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And it helps explain why - against all reason - so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend - one who will listen when others won’t.ĭuring the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed - each provides so many automatic listeners. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating he says the A.I.
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Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.Īs we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. (The word itself is kinetic it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.Ĭonnecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places - in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. Human relationships are rich they’re messy and demanding. Not too much, not too little - just right. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones.
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But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”Ī 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.” I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He doesn’t stop by to talk he doesn’t call. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.Ī businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them.