Step away from your phone: the new rules of conversation

Young people today, along with their Snapchat and their selfies and their sexting, apparently engage in a practice known as “phubbing”. According to Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist of digital life, this involves maintaining eye contact with one person while text-messaging another. “My students tell me they do it all the time and that it’s not that hard,” she writes in her new book, Reclaiming Conversation. I nearly fell out of my wingback chair into my bowl of Werther’s Originals.

Surely kids aren’t incapable of concentrating on one other human being face to face? But I’m a hypocrite: the main reason I don’t text while looking at someone else is just that I’d be terrible at it. Instead, I am always drifting away from a live conversation to check my iPhone under the table, or in the bathroom. When I see someone typing instead of interacting with someone at the supermarket checkout, I wince at the rudeness, because I’d never do that myself, unless it were really urgent… and yet it often does feel really urgent, so I do. Turkle’s thesis, in short, rings troublingly true: we’re more connected than ever, yet we talk – really talk – less and less.

If face-to-face conversation is dying – and Turkle isn’t the only techno-sceptic to make that case – then it has something to do with our fear of feeling vulnerable. Nobody ever enjoyed feeling sad, or awkward, or stressed, or being put on the spot. But now we have a place to run and hide when those emotions arise: we can check out of the here and now, into digital space. There, we can edit our thoughts before we express them; we can hide our faces, and even our names; we can interact with others while holding them comfortably at bay. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversations,” one of Turkle’s young interviewees exclaims. “It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say!”

Hence the cliche of the millennial who can’t bear talking on the phone, and thinks it unconscionably rude when someone calls, except in an emergency, without emailing first. In the US, the online food-ordering service Seamless runs ad campaigns that celebrate their proudest selling point: that you can feed yourself without ever speaking to a human. And if even the phone induces such deer-in-the-headlights panic, how can the future of face-to-face conversation, in which even a stray twitch of a lip might betray you, be anything but bleak?

Of course, people have been making curmudgeonly objections to the social effects of new technologies for centuries: every new way of communicating gets condemned as less authentic than the one before. Doomsayers warned that the telephone threatened the fabric of society; one 1889 article proposed that, “instead of permitting its introduction into houses indiscriminately, telephone stations might be established, when desired, to embrace districts of six blocks square”, which you could visit if you absolutely had to make a call. Socrates, western civilisation’s first great conversationalist, even denounced writing itself, on the grounds that words fixed on the page encouraged forgetfuless, and couldn’t form part of a back-and-forth argument, which was what led to the truth. Besides, Turkle’s critics argue, research evidence contradicts the idea that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter get used as substitutes for “real” conversation; on the contrary, people with more online connections have as many or more offline ones as others. Anyway, don’t we edit ourselves offline just as much as in cyberspace – in our choice of clothes and haircut and makeup and the books we carry on the train?

All this may be absolutely true, yet it doesn’t quite strike at the kernel of Turkle’s concern, which is that it is increasingly tempting to use digital connection to avoid feelings and situations we’d rather not face. Her early research was in psychoanalysis, and the archetypal face-to-face conversation, for her, is still the one that happens in the therapist’s consulting room: a place not simply to present your problems and be prescribed a solution, but a space where things can bubble up, unpremeditated. In therapy, she writes, “you pay attention, but you let your mind wander. You focus on detail and discover the hidden dimensions of ordinary things. Talk therapy slows things down, so that they can be opened out.” In the absence of such conversational spaces, she argues, we’re experiencing a rapid decline in empathy. Research carried out by the University of Michigan in 2010 found that young people’s ability to identify and relate to feelings – both their own and other people’s – is in steep decline. Ironically, being more connected seems associated with getting lonelier.

This is a tough problem to solve, because you can’t just decide to experience a spiritually nourishing conversation; it’s the sort of thing that emerges only sometimes, haltingly and unbidden. Still, there are ways to make them more likely. If you have young children, Turkle suggests, you might start by defining certain “sacred spaces” (the dining room, the family car) where screens aren’t allowed. (Parents must set the example: “Several generations of children,” she writes, “have grown up expecting parents and care takers to be only half-there.”) Among adults, it might not hurt to try a little more conscious planning of conversation; the Oxford academic Theodore Zeldin pioneered the “conversation menu” for dinners and other events, a list of open-ended questions aimed at stimulating exchanges bigger than small talk. Or you could play the phone game, in which smartphone-addicted people, meeting for dinner, place their devices in a pile in the middle of the table; the first to succumb to the temptation of a ping or a buzz must pay for everyone’s food.

Leaving yourself exposed to the risk of awkward or upsetting conversations is bad, but picking up the bill, it seems, is even worse. In any case, those potentially uncomfortable conversations are what make life meaningful. Turkle quotes the comic Louis CK, in a routine on why he won’t let his daughters own smartphones, delivering, in the guise of comedy, a chilling warning: “Because we don’t want that first feeling of sad, we push it away with our phones. So you never feel completely happy or completely sad. You just feel kind of satisfied with your products. And then… you die.”