In a recent
essay in The New York Times’ "Sunday Review," writer/ professor Sherry Turkle
makes observations about our culture’s “flight
from conversation.” She laments that, despite our technologically linked
world, as we are only a text or chat or status away from sharing something, we
“hide from one another, even as we constantly are connected to one another.”
Her insights are sharp and valuable, as we should be striving to see how our
technological advances have shaped and will shape the social and cultural world around
us. Turkle’s hypothesizing offers much provocation about the way our culture’s
social values will evolve and shift over time, especially in the spheres of
behavior, learning, and education.
One
fascinating thing Turkle says is that the “thing we value most is control over
where we focus our attention.” Valuing our own control over where we focus our
attention will surely have vast social consequences, especially in the area of
learning. If learning at a distance that we ourselves control becomes the
norm, what will happen to learning itself? Will we stop being able to leap into
someone else’s perspective, in order to understand a problem or see a solution
in a better way? Will we stop paying attention to things that we might be drawn
to unexpectedly? How will our privileging of the control of our attention
change the way we learn, and change the way we think? Turkle's essay opens up
this necessary dialogue.
Another
thing Turkle discusses is the way technological connections prevent us from
learning how to be alone. “Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into
a problem that can be solved,” she writes. She worries that our habits of
being only a click or a text away from sharing our thoughts will deplete our
cultural ability to be alone, and as a result, everyone will be lonely,
ironically creating a world more disconnected than ever before. Turkle
suggests, “Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t
experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare
parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.”
Turkle
provokes thought on things like “Siri” which promise a simulation of
companionship and compassion; she surmises that with technology we are
“cleaning up human relationships” which are “messy and demanding.” But for a
price – human relationships have a richness that the simulations, for obvious
reasons, don't have. In the end, our flight from conversation represents a loss
for humanity that will have ripple effects in all areas of human life.
As I read,
it struck me that we often talk about the “academic conversation,” and I
wondered how Turkle’s thoughts and ideas about technology’s influence on social
conversations could be thought of in the context of academia. Conversations
teach us patience, she proffers, while technological connection and exchanges
speeds things up, but only by dumbing us down and removing complexity and true
understanding. How will this dumbing down of our communication affect the kind
of sustained conversations we aim to create and participate in within and
across our academic disciplines?
Looked at
through the frame of education, the flight from conversation would wound our
ability to see and understand different and new perspectives, a cornerstone of
true forward thinking and learning. Turkle says, “In conversation we tend to
one another.” To unpack this statement, she looks at the etymology of the word,
which comes from the verbs that mean “to move, together,” and suggests that
having a conversation is kinetic, and generates energy, and asks us to see
things from perspectives other than our own. The loss of this sort of mobility
in perspective, as well as these changes in social habits of expression that
Turkle describes, will surely affect academia and scholarship in more ways than
we can predict.
But what I
want to suggest here, though, to contribute to these speculations, has to do
with the way these changes may affect our perception of graduate school in a
positive way. My provocation here is that perhaps a benefit of these
changes may be that the inherent value in a graduate education will become more visible -- will be thrown into sharp relief --
as this social and cultural lack that Turkle identifies persists and
intensifies.
From some
advice given in The Chronicle by writers considering the cause and effects of the bleak
academic job market for liberal arts and science Phds, it doesn’t always seem
that a getting a graduate education from a arts and sciences school is a smart
or practical decision.
Yet, if we
insist that graduate liberal arts education is built on meaningful exchanges of
ideas between people, then perhaps it will become one of the only spaces in
which the skill of sustaining a conversation – and by this I do mean an oral,
face to face conversation, complete with eye contact, internalization,
reflection, depth, and response – is still fostered, nurtured, and practiced.
With no
irony here or facetiousness here at all, I can see a way to look at graduate
school and graduate education as a location in which an insistence on
conversations will continue to exist. I offer this with all earnesty, and
perhaps with a shade too much idealism. But perhaps a graduate school education
will be a space in which the value in conversation, solitude, patience,
messiness, demanding relationships, and mobility in perspectives will be
preserved. And perhaps if we look at it as such, we may begin to understand the
terms under which a graduate education in the arts and sciences is inherently
worthwhile, despite the kinds of obstacles that exist for grads to becoming
employed and earning a living.
What do you
think of the role of graduate education in the preservation of conversation?
What do you think about our "Flight from Conversation" in terms of
education, higher learning, and academic scholarship? I’d love to hear your
sustained, intimate, genuine thoughts – even if it’s just in a post to Facebook
or this blog. Perhaps then we can go get some coffee and discuss one on one! ;)
