Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

that our children are less empathic than they should be for their age, and that it seems nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation at a family dinner.

I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices. To the contrary, I’m suggesting that we look more closely at them to begin a more self-aware relationship with them.

The multitasking life puts us into a state similar to vigilance, one of continual alert. In that condition, we can follow only the most rudimentary arguments. So multitasking encourages brevity and simplicity, even when more is called for. And the harm that multitasking does is contagious. We’ve seen that someone multitasking on a laptop distracts

puts us into a state similar to vigilance: Giles M. Phillips, “Mobile Users Are More Vigilant than Situated Users,” in Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCI 2014, LNCS 8512, Masaaki Kurousu, ed. (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014): 166–77.

Create sacred spaces for conversation.

A 2015 Pew Research study reported that younger users of mobile phones “stand out prominently when it comes to using their phones for two purposes in particular: avoiding boredom, and avoiding people around them.” Aaron Smith, “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015,” Pew Research Center for Internet, Science, and Technology, April 1, 2015,

And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. In one experiment, people were asked to sit quietly—without a phone or a book—for fifteen minutes. At the start of the experiment, they were also asked if they would consider administering electroshocks to themselves if they became bored.

a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications: Psychologist Sara Konrath collated evidence from seventy-two studies that suggested that empathy levels among U.S. college students are 40 percent lower than they were twenty years ago. She notes that in the past ten years there has been an especially sharp drop. She and h