Reclaiming Conversation (7 page)

I
n the chapters that follow, I look at the kinds of conversation Thoreau envisaged when he described the three chairs in his cabin. The story begins with
one-chair conversations
, those of solitude. Solitude does not necessarily mean being alone. It is a state of conscious retreat, a gathering of the self. The capacity for solitude makes relationships with others more authentic. Because you know who you are, you can see others for who they are, not for who you need them to be. So solitude enables richer conversation. But our current way of life undermines our capacity for solitude.

I've said that, these days, being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved, and people try to solve it with technology. But here, digital connection is more a symptom than a cure. It expresses but it doesn't solve the underlying problem—a discomfort with being alone. And, more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people
think of themselves. It is shaping a new way of being. I call it “I share, therefore I am.” We share our thoughts and feelings in order to feel whole.

In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don't know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are. We take what we need from them in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as
spare parts to support our fragile selves
.

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. Many think of Thoreau as a recluse. He was anything but. In fact, his friends joked that he could hear the Emerson family dinner bell from his cabin in the woods. Thoreau's
two-chair conversations
are with friends, family, and romantic partners.

These days, parents complain that children won't talk to them because they are so busy with their phones at mealtime; children have the same complaints about their parents. Parents respond that children don't have the “standing” to make this kind of complaint. During meals, children go to their phones. We are at an odd standoff with neither side happy.

In a television commercial for Facebook, a large, gregarious family sits down to a meal. It is a Norman Rockwell moment. In our positive associations to family dinner, myth and science come together. We know that for children the best predictor of success later in life is the number of
meals shared with their families
. The dinner in the Facebook commercial looks like one of those dinners that everyone knows they are supposed to love.

Just as the viewer locks on to this image of unconditional “good,” the
narrative is disrupted. An older woman at the table—let me call her “boring Auntie”—begins a painfully dull story about trying to buy a chicken at the market. A teenage girl at the table does the predictable: She pulls out her phone and goes onto Facebook. Immediately, the scene is populated with scenes from her newsfeed: A friend plays the drums, another performs ballet, yet others are in a snowball fight. The teenager is no longer at dinner. She is elsewhere.

We once taught our children to ignore a ringing phone at dinner. We became annoyed if telemarketers interrupted us. Now, Facebook suggests that it may be a good thing to
interrupt dinner
ourselves
.

And then there are
three-chair conversations,
conversations in the social world. Here I begin with examples from the world of work. I look at my own kind of workplace, the world of education, and also the business and corporate world. I saw striking commonalities between education and business, between the dynamics of classrooms and offices. I found conversation to be at the heart of the learning culture and I learned that conversation is
good for the bottom line
.

And both domains face similar threats to their cultures of conversation
.
In classrooms and offices, the cultural expectation for multitasking subverts conversation and constant interruption threatens achievement. Just as we go to dinners with friends that are not quite dinners together, we go to classes that are not quite classes and work meetings that are not quite meetings. What these not quite encounters have in common is that we all feel free to be on some device and to let our minds wander.

And, most recently, in both education and at work, conversation is challenged by new experiments that use technology to engage people from a distance. So, for example, there is the hope that online courses will make remote
learning more “efficient
” in ways that can be measured. One unexpected result of the online experiments has been to make the value of teachers and students talking face-to-face ever more clear. A teacher “live” in front of a classroom gives students an opportunity to watch someone think, boring bits and all. That teacher is a
model for how thinking happens, including false starts and hindsight. There has been a parallel development in the workplace: Many of the firms that encouraged employees to work at home are calling them back to the office in order to have a more collaborative and productive workforce.

Of course, in many businesses, remote work is the cost-saving rule. I interview an executive, Howard Chen, who is the creator of a social media site for a multinational corporation. He is passionate about the necessity for advanced social media in his company because it has decided to close down local offices. In their place is a new system called “hoteling.” When people need the resources of an office, they bring their computer to a building where an automated system assigns them a room. When they get there and plug in their computer, a virtual telephone pops up on the screen. That is their company line for the day. They are “at work.”

So when Chen goes to the office, there are no regular colleagues around, no community at all. But this is all the more reason for him to be excited about the new social network he has designed. He dreams that it will restore life to his work environment, now stripped so bare of familiar objects and people. On the day I meet him, we are in a new hotel space. He responds to his unfamiliar physical surrounds by extolling the “sociability” of his social media. With only a few keystrokes he can call up an international database of all employees and their interests. This, he hopes, can be the basis for online conversations and new connections. He says, “Yeah, if you're a soccer fan, you can talk to all the other soccer fans in the company. How cool is that?” But as an aside, he says that recently he has been feeling rather sad:

Last week I was sitting there and I finished doing something and I looked around and you could hear a pin drop. And I'm, like, this is ghastly. It's just horrible. So I took out my iPhone and I recorded the silence for a minute to show my wife. This is what it sounds like, or doesn't sound like, at work.

