Reclaiming Conversation Read Online Free

you are faced with a beautiful sunny day, one of the most beautiful days you have ever seen, and somehow this makes it easier to put the problem out of mind. Similarly, we now rarely give each other our full attention, but every once in a while, we do. We forget how unusual this has become, that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with parents or friends. For them, phones have always come along.
    I often speak to audiences of parents and many describe their difficulties in talking to their children. And then someone will raise a hand and say, “My son loves to talk and he is sixteen years old.” As if this means the case is closed.
    But the case is not closed. We have not assessed the full human consequences of digital media. We want to focus on its pleasures. Its problems have to do with unintended consequences. To take the measure of these , I follow a path suggested by Thoreau’s three chairs: a first for solitude, a second for friendship, and a third for society.
    Thoreau said that when conversation became expansive, he brought his guests out into nature. This image leads me to think of a “fourth chair”: conversations that Thoreau could not have envisaged. I look at how we have built a “second nature,” an artificial nature, and try to enter into dialogue with it. We have built machines that speak , and, in speaking to them, we cannot help but attribute human nature to objects that have none.
    We have embarked upon a voyage of forgetting. It has several stations.
At a first, we speak through machines
and forget how essential face-to-face conversation is to our relationships, our creativity, and ourcapacity for empathy.
At a second, we take a further step and speak not just through machines but to machines
. This is a turning point. When we consider conversations with machines about our most human predicaments, we face a moment of reckoning that can bring us to the end of our forgetting. It is an opportunity to reaffirm what makes us most human.
The Moment Is Right to Reclaim Conversation
    I n 2011, when I published
Alone Together
, a book critical of our inattention to each other in our always-connected lives, I knew I was describing complications that most people did not want to see. As a culture, we were smitten with our technology. Like young lovers, we were afraid that too much talking would spoil the romance. But now, only a few years later, the atmosphere has changed. We are ready to talk. When we have our mobile devices with us, we see that we turn away from our children, romantic partners, and work colleagues. We are ready to reconsider the too-simple enthusiasm of “the more connected we are, the better off we are.”
    Now, we begin to take the measure of how our communications compel us. We have learned that we get a neurochemical high from connecting. We recognize that we crave a feeling of being “always on” that keeps us from doing our best, being our best. So we allow ourselves a certain disenchantment with what technology has made possible.
    We recognize that we need things that social media inhibit. My previous work described an evolving problem; this book is a call to action. It is time to make the course corrections. We have everything we need to begin. We have eachother.

The Flight from Conversation
    My guess—and I think this will be debated for a long time—is that humans are very communicative, and so the fact that you’re talking to more people with shorter bursts of communication is probably net neutral to positive.
    â€”ERIC SCHMIDT, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF GOOGLE
    Don’t all these little tweets , these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?
    â€”STEPHEN COLBERT, ACTOR AND COMEDIAN
    T hese days, we want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to wherever else we want to be,