Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said "Mom, you will rock." I love this.
Getting that text, it was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody
the central paradox I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell
you that too many of them can be a problem. Actually, that reminder of my
daughter brings me to the beginning of my story.
1996 when I gave my first TED talk, Rebecca was five years old and she was
sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated
our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired Magazine. In
those heady days we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual
communities, we were exploring different aspects of ourselves and then we
unplugged. I was excited, and as a psychologist what excited me most was
the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about
ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world. Now fast
forward to 2012. I'm back here on the TED stage again, my daughter's 20, she's
a college student, she sleeps with her cell phone, so do I, and I've just written
a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired
Magazine. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe and
I'm here to make the case that we're letting it take us places that we don't
want to go. Over the past
fifteen years I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've
interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their
plugged-in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little
devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't
only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with
our devices are things that only a few years ago we would have found odd or
disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar. Just how we do things. So
just to take some quick examples, people text or do email during corporate board
meetings they text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during
presentations actually, during all meetings. People talk to me about the
important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting.
People explained to me that it's hard, but that it can be done.
Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain
about not having their parents' full attention but then these same children deny
each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and
her friends being together while not being together while not being together. And we even text at
funerals. I studied this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our
reverie and we go into our phones. Why does this matter? It matters to me
because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble. Trouble, certainly, in how
we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our
capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone
together. People want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to
all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives.
They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that
matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. So you
want to go to that board meeting but you only want to pay attention to the bits
that interest you. And some people think that's a good thing, but you can end up
hiding from each other even as we're all constantly connected to each other.
A 50 year-old businessman laments to me that he feels he doesn't have colleagues
anymore at work. When he goes to work he doesn't stop by to talk to anybody, he
doesn't call and he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues, because he
says they're too busy on their email. But then he stops himself and he says, you
know, I'm not telling you the truth. I'm the one who doesn't want to be
interrupted. I think I should want to, but actually I'd rather just do things
on my blackberry.
Across the generations I see that people can't get enough of each other if and
only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I
call it the goldilocks effect. Not too close, not too far, just right. But what
might feel just right for that middle aged executive can be a problem for an
adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An eighteen
year old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully
When I ask people what's wrong with having a conversation? People say, I'll tell you
what's wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you
can't control what you're gonna say. So that's the bottom line. Texting, email,
posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get
to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to
retouch the face, the voice, the flesh, the body, not too little, not too much, just
right.
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding and we clean
them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is
that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We shortchange ourselves and
over time we seem to forget this or we seem to stop caring. I was caught off
guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question. A profound question.
He said, don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online
communication add up to one big gulp of real conversation? My answer was no, they
don't add up.
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information,
they may work for saying I'm thinking about you or even for saying I love you.
I mean look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter. But they
don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and
understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn
how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really
matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids
growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development. Over and over I hear I would
rather text than talk and what I'm seeing is that people get so used to
being shortchanged out of real conversation, so used to getting by with
less that they become almost willing to dispense with people all together. So for
example, many people share with me this wish, that someday a more advanced
version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone will be more like a best
friend, someone who will listen when others won't. I believe this wish reflects
a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years. That feeling that no one
is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's
why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or twitter feed.
So many automatic listeners and the