From it came the theory of seven minutes, the time it is supposed to take to capture someone's attention before they look at the phone. Now, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé professor of MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program is immersed in a new book in which she will encourage parents, teachers and employees to have quality conversations, those that have been swallowed up in the age of technology.
QUESTION. His book "In Defense of Conversation" marked a turning point in the analysis of the way we communicate. That was in 2015. Has anything changed since then?
ANSWER. Many things. For example, the companies at the forefront of social media have increased our isolation, keeping us in a kind of silo chamber, increasing our loneliness and deteriorating the quality of our public life. They keep us glued to screens and don't mind us getting angry at the lies and misinformation that are shared through them. In addition, the connection between social media use and depression has been established. They make us more critical of our physique and less confident in off-screen conversations.
Q. Seen this way, it seems that we have not learned anything...
R. The inventors and investors of the technology have presented social media and artificial intelligence as a form of inevitable progress. But as time goes by we have seen that these tools, far from improving us, have diminished our attention span, deep thinking and empathy, and this applies to our personal lives. The insecurity they provoke has complicated even political action, where some take refuge behind screens or seek the simplicity of the polarizing narrative. Despite mounting evidence of harm, technologists deny the harmful effects and deflect responsibility.
Q. Why is it so difficult for us to talk to each other?
R. It is a profound question. I relate it to our fear of our own vulnerability. I remember interacting with a young man through social media, who told me that he preferred to talk through messages instead of talking face-to-face. He was a handsome and polite teenager, just the kind of person who assumed he would do well in any social setting. What I was avoiding, precisely, was that vulnerability.
Q. And how do we train ourselves to get back into the conversation? Where do we start?
A. We have to start with small steps. It is urgent to clarify how to interact with a generation that is destined to spend much of its life as consumers and workers who talk to machines. Children must be educated so that they have the desire and skills of human empathy, and know how to distinguish which conversations are intended solely to get their data to the system.
Q. How should parents address these little ones, when many of them are so dependent on devices?
R. This is one of the most irritating problems. Parents have abdicated their responsibility here. The first thing they must do is deal with their own resistance to being fully present in their families.
Q. How long is it advisable to park my phone per day?
R. You have to think more about context than time. There have to be sacred spaces where you are not on the phone: during meals, their preparation, in the car, in the bedroom, when your children or your partner are talking to you, during important conversations, with colleagues and friends. The point is not to ban the phone from our productive and creative lives, but to allow our emotional and creative lives to grow.
Q. Is there a phobia of conversation? Two recent reports reveal that there is a "mute generation," the one that dreads picking up the phone. 75% of millennials avoid calls and 81% feel anxiety. We don't improve.
R. We don't get better because we refuse to take this as a serious problem. And it's not surprising that the tech industry is poised to make things worse. They propose to move us all to the metaverse, where the distinction between face-to-face conversation and what we do with our avatars will be blurred. In fact, we will be our avatars. It's a bad thing, encouraging everyone to be online to experience what's going to be marketed as augmented reality.
Q. Are the calls as disruptive, as these young people believe?
R. In the "bad old days," which everyone thinks you're running away from, you worked in relative quiet, and suddenly a call would take you away from writing or thinking for about ten minutes. It is now considered normal for people to interrupt each other every few seconds. You work in a barrage of controlled interruptions, and it is the tranquility of a conversation, with its narrative flow, that is perceived as disconcerting. The concept of what 'disruption' means has been reversed, and it's something I'm studying.
Q. Can the fear of communicating extend to other areas, for example, when meeting new people or even flirting?
R. We have become phobic to unfiltered communication. We want to flirt on dating apps where we are represented by our best photography. And we follow friends on social networks who are their best version. The pressure to feel like that best version is the order of the day. And, increasingly, one feels that what he sees in the mirror is not up to par.
P. Ghosting is one of the phenomena that young people have complained about the most, some even end up going to the psychologist. Is disappearing without explanation a matter of cowardice or the result of inexperience in communication?
R. It's because of a way it connects. For young people, the origins of the relationship that starts online will always be "online" and, therefore, the rules will be different. They treat each other as if they were robots or avatars. It's a depressing degradation of human connection, predictable but dangerous.
P. I was fascinated by the theory of 7 minutes, the time it is supposed to take to grab someone's attention before they look at their phone. What pressure!
R. The most striking thing is that the same young woman who discovered this theory, was not willing to put away her phone during that time. If you think about it from the perspective of a conversation where there's no phone in front of you, chatting with someone for seven minutes is common. Only when you have your phone on you and are thinking about those "other places" that can take you, seven minutes in a conversation can seem like an eternity.
Q. Is it possible that we are less ashamed to share intimacies with a stranger than to greet a neighbor?
R. We may be more willing to share intimacies through a screen than with a person. But what needs to be examined is the notion of "sharing," because it doesn't mean venting or downloading information about anyone. It is to dialogue with someone who feels empathy and can engage with us. Talking to intelligent machines or through networks has degraded this value of empathy, authenticity and privacy.
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