We work so hard to build our online connections. We have so much faith in them. But we must take care that in the end we do not simply feel alone with our devices.

This is all the more important because although the flight from conversation affects us as individuals, it also changes our life in communities. Here I consider three questions about politics and social policy on our new digital landscape.

First, the Internet gives us the possibility of sharing our views with anyone in the world, but it also can support information silos where we don't talk to anyone who doesn't agree with us. Studies show that people don't like posting things that their followers won't agree with—everyone wants to be liked. So technology can sustain ever more rigid partisanship that makes it hard to talk, enabling us to live in information bubbles that don't let in dissenting voices.

Second, 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. I have said that technology gives us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Now I worry that it can also give us the illusion of progress without the demands of action.

Third, digital communication makes surveillance easier. The corporations that provide us with the means to talk on the net (to text, email, and chat) take our online activity as data. They declare ownership of it and use it, usually to better sell things to us. And we now know that our government routinely makes a copy of our communications as well. The boundaries have blurred between private communication and routine surveillance, between private communication and its repackaging as a commodity. So, in addition to the question
What is intimacy without privacy?
I consider another:
What is democracy without privacy?

A
nd I think of a “fourth chair.” I've said that when conversation got expansive, Thoreau took his guests into nature. I think of this as his fourth chair, his most philosophical one. These days, the way things have gotten philosophical causes us to confront how we have used technology to create a second nature, an artificial nature. For so long we have assumed that the conversations that matter are the conversations we have with other people. In recent years, this idea has been challenged by computer programs that seduce us not by their smarts but by their sociability. I explore proposals for new, more intimate conversations with “socially” competent machines—a development with the potential to change human nature itself. For me, our
fourth-chair conversations
are ones that Thoreau could not have envisaged: We are tempted to talk not only through machines but to them, with them.

At first, we met Siri, a digital companion always ready to engage. But that was just the beginning. As I write these words, the media is full of stories about the launch of the first “home robots” who are there to be always-available “best friendly companions” by acting as though they understand what you are saying when they exchange pleasantries through the
magic of simulated feelings
. Have we forgotten what conversation is? What friendship is? Is talking to machines companionship or abandonment?

We lose our words.
Intelligence
once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit. And yet we readily call machines intelligent now.
Affective
is another word that once meant a lot more than what any machine can deliver. Yet we have become used to describing machines that portray emotional states or can sense our emotional states as
exemplars of “affective computing
.” These new meanings become our new normal, and we forget other meanings. We have to struggle to recapture lost language, lost meanings, and perhaps, in time, lost experiences.

At one conference I attended, the robots were called “caring machines,” and when I objected, I was told we were using this word not because the robots care but because they will take care of us. Caring is a behavior. It is a
function, not a feeling
. The conference participants seemed puzzled: Why did I care so much about semantics? What's wrong with me?

It is natural for words to change their meaning over time and with new circumstances.
Intelligence
and
affective
have changed their meaning to accommodate what machines can do. But now the words
caring
,
friend
,
companionship
, and
conversation
?

A lot is at stake in these words. They are not yet lost. We need to remember these words and this conversation before we don't know how to have it. Or before we think we can have it with a machine.

We paint ourselves into a corner where we endanger more than words.

I talk of our having arrived at a “robotic moment,” not because we have built robots that can be our companions but because we are willing to consider becoming theirs. 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.

The ironies are substantial. We turn toward artificial intelligence for conversation just at the moment that we are in flight from conversations with each other.

More generally, in our fourth-chair conversations, we imagine ourselves in a new kind of world where machines talk to each other to make our lives easier. But who will we become in this world we call friction-free where machines (and without our doing any talking at all!) will know what we want, sometimes even before we do? They will know all about our online lives, so they'll know our taste in music, art, politics, clothes, books, and food. They'll know who we like and where we travel.

In that world, your smartphone will signal your favorite coffee shop as you set out in the morning to get a latte, which of course will be
waiting for you when you arrive, exactly as you want it. In the spirit of friction-free, your phone will be able to reroute and guide you so that you can avoid your ex-girlfriend and see only designated friends on your path. But 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? In this case, if technology gives us the feeling that we can communicate with total control, life's contingencies become a problem. Just because technology can help us solve a “problem” doesn't mean it was a
problem in the first place
.