WASHINGTON — Let’s try an experiment: Put your phone on the table in front of you and strike up a conversation with a friend or co-worker.
How long does the conversation last before you glance at your phone? If you’re like most, the answer is not long at all.
In today’s fast-paced world where multi-tasking is the norm, it’s becoming less taboo to hide distraction. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T. and the author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age,” says cellphones have a lot of capabilities, and one of them is seduction. Turkle says they have the ability to draw you in, even when you’re with other people — and this is having a profound impact on our professional and personal lives.
For starters, conversation is becoming a rarity. Turkle cites a study where a powered-down cellphone was placed between two people seated across from each other at a dinner table. For the duration of dinner, the conversation remained trivial and the two subjects connected less than those in the control group, where there was no phone.
“So we trivialize our conversations, we feel less connected to each other if there’s a phone on the table. Even a silent phone on the landscape disconnects us. The phone basically says, ‘This conversation could be interrupted. I’m not completely here for you.’ And we’re doing this to each other all the time. It’s become the way we live our life.”
When Turkle began studying the phenomenon of texting vs. talking, she learned about an etiquette code of sorts from college students, referred to as “the rule of three.”
“When they [a group of five or six students] go to dinner, they’ll bring their phones, and if three people have their heads up in a conversation, they’ll feel that they can put their heads down and look at their phones,” she explains.
The result is disengaged conversation, and ultimately, a decline in empathy.
“They’re not learning about each other and not learning to empathize with each other, because they are time-sharing between the conversation and what’s going on in their phones.”
In fact, there’s been a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students in the past 20 years, Turkle says, most of which has taken place in the past 10.
“I think it’s turning us into a society where empathy is in crisis,” she says. “This isn’t good because we need empathy to know each other, to experience each other. And [younger generations] are not learning empathy in their families because they talk about being in families where their parents are texting at breakfast and lunch.”
Turkle says the fear of being alone is one reason people are so quick to draw their phones — even while in the presence of others. “They see being alone as a problem that technology should solve.”
But solitude is important, she says. It helps people to develop their own thoughts and opinions that contribute to, and spark, conversation.
Turkle mentions another experiment where subjects were asked to sit in a room without a phone or a book for six minutes. After the six minutes were up, many opted to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than continue to sit with their own thoughts.
Turkle says teaching children to be alone helps them from becoming lonely in the future. They need to be able to think, to imagine and to be comfortable with silence.
“We’re denying our children by not teaching them the capacity for solitude,” she says. “You need to be able to think for yourself and have conversations in your head in order to come to the conversations with other people with something to say. We need to be able to reclaim solitude in order to reclaim conversation and reclaim our ability to be with other people.”
Turkle has some tips for parents who want to restore meaningful conversation with their children. For starters, she suggests designating certain areas in the home as “conversation spaces” that remain device-free.
The kitchen and dining room are a few obvious options, and Turkle also recommends the car. The driver is not texting or perusing Pinterest, and no one else should be as well.
“Nobody is catching up on their social media feed; nobody is watching movies. That’s the place where your family talks.”
If kids argue against the new rule, Turkle says to exercise your parental authority and keep your explanation simple. “Say, ‘You know, in our family, it’s very important that we talk to each other. And in our family, that’s the time we talk to each other.’”
If the behavior is introduced early enough, a device-free car ride will become the norm. But older kids can adapt to the new rule too.
“You say, ‘You know, I feel I’ve made some mistakes. I’m not talking to you enough, I’m on my phone too much and I’m losing out. So we’re using the car to talk now,’” Turkle says.
The second thing parents can do is become more mindful of their own behavior.
“If you’re in a conversation with your kids and you find yourself starting to text, you just have to stop yourself and say, ‘What is my intention here?’ Because you’re teaching your children that you can’t tolerate walking to the corner store without having your phone with you. You know, you can’t stand walking on a beach without taking your phone along,” Turkle says.
Her last bit of advice is to trust your gut.
“Technology makes us forget what we know about life,” Turkle says. “You really are an expert in what you know about life, and remember what you know about life.
