Metadata
- Author: Sherry Turkle
- Full Title:: Reclaiming Conversation
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Read date:: 2025-08-15
Highlights
We are forever elsewhere. (View Highlight)
We begin to think of ourselves as a tribe of one (View Highlight)
It all adds up to a flight from conversation—at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous (View Highlight)
From the early days, I saw that computers offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship and then, as the programs got really good, the illusion of friendship without the demands of intimacy. Because, face-to-face, people ask for things that computers never do. With people, things go best if you pay close attention and know how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Real people demand responses to what they are feeling. And not just any response. (View Highlight)
Henry David Thoreau moved to a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to learn to live more “deliberately”—away from the crush of random chatter. But the cabin furniture he chose to secure that ambition suggests no simple “retreat.” He said that in his cabin there were “three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.” (View Highlight)
Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. (View Highlight)
Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other. (View Highlight)
This is pleasurable and to be cherished. The problem comes if these “reminders” of intimacy lead us away from intimacy itself. (View Highlight)
Reclaiming conversation begins with the acknowledgment that speaking and listening with attention are skills. They can be taught. (View Highlight)
Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. (View Highlight)
If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch. (View Highlight)
Research shows that those who use social media the most have difficulty reading human emotions, including their own. (View Highlight)
in creative conversations, in conversations in which people get to really know each other, you usually have to tolerate a bit of boredom. (View Highlight)
Andrew Przybyliski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2012): 1–10, doi:10.1177/0265407512453 827; Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, et al., “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,” Environment and Behavior (2014): 124, doi:10.1177/0013916514539755. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-16
in conversations that could potentially take unexpected directions, people don’t always try to get things “right.” They learn to be surprised by the things they say. And to enjoy that experience. The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.” (View Highlight)
Declaring and defending yourself is how you learn to be forthright. It is a skill that helps in both love and politics. (View Highlight)
A college senior has a boy in her dorm room. They’re in bed together. But when he goes to the bathroom, she takes out her phone and goes on Tinder, an app where she can check out men in the area who might be interested in meeting—or more. She says, “I have no idea why I did this—I really like this guy… . I want to date him, but I couldn’t help myself. Nothing was happening on Facebook; I didn’t have any new emails.” Lying there in bed, waiting for her lover to come out of the bathroom, she had hit one of life’s boring bits. (View Highlight)
On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-18
people who chronically multitask train their brains to crave multitasking. Those who multitask most frequently don’t get better at it; they just want more of it. (View Highlight)
we are wired to crave what neuroscientists call “the seeking drive,” the kind of experience that scrolling through a Twitter feed provides. (View Highlight)
A sixteen-year-old boy tells his mother that he has just received a text from his best friend. His friend’s father has died. He tells his mother that he has texted his friend to say he is sorry. His mother, almost uncomprehending, asks, “Why didn’t you call?” She is thinking about consolation. The boy says, “It isn’t my place to interrupt him. He’s too sad to talk on the phone.” The boy assumes that conversation is intrusive even at moments that beg for intimacy. (View Highlight)
If you don’t have practice in thinking alone, you are less able to bring your ideas to the table with confidence and authority. Collaboration suffers. As does innovation, which requires a capacity for solitude that continual connection diminishes. A love of solitude and self-reflection enables sociability. (View Highlight)
when politics goes online, people begin to talk about political action in terms of things they can do online. They are drawn to the idea that social change can happen by giving a “thumbs-up” or by subscribing to a group. The slow, hard work of politics—study, analysis, listening, trying to convince someone with a different point of view—these can get lost. The Internet is a good start, a place to bring people together. But politics continues in conversation and in relationships developed over time. (View Highlight)
Now I worry that it can also give us the illusion of progress without the demands of action. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-19
I find people increasingly open to the idea that in the near future, machine companionship will be sufficient unto the day. People tell me that if a machine could give them the “feeling” of being intimately understood, that might be understanding enough. Or intimacy enough. (View Highlight)
who said that a life without conflict, without being reminded of past mistakes, past pain, or one where you can avoid rubbing shoulders with troublesome people, is good? Was it the same person who said that life shouldn’t have boring bits? (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-20
You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That’s just being a person… . Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty, forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching and you’re in your car and you start going, Ooh, here it comes that I’m alone, like it starts to visit on you just like this sadness. Life is tremendously sad. (View Highlight)
