{"product_id":"reclaiming-conversation-isbn-9780143109792","title":"Reclaiming Conversation","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe 10th anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A persuasive and intimate book . . . showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends, and coworkers, even from ourselves.” —Carlos Lozada, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Turkle] presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Neil Postman was the greatest media analyst of the late 20th century . . . I often wish that Postman was here with us today as the pace of change and concerns about harms increase rapidly. But we do have a Neil Postman, and her name is Sherry Turkle . . . \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e was a landmark work of media scholarship . . . Sherry gives us the most powerful summation of how smartphones and social media, these powerful technologies of connection, have damaged close human relationships. She does it in four words: 'We are forever elsewhere.'”\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Jonathan Haidt, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Anxious Generation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cu\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eA prescient bestseller a decade ago, and essential today—with new insight into the threats of generative AI.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSherry Turkle, long an enthusiast for the promise of digital technology, now investigates its troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. At the dinner table, children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. At work, we retreat to our screens and home offices, forgoing the water-cooler conversation that once made us more productive and engaged. Online, we post opinions that our friends will agree with, avoiding the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. When we turn to our devices instead of to one another, the cost is our own humanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut there is good news: conversation cures. Face-to-face dialogue builds empathy, friendship, and creativity; it’s the cornerstone of democracy and good for the bottom line. Drawing on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle makes the paradigm-shifting case for conversation.“Turkle is by no means antitechnology. But after a career examining relations between people and computers, she blends her description with advocacy. She presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships.” —\u003cb\u003eJacob Weisberg,\u003ci\u003e The New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Turkle deftly explores and explains the good and bad of this ‘flight from conversation’ while encouraging parents, teachers and bosses to champion conversation, use technology more intentionally and serve as role models.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSuccess\u003c\/i\u003e, A Best Book of 2015 \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e reminds readers what’s at stake when devices win over face-to-face conversation, and that it’s not too late to conquer those bad habits.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eSeattle Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Turkle’s witty, well-written book offers much to ponder. . . . This is the season of polls and sound bites, of Facebook updates extolling the perceived virtues or revealing the assumed villainy of opinions. Talk is cheap, but conversation is priceless.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Drawing from hundreds of interviews, [Turkle] makes a convincing case that our unfettered ability to make digital connections is leading to a decline in actual conversation—between friends and between lovers, in classrooms and in places of work, even in the public sphere. In having fewer meaningful conversations each day, Turkle argues, we’re losing the skills that made them possible to begin with—the ability to focus deeply, think things through, read emotions, and empathize with others.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe American Scholar\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a persuasive and intimate book, one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e is best appreciated as a sophisticated self-help book. It makes a compelling case that children develop better, students learn better, and employees perform better when their monitors set good examples and carve our spaces for face-to-face interactions.”\u003ci\u003e —\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJonathan Franzen\u003ci\u003e, The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nobody has thought longer or more profoundly than Sherry Turkle about how our brave new world of social media affects the way we confront each other and ourselves. Hers is a voice—erudite and empathic, practical and impassioned—that needs to be heeded.” —\u003cb\u003eRebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of \u003ci\u003ePlato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book makes a winning case for conversation, at the family dinner table or in the office, as the ‘talking cure’ for societal and emotional ills.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A timely wake-up call urging us to cherish the intimacy of direct, unscripted communication.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Neil Postman was the greatest media analyst of the late 20th century . . . I often wish that Postman was here with us today as the pace of change and concerns about harms increase rapidly. But we do have a Neil Postman, and her name is Sherry Turkle . . . \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e was a landmark work of media scholarship . . . Sherry gives us the most powerful summation of how smartphones and social media, these powerful technologies of connection, have damaged close human relationships. She does it in four words: 'We are forever elsewhere.'” \u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Haidt, bestselling author of  \u003ci\u003eThe Anxious Generation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cu\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“'Only connect!' wrote E. M. Forster in 1910. In this wise and incisive book, Sherry Turkle offers a timely revision: 'Only converse!'” —\u003cb\u003eNicholas Carr, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Shallows \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eand \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Glass Cage\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Smartphones are the new sugar and fat: They are so potent they can undo us if we don’t limit them. Sherry Turkle introduces a lifesaving principle for the twenty-first century: face-to-face conversation first. This heuristic really works; your life, your family life, your work life will all be better. Turkle offers a thousand beautifully written arguments for why you should lift your eyes up from the screen.” —\u003cb\u003eKevin Kelly, senior maverick