In her New York Times essay “The Flight from Conversation,” Sherry Turkle posits an inverse relationship between social media use and our feeling of connectedness with other people. Her thesis is that technology has changed us at a fundamental level. My thesis is that every behavior the author points to has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human nature. Turkle at once indicts people and blames smartphones. But unhealthy relationships start with you. The First Step of AA is: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol –– that our lives had become unmanageable.” If our lives are unmanageable at some level — and that is Turkle’s argument — then we must identify the causes of these behaviors in ourselves and not in the things we abuse.
Technology changes “not only what we do, but also who we are,” Turkle writes. What other factors are a part of “who we are” except “what we do”? To believe most things Ben Franklin said, none. Nick Carraway (lying bastard that he is) suggested that personality was an “unbroken series of successful gestures.” So yes, how we use technology is going to change “who we are,” just like our hobbies and how we respond to racism or failure. But why is change bad? What was so great about the old us?
The old us, indeed. To read this article, pre-smartphone man was altruistic and purely social. These days, “We want to customize our lives. . . . We have gotten used to the idea of being . . . loyal to our own party.” If Turkle is speaking of cultural tastes, I don’t even see a problem with this being true in some new way; the greatest thing about the internet is that it facilitates individual inquiry. If she means socially, I think people must look out for their own interests; you have to cultivate your own garden first, lest you stumble through a picaresque of earthquakes and false paradises. If, finally, she means we are more solipsistic and egotistical: have humans not always desired to “customize their lives” in some way? Despite its neoliberal proselytizing, The Giver certainly incites horror in us. Isn’t she teaching the same lesson as the ghosts in It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol — to not be too caught up in your own good? So yes, of course she is right to revisit these problems, but their causes predate Twitter.
Further, if technology has so fundamentally changed “who we are,” why do the people Turkle interviews show such awareness of their problematic use of technology? A 16-year-old would “like to learn how to have a conversation.” Yet moments later, she laments that we have forgotten “that there is a difference” between texting and speaking.
Turkle says these new media are a way of “cleaning up” the “messy and demanding” nature of relationships, in addition to letting us “present the self we want to be.” But what is bad about organizing our behavior? Art, tax codes, marriage, the incest taboo, birthday cards — all of these are ways of “cleaning up” that mess. As for being a tool of self-presentation, did we used to get dressed in the dark? Turkle is working from an essentialist framework of human nature in which the soul is distorted and degraded — rather than expressed — through communication. Yes, now we can “edit” and “delete” to an unprecedented extent, but the people who claim these are bad things are the same people who remind us to clean up our Facebooks when job hunting.
Then there comes the ode to the days when people played inert roles in their own social lives: “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. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.” That citation is helpful; fairy tales are about human nature: curiosity, vanity, risk. As a poster child of invasiveness, pickiness, and disregard for others, Goldilocks is proof that nothing has changed.
Turkle rightly notes that we speak differently through text than through speech. “When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits.” True — I happen to believe that relationship talks should happen in person. But even texting is more personal than third-party-mediated telegrams, and people learned that etiquette well enough without permanently enfeebling the human race. But Turkle is right: people used to be able to tell the truth without resorting to technology — they used alcohol.
The author continues, “These days, social media continually asks us what’s ‘on our mind,’ but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective.” True. But you may have noticed it is often baby boomers posting over-personal vacation stories and declarations of love on your Facebook; except for a eulogy to a recently deceased grandmother, young people post mostly jokes, plans, or links. It is our parents who think this is replacing conversation — of course they’re disappointed.
But Turkle also doesn’t like it when technology does promote reflection. She tells of a grieving woman who talked to a robotic seal: “The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.” If Turkle finds this “haunting,” I suggest she visit a church, where she will see people with their eyes closed talking to no one at all and walking away rejuvenated. When I was six I told my cat she was the only one who understood me. Sometimes the listener is immaterial.
But now the problem is that with all these tools of self-expression at our disposal, we spend more time thinking about ourselves than about our friends: “we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.” You mean like Lady Macbeth did with her husband or Pip with his stranger-benefactor or you with your co-dependent ex-boyfriend? Projecting and opportunism in human relationships are not good, but literature attests that humans have always thought of themselves this way. Technology certainly inflames these tendencies, but we don’t tear bridges down to prevent suicide — we build walls to make them safe.
And indeed, there is a problem with technology. Turkle writes, “We used to think, ‘I have a feeling; I want to make a call’ Now our impulse is, ‘I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.’” Drug use is when we take drugs to feel special. Drug abuse is when we take drugs to feel normal. Your brain can get used to getting a higher level of sexual arousal on the internet more easily than it can get a lower level with another person; it’s possible this builds tolerance. But just as we shouldn’t teach abstinence-only sex ed, we shouldn’t ban internet porn and Facebook chat because they can be abused. Education, not censorship and shame, is always the answer. The Twelve Steps to recovering from drug dependency do not start with, “Rail against the evils of alcohol.” They start with you.
This post may contain affiliate links.