It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don’t need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy. (View Highlight)
American culture tends to worship sociality. We have wanted to believe that we are our most creative during “brainstorming” and “groupthink” sessions. But this turns out not to be the case. New ideas are more likely to emerge from people thinking on their own. Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations. (View Highlight)
rilke confronted its difficulty: “And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.” (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-24
One of the gamblers Schüll interviewed said, “I’m almost hypnotized into being that machine.” For gamblers in the machine zone, money doesn’t matter. Neither does winning or losing. What matters is remaining at the machine and in the zone. Technology (View Highlight)
Madrigal calls the machine zone the “dark side of flow.” (View Highlight)
Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation. (View Highlight)
I’ve found that, surprisingly, using avatars to experiment with identity can be more straightforward than using a Facebook profile for this purpose. In the case of the avatar, you begin with clarity that you are “playing” a character that is someone other than you. That’s the game. On Facebook, you are, ostensibly, representing yourself and talking about your own life. (View Highlight)
one wonders if in tracking their grief, they keep themselves too busy to feel it. (View Highlight)
keep us on the feeling or does it distract us because, once categorized, we have done something “constructive” with the feeling and don’t have to attend to it anymore? (View Highlight)
here, our language betrays us. We talk about the “output” from our tracking programs as “results.” But they are not results. They are first steps. But too often, they are first steps that don’t suggest second steps. (View Highlight)
She says that after two weeks of the program’s “constructive criticism,” the program has begun to “train” her. She now writes what she thinks the program would like to hear. She makes an effort to be upbeat and to talk more about other people in her 750 words. Linda says that according to the program, she’s not as self-important as she once was. I’m in a group where Linda discusses her relationship with 750 Words. The question comes up as to whether Linda’s approach is making her a better person. Sure, she is gaming the system, but maybe the system is gaming her (View Highlight)
As things played out, Cara’s “happiness tracker” didn’t lead to this kind of reflection. Indeed, she saw the number she got from the program as a “failing grade” and it sparked a desire to get a better one. It pushed her into action. But without a person with whom to discuss the meaning behind the number, without a methodology for looking at her current feelings in relation to her history, she was flying blind. (View Highlight)
A first strategy is not to take words literally but to have patience with them. Wait and see where words lead you if you let them take you anywhere. The therapist creates a space for a kind of conversation that encourages you to say what comes to mind without self-censorship. An algorithm asks for specifications. In talk therapy, one is encouraged to wander. (View Highlight)
A second strategy is to pay special attention to how the legacy of past relationships persist in the present. To this end, talk therapy creates a space in which therapists do not offer themselves as standard conversational partners but remain more neutral. This makes it easier to see when we project feelings from the past onto them. These feelings can be of every sort, positive and negative—of abandonment, of love, dependency, or rage. Our projections are known as the transference: (View Highlight)
you accuse your therapist of inattention but are actually addressing (View Highlight)
you learn to recognize moments when you accuse an intimate of the qualities that you most dislike in yourself. (View Highlight)
If you act out, you create change and perhaps crisis. All of the new noise you make can drown out the feelings you were originally trying to understand. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-24
going out for a drink often seems like too much work.” (View Highlight)
At any party, her friends are texting friends at other parties to figure out “whether we are at the right party.” Kati says, “Maybe we can find a better party. Maybe there are better people at a party just down the block.” (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-06
Texting and email make people feel in control, but when they talk in detail about their online exchanges, the stories are usually about misunderstandings and crossed signals. The feelings of control are just that: feelings. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-29
“The things I talk about now, I feel they come from my phone. (View Highlight)
There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as “whole person conversation”—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t look away or text another friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. (View Highlight)
In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online? One thing seems clear: Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-02
The trick, hard now, but perhaps not so hard in ten years, is not to devalue yourself when the friend beside you turns to the “people on the phone.” (View Highlight)
seems pragmatic, but I see little evidence that it makes emotional sense. (View Highlight)
When you allow yourself to be consoled by a friend in person, you take the chance that things might go beyond this. There is more of a chance for the conversation to open out onto more delicate areas. (View Highlight)
This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-03
