19 Jul Make Time for Face-to-Face
As grandparents, we’ve all done it–walked into a room full of loved ones and found everyone glued to their phones. Or we have had the experience of hosting the elongated family for dinner, just to have the teens texting with friends as we attempt to inquire about school and that they are dating. Does not it seem like our families really spent some time together when we were growing up? Didn’t we anticipate such gatherings since they gave us time to talk, interact with each other, and grab up?
One of the challenges of living in the digital age is certainly that, in certain ways, we’ve forgotten how to convey–really communicate–with each other, and with ourselves. Perhaps You hear that announcement and end up responding:
“What do you mean by that? Communication now is simpler and faster than previously. How have we forgotten how to get it done?”
It is a good question, and something that Sherry Turkle has been speaking about for years while analyzing how technology and communication influence relationships. She asserts that we need to “reclaim conversation” and our ability to genuinely connect with other people. According to Turkle, this occurs only as we are able to embrace solitude, without attempting to fill that emptiness by endlessly “connecting” with other people through technology.
It isn’t that having friends on Facebook and Instagram is superficial, or that technology does not play a crucial role in helping us stay connected to each other. The issue lies in how those mediums may make us feel like we’re connected to a bunch of individuals, when the truth is that we do not really understand how our “friends” are actually doing. (Many of them probably do not know how we’re doing, either.) Ironically, these types of connections can actually make us feel more alone.
And what about anything else? By way of example, Ms. Turkle is worried that we are losing the ability to become real. Why? Because cultivating an online persona makes it feasible for us to edit our lives and just show the edition of ourselves we need all to see. If we have a dialog over text or email, we could think before we react, and we’ve got the time to polish what we say rather than being required to engage in the moment. In contrast, face-to-face interaction means honest, off-the-cuff dialogue that offers a truer representation of who we are, unedited and raw.
Turkle says that technologies has also fostered what she terms the “Goldilocks effect,” meaning that it makes it feasible for us to maintain our relationships “not too close and not too much, but just right.” In trying to maintain so many connections open, however, we cultivate just that: a link. But that relationship does not often entail a purposeful, deep interaction as a consequence of truly spending some time with someone else. In short, all of the “linking” gives us, as Sherry states, the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” That type of connecting resembles touching base, but it doesn’t demand that we spend, be within a conversation, give somebody our entire attention, or forfeit our time to actually talk to someone.
For all these reasons, it appears critically important that we carve out opportunities to spend some time with those we love, particularly our children and grandchildren. While they are very adept at video and text messaging (and they will probably be thrilled when we participate together in this way), there is really no substitute for spending some time with the younger generation. These interactions can help them love relationships that are real, images which are real, and interactions that are engaging and authentic. And in a day when so many do not understand the way to have profound–or hard–life discussions, we could mimic what those look like.
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The information and quotes in this post came from the next TED talks by Sherry Turkle:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-1038903
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtLVCpZIiNs&list=PLQdWctT0t4vewfETRe7nMfGQOAzHwg4dc&index=3
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