant idea, made sense, didn't work out, didn't work out. Didn't work out.

The data's starting to come in, didn't work out. No fuss, no muss. We're not anti-technology. We love it. We do everything on it. Didn't work out. And I think that's very hopeful. You also tell a story where the students, the class you taught a memoir

like the small, where it was actually the students who came to you and said this isn't working out for us. Yeah this was an interesting class I taught a class I still teach it on memoir where the students basically write about their own experience so this particular year I mean it was a very

lot of kids who had very hard scrabble lives there was some stories of dealing with difficult family situations and poverty. And there was a boy who basically slept in his car for a summer because he didn't have any place else to go. I mean, really, you want to pay attention to these stories. And these students came to me in office hours, a little group of them, and they said, you know, we're distressed because we're texting under the table, and we want to talk to you about it.

And I said, well, let's discuss this in class. And, of course, once we discussed it in the class, most of the class were doing the same thing. And, you know, they talked about how it made them anxious to not be in touch, not because they had anything to say, you know, out to the world, but because they couldn't tolerate not knowing who wanted them, not seeing who wanted them. And it was so moving. I mean, that is the pull, is you want to see who's thinking of you. You want to see who's reaching out to you. And it's just become easier

to say to people, look, you know, this is our vulnerability. This is what I mean in my book when I talk about, you know, designing for our vulnerability. I mean what I mean in my book when I talk about designing for our vulnerability. I mean, we know this about ourselves. We want to know who wants us. It's a human thing. So put away your phone, accept your vulnerability for the 40 minutes of class or the 50 minutes of class and – or what I do now sometimes is I take – you know, I have a class for 20 – you know, if it's a – often it's a two-hour class. Take and do 50 minutes and take a 10-minute break and do another 50 minutes and take – I mean, take a break. I mean, you know, if you're – Go get your head – get a – Well, yes.

I mean, or if you're having a – you know, it doesn't just come up in class. It comes up in meetings. I mean, there are many chapters on business in the book. I mean, if you're having a meeting, you don't want a board meeting where everybody's on their phones. I mean, the number of board meetings where people are texting and there was one hysterical story about somebody who bought a car during a board meeting. And the person who was sitting next to him was, like, staring at him. He was buying this car. And I'm like, what? car during a board meeting and the person who's sitting next to him is like staring at him he's buying this car and like what you know take a do your you know have your meeting and then take a break and then buy your car during the 10 minute break we were a couple months back wife and i

wrapped it in with somebody who uh owned some businesses and he was telling us how he was having a meeting with all the managers and stuff like that. And there was one guy texting just like openly on his phone while the meeting was going on. And the boss said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm texting. He said, put your phone away. He said, I can listen and text at the same time. Boss said, pack up your bags. You're fired. Don't ever come back. So it's interesting how there's a real spectrum of how people are dealing with it and sort of understanding the deeper psychology of the world these days.

Well, I mean, it's also, you know, again, we're talking about the rules. I mean, I tell many stories in the book about people who, there's one story about a young woman who gives her client presentation and then goes on Facebook right in front of the client. And later her manager is like crazy, crazy. You know, what just happened in there?

And the young woman, you know, just graduated business school. It's like, well, I gave a great presentation. And then I was, didn't I? I mean, then I was done. And then I did, then I went on. I mean, that her sense. She didn't register. She didn't register that she had transgressed.

Right. Because that's what she always did in school. She gave a great presentation and then she went on Facebook. Yeah. That's what she always did in school. She gave a great presentation, and then she went on Facebook. And so the manager, well, at first the manager was beside herself and I think was close to firing her. And then she sort of stepped back and said, you know, I just need to hit the restart button with these brilliant business school, just out of business school students from the best business schools in the country and accept that they need to be retrained.

And she just kind of devoted herself to kind of a master class in conversation, which is why I spent so much time with her. Which kind of brings us full circle to a certain extent. So the name of this is Good Life Project, and I'm particularly curious to your answer to this last question, which is always my last question. So if I offer out to you the term to live a good life,

what does that mean to you? Someone once said to love and be loved and all the rest is details. And I think that to love and be loved, to have relationships that matter, you have to have conversations that matter.

And everybody has different kinds of love and different kinds of relationships that matter, but I think that without conversation, for me, if you're trying to flatten that out, we're not equipping yourself to have the richest ones possible, which I kind of see happening around me. I think you're not putting yourself in the best situation.

So sort of for right now, I've made that my quest, is to try to study how we can use where technology has brought us to interrogate the kinds of conversations were happening and how to make them matter more. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. You know, if you actually stayed till this point in the conversation, I'm guessing there's

a pretty good bet that you've gotten something out of this episode, some nugget, some idea. If that is right and you feel like sharing, then by all means, go ahead. We love when you share these conversations and get the word out. And if you wouldn't mind, I would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds, jump onto iTunes or use your app and just give us a quick rating or review. When you do that, it helps get the word out, helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here, and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's

lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

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