We’ve seen families who hoped to export conflict by having their disagreements by text message and email. Here is another idea that involves export—this time the wholesale export of your experience. Behind technological fantasies there is so often a deep sadness that human beings have simply not gotten it right and technology will help us do better. (View Highlight)
Research supports what literature and philosophy have told us for a long time. The development of empathy needs face-to-face conversation. And it needs eye contact. The work of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has taught us that children need eye contact to develop parts of the brain that are involved with attachment. Without eye contact, there is a persistent sense of disconnection and problems with empathy. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-04
When you have a growing awareness of how much you don’t know about someone else, you begin to understand how much you don’t know about yourself. You learn, says Williams, “a more demanding kind of attention. You learn patience and a new skill and habit of perspective.” (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-05
The psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the notion of the “paradox of choice.” While we think we would be happiest if we had more choices, constrained choice often leads to a more satisfied life. In the 1950s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon made a distinction between people who try to maximize and those who satisfice, a word he invented. (View Highlight)
if individuals achieve a sense of community, it is because they have actively cultivated and maintained these connections over a lifetime. It is something they have committed to. (View Highlight)
nearly half of cell-owning young people in serious relationships say that their partners have been distracted by their mobile phones while they were together. (View Highlight)
“I definitely don’t talk to him about nonsense because I need to make the best use of my time with him. Because if he is actually spending time listening, I’m making sure that I’m saying things that are actually worth saying.” (View Highlight)
n a stand-up routine on modern romance, Aziz Ansari asks people to raise their hands if they have ever just stopped texting someone when they were not “into” the relationship. A theater of hands goes up. Then he asks people to raise their hands if that is how they’d like someone to convey to them a lack of continuing interest. There are no hands. There is a lot we accept as the new normal that we don’t like at all. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-06
But Chris Rock also said that on first dates, we don’t send ourselves but we send our “representatives”; we send our best selves. Over time, our representatives can’t do the job and “we” start to show up. And that is where a relationship either works or doesn’t. In digital connections, the danger is that we can keep sending in our representatives. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-06
We decide to try a device-free class with a short break to check phones. (View Highlight)
It is commonplace to talk about multitaskers as addicted. I don’t like to talk about addiction in this context because I find that discussing the holding power of technology in these terms makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel they are facing something against which resistance seems almost futile. This is a fallacy. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-07
if we decide that deep attention is a value, we can cultivate it. (View Highlight)
6 (March 2009): 32–37, http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational (View Highlight)
Sound bites, text bites, and mind bites are a reflection of a culture that has forgotten or become too distracted by and too drawn to the next piece of new information to allow itself time to think.” (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-13
it (View Highlight)
refusing-to-stand-on-the-shoulders-of-giants
The problem isn’t web surfing. It’s turning to bits and pieces at times when a more sustained narrative, the kind you are more likely to meet in a book or long article, would be a better choice. This teacher is saying that her students don’t have the materials in mind to consider the whole and so they have trouble arguing a point of view. (View Highlight)
For her, another fact about the United States in 1863 simply floats free in its own universe, somewhere out there in the cloud; it is not added to a story about the Civil War that Maureen already knows. (View Highlight)
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-15
We think with what we know; we use what we know to ask new questions. (View Highlight)
An irony emerges. Research on MOOCs, the pedagogical form that was hailed because it offers so much to measure, shows that they work best when they are combined with the least measurable element of a traditional classroom: presence. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-20
“What is the best reason for a mother to breast-feed a child?” (View Highlight)
Finally, Bettelheim said softly, “It feels good.” (View Highlight)
The child has a bodily sensation that he or she is satisfying the mother, giving pleasure by receiving pleasure, because the breast feels good to the child as well. And from this template, argued Bettelheim, all successful relationships are built. You give pleasure to another through something that gives you pleasure. (View Highlight)
He argued that wearing a mask—what he thinks anonymous polling accomplishes—may free people up to express themselves, but face-to-face encounters encourage civility and a sense of accountability. (View Highlight)
the classroom is a place to learn how to participate in the conversations that make democracy work. Anonymous polling and comments don’t teach you to stand up for your beliefs. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-20
my experience is that you really don’t know when you are going to have an important conversation. You have to show up for many conversations that feel inefficient or boring to be there for the conversation that changes your mind. (View Highlight)