for\u003ci\u003e Wired\u003c\/i\u003e; author of \u003ci\u003eWhat Technology Wants\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Digital media were supposed to turn us from passive viewers to interactive participants, but Turkle reveals how genuine human interaction may be the real casualty of supposedly social technologies. Without conversation, there is no syntax, no literacy, no genuine collaboration, no empathy, no civilization. With courage and compassion, Turkle shows how the true promise of social media would be to reacquaint us with the lost of art making meaning together.” —\u003cb\u003eDouglas Rushkoff, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePresent Shock\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“To reclaim conversation is to reclaim our humanity. We all know it at some level, and yet how satisfying to find our hunch proved right: Turkle shows us that to love well, learn well, work well, and be well, we must protect a vital piece of ourselves, and can. What an important conversation about conversation this is.” —\u003cb\u003eGish Jen, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTypical American \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eand \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eMona in the Promised Land\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Like the air we breathe, or the water we drink, most of us take face-to-face conversations for granted. In this brilliant and incisive book, Sherry Turkle explains the power of conversation, its fragility at present, the consequences of its loss, and how it can be preserved and reinvigorated.” \u003cb\u003e—Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sherry Turkle’s unrivalled expertise in how people interact with devices, coupled with her deep empathy for people struggling to find their identity, shine through on every absorbing and illuminating page of \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e. We can start remembering how to talk to one another by talking about this timely book.” \u003cb\u003e—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and author of\u003ci\u003e MOVE \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eConfidence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It is a rare event when a single book presents both a compelling indictment of one of the more insidious effects of technology on our culture and an immediate, elegantly simple antidote---all the while providing a stirring apologia for what is most important about language's power to move us, to expand our thoughts, and to deepen our relationship to each other. Once again, Sherry Turkle seeks to preserve human qualities that are eroding while we are always \"elsewhere\": empathy, generativity, and mentoring our young.” —\u003cb\u003eMaryanne Wolf, John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In a time in which the ways we communicate and connect are constantly changing, and not always for the better, Sherry Turkle provides a much needed voice of caution and reason to help explain what the f*** is going on.” —\u003cb\u003eAziz Ansari,\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e author of Modern Romance\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSHERRY TURKLE\u003c\/b\u003e has spent the last 30 years studying the psychology of people’s relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the author five books and three edited collections, including a trilogy of three landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: \u003ci\u003eThe Second Self, Life on the Screen \u003c\/i\u003eand most recently, \u003ci\u003eAlone Together\u003c\/i\u003e. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, she is a featured media commentator. She is a recipient of a Harvard Centennial Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. \u003c\/p\u003eThe Case for Conversation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Empathy Diaries\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTwelve-year-olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds. . . . They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children. \u003c\/i\u003e—The dean of the Holbrooke Middle School, commenting on an “empathy gap” among students*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy a book on conversation? We’re talking all the time. We text and post and chat. We may even begin to feel more at home in the world of our screens. Among family and friends, among colleagues and lovers, we turn to our phones instead of each other. We readily admit we would rather send an electronic message or mail than commit to a face-to-face meeting or a telephone call. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis new mediated life has gotten us into trouble. Face-to-face con­versation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood. And conversation advances self-reflection, the con­versations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut these days we find ways around conversation. We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other. For on our screens, we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be. Of course, performance is part of any meeting, anywhere, but online and at our leisure, it is easy to compose, edit, and improve as we revise. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe say we turn to our phones when we’re “bored.” And we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment. We are forever else­where. At class or at church or business meetings, we pay attention to what interests us and then when it doesn’t, we look to our devices to find something that does. There is now a word in the dictionary called “phub­bing.” It means maintaining eye contact while texting. My students tell me they do it all the time and that it’s not that hard. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe begin to think of ourselves as a tribe of one, loyal to our own party. We check our messages during a quiet moment or when the pull of the online world simply feels irresistible. Even children text each other rather than talk face-to-face with friends—or, for that matter, rather than daydream, where they can take time alone with their thoughts. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt all adds up to a flight from conversation—at least from conversa­tion that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnera­ble. Yet these are the conversations where empathy and intimacy flourish and social action gains strength. These are the conversations in which the creative collaborations of education and business thrive. