Is author Sherry Turkle alone? Has she experienced a massive increase in loneliness since the development of smart phones or is she just so smart and mature, she can handle technology, while the plebs are not to be trusted with it?
Sherry Turkle writes in this 2010 book:
* We are lonely but fearful of intimacy.
[LF: Who’s lonely? Is Sherry lonely and fearful of intimacy? If not, why not? How is she different from everyone else? I see no difference in the loneliness of people I know now compared to 40 years ago. I experience loneliness less than 1% of my waking hours.]
* We’d rather text than talk.
[LF: Is this true for Sherry? Sometimes text is more useful than talk and sometimes it is not. I text fewer than ten words a week on average.]
* People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
[LF: Who’s lonely?]
* I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.
[LF: Not true to my experience.]
* We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.
* We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture.
* Technology ties us up as it promises to free us up. Connectivity technologies once promised to give us more time. But as the cell phone and smartphone eroded the boundaries between work and leisure, all the time in the world was not enough. Even when we are not “at work,” we experience ourselves as “on call”; pressed, we want to edit out complexity and “cut to the chase.”
[LF: Does it not depend on what you do with tech?]
* A few years ago at a dinner party in Paris, I met Ellen, an ambitious, elegant young woman in her early thirties, thrilled to be working at her dream job in advertising. Once a week, she would call her grandmother in Philadelphia using Skype, an Internet service that functions as a telephone with a Web camera. Before Skype, Ellen’s calls to her grandmother were costly and brief. With Skype, the calls are free and give the compelling sense that the other person is present—Skype is an almost real-time video link. Ellen could now call more frequently: “Twice a week and I stay on the call for an hour,” she told me. It should have been rewarding; instead, when I met her, Ellen was unhappy. She knew that her grandmother was unaware that Skype allows surreptitious multitasking. Her grandmother could see Ellen’s face on the screen but not her hands. Ellen admitted to me, “I do my e-mail during the calls. I’m not really paying attention to our conversation.”
Ellen’s multitasking removed her to another place. She felt her grandmother was talking to someone who was not really there. During their Skype conversations, Ellen and her grandmother were more connected than they had ever been before, but at the same time, each was alone. Ellen felt guilty and confused: she knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen, another task among multitasks.
[LF: The problem is not the tech, it is Ellen’s thinking. It strikes me that she is doing something nice for her grandmother and she has no reason to feel guilty about multi-tasking through the task. It might be a wonderful world where grandkids want to talk regularly with their grandparents, but it is not reality. There are a lot of people who would like to talk to me who I am not interested in talking to, just as there are many people I would like to talk to who are not interested in talking to me. This has nothing to do with tech.]
* In corporations, among friends, and within academic departments, people readily admit that they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face-to-face.
[LF: Some people I would rather talk to face-to-face. The other people aren’t that important to me. I’m not looking to have an I-Thou relationship with everyone.]
* When part of your life is lived in virtual places—it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site—a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is “true here,” true in simulation.
[LF: We’re different with different people and with different situations. “What is true here” would be true even without technology. I don’t see anything inherently vexing about this.]
* Yet, even such simple pleasures bring compulsions that take me by surprise. I check my e-mail first thing in the morning and before going to bed at night. I have come to learn that informing myself about new professional problems and demands is not a good way to start or end my day, but my practice unhappily continues. I admitted my ongoing irritation with myself to a friend, a woman in her seventies who has meditated on a biblical reading every morning since she was in her teens. She confessed that it is ever more difficult to begin her spiritual exercises before she checks her e-mail; the discipline to defer opening her inbox is now part of her devotional gesture. And she, too, invites insomnia by checking her e-mail every night before turning in.
[LF: I usually wait about 2.5 hours every morning before checking my email. It’s not that hard. I got my first cell phone in 1997 and my first smart phone in 2007. I don’t feel that these tools reduced the quality of my life and I have rarely had anyone complain about my use of them. I occasionally have had women checking their cell phones while I’m talking with them. I usually walk away in response.]
* Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life—and both robotics and networked life do that—we become less willing to get out there and take a chance. A song that became popular on You Tube in 2010, “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” ends with the lyrics “And if you think I’m not the one, log off, log off and we’ll be done.”
[LF: I don’t see normal people going this route.]
* In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other.
[LF: How much were strangers speaking to each other in the old regime?]
* When people have phone conversations in public spaces, their sense of privacy is sustained by the presumption that those around them will treat them not only as anonymous but as if absent.
[LF: Tech allows boorish people new ways to be boorish.]
* When Rebecca and I returned home from France, I talked about the trip with a close friend, a psychoanalyst. Our discussion led her to reminisce about her first visit to Paris. She was sixteen, travelling with her parents. But while they went sightseeing with her younger brother, she insisted on staying in her hotel room, writing long letters to her boyfriend. Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and the novelty of our circumstances.
* Research portrays Americans as increasingly insecure, isolated, and lonely. 5 We work more hours than ever before, often at several jobs. Even high school and college students, during seasons of life when time should be most abundant, say that they don’t date but “hook up” because “who has the time?” We have moved away, often far away, from the communities of our birth. We struggle to raise children without the support of extended families. Many have left behind the religious and civic associations that once bound us together. 6 To those who have lost a sense of physical connection, connectivity suggests that you make your own page, your own place. When you are there, you are by definition where you belong, among officially friended friends.
