The Flight From Conversation

There is no texting on my family phone service. Not only do I want to avoid paying for it, I also want to encourage my children to talk with people, instead of talking at them, as so many of their friends prefer to do. The new methods of communication we use free us up from the annoyance of having to look at, pay attention to, or listen to other people. Sherry Turkle at the New York Times has also noticed this.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.

Many young people see the lack of face-to-face conversation as a benefit to the new communication, but as they mature they may realize that as they dispense with listening, their network connections ("friends") are not listening to them, either. Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)