Q. Your previous book, "Alone Together" (2011),
A. "Alone Together" was a report on the state of the field as it was. People were telling me: I'd rather text than talk. "Reclaiming Conversation" is looking at what that means: Did people really mean it? Yes, and since it was so, the book became a call to action. It's not an anti-technology book; it's a pro-conversation book. We can enjoy and profit from mobile technology and not give up conversation. I would go further: This is what we have to learn how to do, because conversation is essential to our humanity—and to our creativity, our work, and our ability to be in families.
The disruptive experience I'm trying to capture is that sense that we are so often only partially in a conversation: If you and I are having lunch, and I put up my hand and say, "Just give me a second, I just want to check my phone." I argue that this new experience of being together, but also being elsewhere, is undermining our capacity to have the conversations that count. Or even more simply, experiments show that you can decrease the quality of a conversation and the degree of connection its participants feel toward each other by something as simple as putting a silenced phone on the table between them. So phones diminish empathy. There is in fact a 40 percent decline in all the ways we know how to measure empathy among college students during the past twenty years. But we are resilient. In only five days in a sleepaway camp without their phones, empathy levels come back up. How does this happen? The campers talk to each other.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2015-11-professor-face-to-face-dialogue-families-classrooms.html#jCp