* Not that many years ago, one of my graduate students talked to me about the first time he found himself walking across the MIT campus with a friend who took an incoming call on his mobile phone. My student was irritated, almost incredulous. “He put me on ‘pause.’ Am I supposed to remember where we were and pick up the conversation after he is done with his call?” At the time, his friend’s behavior seemed rude and confusing. Only a few years later, it registers as banal. Mobile technology has made each of us “pauseable.” Our face-to-face conversations are routinely interrupted by incoming calls and text messages. In the world of paper mail, it was unacceptable for a colleague to read his or her correspondence during a meeting. In the new etiquette, turning away from those in front of you to answer a mobile phone or respond to a text has become close to the norm. When someone holds a phone, it can be hard to know if you have that person’s attention. A parent, partner, or child glances down and is lost to another place, often without realizing that they have taken leave. In restaurants, customers are asked to turn their phones to vibrate. But many don’t need sound or vibration to know that something has happened on their phones. “When there is an event on my phone, the screen changes,” says a twenty-six-year-old lawyer. “There is a brightening of the screen. Even if my phone is in my purse . . . I see it, I sense it…. I always know what is happening on my phone.”
* Sal, sixty-two, a widower, describes one erased line as a “Rip van Winkle experience.” When his wife became ill five years before, he dropped out of one world. Now, a year after her death, he wakes up in another. Recently, Sal began to entertain at his home again. At his first small dinner party, he tells me, “I invited a woman, about fifty, who works in Washington. In the middle of a conversation about the Middle East, she takes out her BlackBerry. She wasn’t speaking on it. I wondered if she was checking her e-mail. I thought she was being rude, so I asked her what she was doing. She said that she was blogging the conversation. She was blogging the conversation.” Several months after the event, Sal remains incredulous. He thinks of an evening with friends as private, as if surrounded by an invisible wall. His guest, living the life mix, sees her evening as an occasion to appear on a larger virtual stage.
* When psychologists study multitasking, they do not find a story of new efficiencies. Rather, multitaskers don’t perform as well on any of the tasks they are attempting. 17 But multitasking feels good because the body rewards it with neurochemicals that induce a multitasking “high.” The high deceives multitaskers into thinking they are being especially productive.
* One of my friends posted on Facebook, “The problem with handling your e-mail backlog is that when you answer mail, people answer back! So for each 10 you handle, you get 5 more! Heading down towards my goal of 300 left tonight, and 100 tomorrow.”
* The network’s effects on today’s young people are paradoxical. Networking makes it easier to play with identity (for example, by experimenting with an avatar that is interestingly different from you) but harder to leave the past behind, because the Internet is forever. The network facilitates separation (a cell phone allows children greater freedoms) but also inhibits it (a parent is always on tap). Teenagers turn away from the “real-time” demands of the telephone and disappear into role-playing games they describe as “communities” and worlds.” And yet, even as they are committed to a new life in the ether, many exhibit an unexpected nostalgia. They start to resent the devices that force them into performing their profiles; they long for a world in which personal information is not taken from them automatically, just as the cost of doing business. Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner. It is the young who begin to speak about problems that, to their eyes, their elders have given up on.
I interview Sanjay, sixteen. We will talk for an hour between two of his class periods. At the beginning of our conversation, he takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and turns it off. 24 At the end of our conversation, he turns the phone back on. He looks at me ruefully, almost embarrassed. He has received over a hundred text messages as we were speaking. Some are from his girlfriend who, he says, “is having a meltdown.” Some are from a group of close friends trying to organize a small concert. He feels a lot of pressure to reply and begins to pick up his books and laptop so he can find a quiet place to set himself to the task. As he says good-bye, he adds, not speaking particularly to me but more to himself as an afterthought to the conversation we have just had, “I can’t imagine doing this when I get older.” And then, more quietly, “How long do I have to continue doing this?”
* R oman, eighteen, admits that he texts while driving and he is not going to stop. “I know I should, but it’s not going to happen. If I get a Facebook message or something posted on my wall . . . I have to see it. I have to.” I am speaking with him and ten of his senior classmates at the Cranston School, a private urban coeducational high school in Connecticut. His friends admonish him, but then several admit to the same behavior. Why do they text while driving? Their reasons are not reasons; they simply express a need to connect. “I interrupt a call even if the new call says ‘unknown’ as an identifier—I just have to know who it is. So I’ll cut off a friend for an ‘unknown,’” says Maury. “I need to know who wanted to connect…. And if I hear my phone, I have to answer it. I don’t have a choice. I have to know who it is, what they are calling for.” Marilyn adds, “I keep the sound on when I drive. When a text comes in, I have to look. No matter what. Fortunately, my phone shows me the text as a pop up right up front . . . so I don’t have to do too much looking while I’m driving.” These young people live in a state of waiting for connection. And they are willing to take risks, to put themselves on the line. Several admit that tethered to their phones, they get into accidents when walking. One chipped a front tooth. Another shows a recent bruise on his arm. “I went right into the handle of the refrigerator.”
I ask the group a question: “When was the last time you felt that you didn’t want to be interrupted?” I expect to hear many stories. There are none. Silence.
* Sociologist David Riesman, writing in the mid-1950s, remarked on the American turn from an inner- to an other-directed sense of self. 6 Without a firm inner sense of purpose, people looked to their neighbors for validation. Today, cell phone in hand, other-directedness is raised to a higher power.
* I have said that in the psychoanalytic tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. 7 It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. So, the narcissistic self gets on with others by dealing only with their made-to-measure representations. These representations (some analytic traditions refer to them as “part objects,” others as “selfobjects”) are all that the fragile self can handle. We can easily imagine the utility of inanimate companions to such a self because a robot or a computational agent can be sculpted to meet one’s needs. But a fragile person can also be supported by selected and limited contact with people (say, the people on a cell phone “favorites” list). In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.
* In treatment, symptoms disappear because they become irrelevant. Patients become more interested in looking at what symptoms hide—the ordinary thoughts and experiences of which they are the strangulated expression.
