Social Development & Smart Phones
Transcript of Sherry Turkle PhD interview by Anna Maria Tremonti, on CBC Radio, Nov 16, 2015
ST “We can’t tolerate our own company, so we reach for a phone. And because we can’t (tolerate our own company), we have a harder time being in relationships with other people.”
AMT “What is it about smart phones that makes them so detrimental to relationships?”
ST “They offer us promises as though gifts from a benevolent genie. It seemed like a good idea at the time that you’ll never have to be alone, that you can put your attention to wherever you wanted to be, that you’ll always be heard, that you’ll never have to be bored. Those are four big promises. And all of that sounds so sweet. But if you really follow those out, those are incompatible with being in a sustained relationship or community. It’s not the phones themselves, it’s the way we’re using our phones.”
AMT “What happens to us when we never have to be bored?”
ST “Boredom is your imagination calling to you and saying ‘It’s important to go inside. It’s important to cultivate your inner life. And it turns out that when you experience boredom, your brain isn’t bored at all. The brain is laying down those parts of the brain that are associated with a stable autobiographical memory. So it isn’t good for us to flee from any moment of boredom by going to a phone. And yet, that’s what is happening.”
AMT “And this is why you write about how important solitude is?”
ST “Yes. Solitude is very important, not just for your own sense of having an identity, but you need solitude, you need not to be constantly distracted by a phone, in order to come to other people in order to form relationships, because if you come to a relationship without knowing who you are, without the capacity for solitude, you’re kind of looking to other people for your sense of who you are, and you’re not able to hear who they really are. And we instinctively shy away from these people. We kind of shun them, we don’t enjoy their presence, because we feel that we’re not heard, we’re being kind of turned into spare parts for their fragile sense of self. So you need to cultivate solitude in order to really have a successful mutual relationship.”
AMT “Right now a generation of kids is being raised with smart phones, tablets, laptops. They’re around them all the time. How does that affect their development?”
ST “Well the first thing it’s important to stress, that at a certain point in development, it’s fine, it’s fun. There are lots of interesting, educational, creative things to do on these technologies. My work is not anti-technologies, it’s pro-conversation. So insofar as they’re doing things on these machines, that are pro-conversation, I’m all in. But unfortunately, we’re doing things like building baby-bouncers that have a slot for a tablet. These are moments when eye-contact with a parent is crucial. We’re giving phones to 3- and 4- and 5-year-olds which are moments when they should be really talking to a caretaker, to a caring person who is making eye-contact with them and talking to them. One of my favorite lines in my book: ‘Technology makes us forget what we know about life.’ And one of the things that every parent sort of instinctively knows about life is that it’s important to talk to your child, make eye-contact with your child, read to your child, so that you have a child who makes eye-contact with you, responds to your face, to your emotions. If we don’t offer our children those experiences, they’re not going to get them from screens. And so the danger is that we will raise children who don’t have those skills and already, as I document in ‘Reclaiming Conversation’, there’s evidence that there’s a significant empathy gap. And by the time kids are in middle school, it is starting to show up big time.”
AMT “And what do you mean by an ‘empathy-gap’?”
ST “An empathy-gap is, as one teacher put it, ‘Twelve-year olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds. They can’t talk to each other. They can’t respond to each other. When they exclude other children, they can’t put themselves in the other child’s place.’ And then, by the college years, we found a 40% decline in all the markers for empathy. And the markers for empathy is simply being able to be told a story, and being able to put yourself in the place of the characters in the story. A 40% decline in that in the past 20 years, which people attribute to the rise of devices, because most of that decline’s in the past 10 years.”
AMT “The Holbrook School in upstate New York brought you in because the teachers were concerned about their students’ technology habits. Tell us a little bit more about what you found about their social development vs their intellectual development.”
ST “Well, intellectually they were fine. This was just a good private school in upstate New York, yet the students were having trouble talking to each other, making eye-contact with each other, speaking-up in class, they were having trouble reading, it’s as though they expected the world to be brought to them in a kind of steady feed. They had trouble with lulls – a word that came up a lot during my research. Now we’re talking on the radio. One of the wonderful things about the radio is that it has a quality of presence. You can hear when I hesitate, and when I stumble and fall silent a little. That’s how you can hear me thinking. That’s how we reveal ourselves to each other. And students didn’t want to do that. It’s almost like they preferred to text to each other rather than talk to each other. Because that’s how they felt safer. They didn’t want those vulnerable moments. They really wanted to hide behind the world of their screens, because the vulnerability of face-to-face conversation was something that frightened them.”
AMT “So what was your advice to the teachers?”
ST “Well, first of all, I gave them some advice they weren’t that anxious to hear. Here’s the great paradox. Here were teachers who were worried about empathy; they were worried about students and technology; they noted and they made me note that at lunch their students didn’t talk to each other, their students shared what was on their phones. And yet, teachers with that kind of sensitivity, had just put the entire school curriculum on the phones and tablets, and had issued a tablet to each child, so that all of the reading, all of the tests, all of the supplemental materials for every course were on a tablet, and they closed the library.”
Sherry Turkle. "Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age." Penguin Press, 2015.
Transcript of the rest of this interview:
