In Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, her important new book on the often adverse effects of technology on society, empathy plays a repeated and crucial role. The ability to develop and converse about sophisticated thoughts on complex subjects, and to appreciate the reactions of others through face-to-face encounters are, in Turkle’s mind, compromised by society’s increasing reliance on smartphones and other portable technologies.

Turkle makes it very clear from the outset that she is not averse to technology — she is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — but she continually expresses hope that society’s reliance on it, to the detriment of personal relationships, could perhaps be moderated a bit. She is careful not to lurch into the cultural pessimism of the late Neil Postman, who in his 1992 book Technopoly, described a culture that “seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” Turkle’s aspiration here is to instead help us modify our behavior in some positive and meaningful way that will help us regain the ability to converse, and ultimately, to empathize.

Turkle begins her book by discussing describing how our technologies have caused silences that have caused us to become “cured of talking” — resulting in a loss of the means of self-reflection. She beautifully details how Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, described leaving the “crush of random chatter” to live in solitude at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. This permitted him a period of “self-reflection,” and his selection of cabin furniture suggested anything but a retreat from talk. He mentions “three chairs — one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.” In Turkle’s words, this was important because “In solitude, we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. When we are secure in ourselves, we are able to listen to other people and hear what they have to say. And then in conversation with other people we become better at inner dialogue.”

Read the article “Reclaiming Conversation: What We Lose When We’re Always Online” on csmonitor.com.