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut these conversations require time and space, and we say we’re too busy. Distracted at our dinner tables and living rooms, at our business meetings, and on our streets, we find traces of a new “silent spring”—a term Rachel Carson coined when we were ready to see that with techno­logical change had come an assault on our environment. Now, we have arrived at another moment of recognition. This time, technology is im­plicated in an assault on empathy. We have learned that even a silent phone inhibits conversations that matter. The very sight of a phone on the landscape leaves us feeling less connected to each other, less invested in each other. \u003cbr\u003eDespite the seriousness of our moment, I write with optimism. Once aware, we can begin to rethink our practices. When we do, conversation is there to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“They Make Acquaintances, but Their Connections Seem Superficial”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn December 2013, I was contacted by the dean of the Holbrooke School, a middle school in upstate New York. I was asked to consult with its faculty about what they saw as a disturbance in their students’ friendship patterns. In her invitation, the dean put it this way: “Students don’t seem to be making friendships as before. They make acquain­tances, but their connections seem superficial.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe case of the superficial acquaintances in middle school was com­pelling. It was of a piece with what I was hearing in other schools, about older students. And so it was decided that I would join the Holbrooke teachers on a faculty retreat. I brought along a new notebook; after an hour, I wrote on its cover “The Empathy Diaries.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor that’s what the Holbrooke teachers are thinking about. Children at Holbrooke are not developing empathy in the way that years of teach­ing suggested they would. Ava Reade, the dean of the school, says that she rarely intervenes in student social arrangements, but recently she had to. A seventh grader tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event. Reade called the remiss seventh grader into her office and asked why it happened. The girl didn’t have much to say:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e[The seventh grader] was almost robotic in her response. She said, “I don’t have feelings about this.” She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThese kids aren’t cruel. But they are not emotionally developed. Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like eight-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way eight-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children. They say to other students: “You can’t play with us.” \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey are not developing that way of relating where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Holbrooke teachers are enthusiastic users of educational tech­nology. But on their retreat, they follow what some call the precautionary principle: “Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action.” These teachers believe they see indications of harm. It is a struggle to get children to talk to each other in class, to directly address each other. It is a struggle to get them to meet with faculty. And one teacher observes: “The [students] sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. As these teachers see it, the old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was invited to Holbrooke because for many decades I have studied children’s development in technological culture. I began in the late 1970s, when a few schools were experimenting with personal computers in classrooms or special computer laboratories. I work on this question still, when many children come to school with a tablet or laptop of their own, or one their school has issued.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the beginning, I found that children used the digital world to play with issues of identity. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, children used simple programming as an expressive medium. A thirteen-year-old who had programmed a graphical world of her own said: “When you program a computer, you put a little piece of your mind into the com­puter’s mind and you come to see yourself differently.” Later, when per­sonal computers became portals to online games, children experimented with identity by building avatars. The particulars changed with new games and new computers, but something essential remained constant: Virtual space is a place to explore the self.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlso constant was the anxiety of adults around children and ma­chines. From the beginning, teachers and parents worried that comput­ers were \u003ci\u003etoo \u003c\/i\u003ecompelling. They watched, unhappy, as children became lost in games and forgot about the people around them, preferring, at long stretches, the worlds in the machine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne sixteen-year-old describes this refuge: “On computers, if things are unpredictable, it’s in a predictable way.” Programmable worlds can be made exciting, but they also offer new possibilities for a kind of experi­ence that some began to call friction-free. Newton’s laws need not apply. Virtual objects can be made to simply glide along. And you, too, can glide along if that’s how things are programmed. In virtual worlds, you can face challenging encounters—with scoundrels and wizards and spells—that you know for sure will work out in the end. Or you can die and be reborn. \u003ci\u003eReal people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the early days, I saw that computers offer the illusion of com­panionship without the demands of friendship and then, as the programs got really good, the illusion of friendship without the demands of inti­macy. Because, face-to-face, people ask for things that computers never do. With people, things go best if you pay close attention and know how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Real people demand responses to what they are feeling. And not just any response.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTime in simulation gets children ready for more time in simulation. Time with people teaches children how to be in a relationship, begin­ning with the ability to have a conversation. And this brings me back to the anxieties of the Holbrooke teachers. As the Holbrooke middle schoolers began to spend more time texting, they lost practice in face-to-face talk. That means lost practice in the empathic arts—learning to make eye contact, to listen, and to attend to others. Conversation is on the path toward the experience of intimacy, community, and communion. Reclaiming conversation is a step toward reclaiming our most funda­mental human values. \u003cbr\u003eMobile technology is here to stay, along with all the wonders it brings. Yet it is time for us to consider how it may get in the way of other things we hold dear—and how once we recognize this, we can take action: \u003ci\u003eWe can both redesign technology and change how we bring it into our lives.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302488625381,"sku":"NP9780143109792","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143109792.jpg?v=1767735521","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/reclaiming-conversation-isbn-9780143109792","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}