Conversations about Smart Phones.

There is a conversation I am very tired of and it goes something like this: People do not interact with each other. People do not know how to interact with each other. People feel alone and lonely. Smart phones (or social media, or technology of any sort) is to blame.

At first this conversation made me mad, but now I’m just tired of conversations framed this way. I have no problem with having meaningful conversations about the use of technology in our lives – but please let’s not place the blame of our choices on technology – but let’s talk about how to use the tools in our lives in ways to develop more meaningful conversation and connection. Actually, let’s make this simple and talk about people rather than going on and on about the dangers and evils of devices.

As a part of our faculty colloquium this week we watched Sherry Turkle’s TED talk ‘Connected, but alone?‘. Two immediate thoughts came to mind – one that she has some good points that are valuable to consider, despite the framing of the conversation, and two that she has no concept of introverts or introversions.

Turkle claims that Twitter and Texting cannot add up to a conversation, and that we cannot get to know people that way. If she thinks that all texting conversations look like the example she gives in her video (see below), then she would be absolutely right.

While I sometimes have very brief texting conversations with friends, a good deal of them look more akin to this.

They very much resemble – conversations. We very much use our texting conversations “for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other” because without these conversations we would have Christmas Cards. These are close friends whom I continue to know what is going on in their lives BECAUSE we have technology. We do not share a physical space.

Do people text only like the texting conversation Turkle uses? maybe. But they don’t text me that way. So maybe the conversation shouldn’t be about hating the tool, but rather learning how to converse in a meaningful way, abbreviations and emoticons or no. I think it’s also misleading to believe that every conversation NEEDS to be meaningful because sometimes you just need to know if you should come home for lunch, or stay put – and that conversation isn’t that much different whether it’s email, text, or on a telephone.

Anyway as the TED talk came to a close I did what Turkle claims is impossible – I turned to my phone and to a text message to have a conversation. I texted a couple of my friends the talk and I said – this is not adding up to my experience – and they said…  Stop blaming tech for people behaving like people. And I said, if only I had not had so many face-to-face interactions in the past 24 hours, that’s the post I would have written because paragraph after paragraph summed up things I had been thinking.

I feel that it’s important to not glorify our interactions prior to technology or to pretend that they were hugely different. I’ve thought about this a great deal as I’ve looked at technology and how I use it. I am likely about the last generation that remembers life before the huge interconnectedness we have now – and that probably depends on whether you put me in X or Y – I’ve seen both, and I am literally right on the dividing line between them. But I frequently feel like these conversations ignore the fact that before there were laptops, tablets, or smart phones in class-rooms, students disengaged. I had a good old paper and pencil and I can detail for you multiple ways that I did not pay attention to the lecture in front of me back when I was a student. obviously this was not every day or it would have affected my grades, which leads me to another issue that I feel blaming the technology skirts which is that we all need to learn self-management. We did prior to smart phones and we do post-smart phones. This is a skill: it can be taught: it can be learned.

If we want people to be comfortable with being alone we need to teach them how to be comfortable with being alone. I personally find this hugely important and I enjoy it, so it’s not something I fight. But I know for other personalities – this is a challenge. This is a personality issue, not a technology issue. But regardless – it can be taught. From a very early age I have allowed Boyo to have times that are quiet and alone. I don’t know if he will be an introvert or an extrovert – I suspect more extroverted at times – BUT he can also sit and engage himself in his room for 20-30 minutes at times without needing any other human interaction. This is a skill and it can be learned, but we have to make it something that’s valued. Meaningful conversation is a similar skill and it can also be learned, but we have to make it something that’s valued.

The problem with so many of these conversations is that they start by making the smart phones, social media, and technology the problem. And when we start there we elevate these tools as being more dangerous/important/significant than they actually are (thus, if we get rid of them the problem will be solved; see I’m still here, back online after a year without the Internet, for one answer to this theory), and we also elevate the past as somehow having been better than the present. Both of these allow us to look away from the reality which is simply this: for ourselves we need to self-regulate. For our children and our students we need to help them learn to self-regulate.

And from one Introvert to the world we need to recognize that all of these conversations tend to glorify the casual face-to-face interaction into something hugely amazing in every scenario. While I don’t disagree that sometimes the smile from someone as you walk down the street can cheer up your day, the other side of it is that sometimes, smart phone in your hands or no, you have had your fill of superficial human interactions for one day and you just want to zone out while you’re waiting for your coffee in the drive-thru line and not have yet another superficial interaction while the barista details all of her weekend plans.