ACRL-VWIG & ALA Virtual Communities in Libraries Program
March 20, 2016

CVL Auditorium in Second Life 12:00pm SLT

A Book Discussion of

"Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age"

By Sherry Turkle.  Penguin Press, October 2015.

Discussion leader: Dr. Valerie Hill, (Valibrarian Gregg, in Second Life)

Valibrarian Gregg presented the basic premises of Sherry Turkle's book, "Reclaiming Conversation" and led a discussion of librarians and educators as we examined communication in the digital age.  In her book Turkle makes the case that reliance on digital technology has led to people feeling less empathy and less a sense of connection with others.  She examined conversation and communication amongst digital natives and conducted interviews with them.  She suggests that much of what makes us human is lost because we've replaced face-to-face conversation with digital, electronic communication.

Val reviewed some of the things Turkle suggests has led to this state of affairs. 

People are constantly bombarded by information today.  The media, especially television, has instilled a sense of our being in a constant state of emergency with "breaking news alerts", news scrolls and distracting special effects that interrupt normal, daily processing of information.  Today's students have grown up in this state of constant distraction and interruptions, a "culture of catastrophe". This constant state has led us to a place where we consider nonstop interruptions  the norm.  Though people adopted new technologies in order to have greater control over their time and effort, increasingly  Turkle found, people are feeling controlled by them.  People escape having true conversations by texting, escaping into their news feeds, checking facts and emails, and communicating in 140 character bits.  

Turkle suggests that the demise of face-to-face conversation has eroded our ability to contemplate our true feelings and express ourselves authentically.  The reliance on digital means of expression and connection to others has, she suggests, led to an atrophying of basic human capacities like empathy and true self-reflection. She says it's only when you speak to people in person that you recognize their full humanity, which is where true empathy begins.

Turkle points out that all social media is based on the idea that "to perform is to be".   She believes students lack empathy for others because their constant connectivity in digital spaces reduces connections to others to a "performance" rather than a relationship. This leads to further disconnection, shallow relationships and  even more inauthenticity. Our "performance" of life becomes the reality of  our lives.  More and more, we give up or ignore privacy for the illusion of having an adoring audience.  The result of this is we become less authentic and even more isolated. 

Everyone is an information manager now, and we purposefully seek out people who share similar beliefs and think the same way we do.  Rather than engaging people in activities and communication which challenges our own ideas,  we have become more narrow minded, seeking out those whose beliefs and opinions reflect our own.   

Turkle, a clinical psychologist, has been writing about human relationships in the digital age for a while now. She is a technology insider (she holds an endowed chair at M.I.T.), who has changed her mind about the role technology should play in people's lives.  She presents her findings as a call to arms that it's time for people to reassert themselves and put technology back in it's proper perspective. She makes a good case for setting limits on digital technology and taking a look at the value of face-to-face conversations and real human contact.

The conversation and discussion at this program was lively and engaging.  Participants made very good observations about the nature of authentic communication and the ways people converse and connect within a virtual world. The irony of having such an in-depth discourse in a virtual world was not lost on any of those avatars present at this meeting.