The Power of Talk in a Digital Age - Reclaiming Conversation

Ms. Turkle is a keen observer of how our interaction with technology is changing the way we interact with each other at home, at work, and beyond. Though a bit repetitive at points, she has a lot to say, and he book is a must read for parents and managers as we think about e changes our technology is making on ourselves, our Families, and society

This is a thought-provoking commentary on the changing nature of conversation and the effects of our device-permeated culture on it. The fact that I was angered and enthralled simultaneously testifies to its efficacy as a goad to considering these issues, and to the importance of those issues. It has sparked a conversation in my own family about our practices and how they might change.

In Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Terkle makes a convincing case that we must reclaim ourselves from technology that we have become addicted to. Hooray for Terkle! Up with empathy, down with smartphones!

An important addition to the conversation about conversation in this digital age. Turkle is uniquely qualified to guide an exploration of how technology is affecting the social fabric of our culture. Read it. Consider it. Find someone to talk with about it.

Turkle provides very clear and well supported arguments about different aspects of technology. She discusses its impact on human interaction, inter as well as intrapersonal relationships and how this affects education across academic levels K-12 and higher education.

Bear with the endless description of the problem, which is what readers bring to the book. If you do you will be richly rewarded as the book moves on, giving real and practical insights to building a cell free existence and enhancing interpersonal dialog. REY

I wanted to love Reclaiming Conversation after thoroughly enjoying Turkle’s previous book, Alone Together, published in 2011.

In 2011, as social media and smartphone usage was rising, making sense of what the hell was going on—the ramifications of technology making us culturally lonelier, IMO, was an interesting topic. I was hoping with reclaiming conversation Turkle would pick up where she left off and for the bulk of her new book describe how people are practically reclaiming conversation and building deeper intimacy in an age of distraction.

Not so much.

Turkle spends practically the entirety of Reclaiming Conversation building a case that we NEED to put down our smart phones, look each other in the eye, give one another attention, and talk face to face with all its messiness. Turkle constantly reiterates how much deeper this makes relationships and how basically everyone from teens to adults yearns for this. I could not help but think, “DUH! It’s 2015, people know the problem by now, but just do not practice solutions for overcoming it.”

I was left wondering, “who is this book really for?”

Is it for people who are deeply distracted by technology? Perhaps, but the odds distracted people (teens and adults alike) will focus to read 448 pages are unlikely. I also believe they do not needed to be persuaded technology is a problem. I would argue the majority already knows.

Is it for people who already agree with Turkle’s viewpoint to make more nuanced viewpoints? Most likely yes. With this book I get to buy into my confirmation bias and cite academic theories and anecdotes to my friends why technology is making us lonelier. But does this really help anyone?

Furthermore I was left wondering, “Why does Sherry Turkle really care that technology is making us lonelier?”

Is it drastically affecting her relationship with her husband, kids, and friends on such a deep disturbing level? This is scratched a little bit, but why spend another book diagnosing the problem rather than personally building deeper connections in real life and exploring others who have done so?

Overall, I found myself very disappointed with this book. The topic could not be more relevant and is important. I just think Turkle took the wrong angle. By now, I know the problem with technology. I want a messiah (or at least a professor) to guide the way of what is next.

With this all said, Turkle DOES do an amazing job describing the problem we are facing in depth. For this alone, I feel the book merits at least 3 stars. I was just left wanting so much more.

In terms of solutions, I would recommend anything by Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead,Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides), or the The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships.

This book should have been a newspaper article at best. There was so much redundancy in the first three chapters that I stopped reading the book. I cannot remember when I read anything as awful as this, and I am an avid reader.

This is a terrifying book; it cautions us about what we are becoming and the consequences of our actions. Sherry Turkle zeroes in on digital media and how it is affecting adults and children. The picture is very ugly.

Early in the book, teachers solicit the author's expertise because they see that their middle-aged students lack empathy towards each other. They want to interact with their digital gizmos rather than talk with each other.

Then the author discusses the the concerns of a growing number of academic professors; with digital devices in the classroom, inattention is rampant. When college students get together, they always have their cellphones. No matter what they are doing, they check their phones almost constantly. When the author asks why they check constantly, they say that they might have an email. Thus, they have their phones within easy grasp 'just in case someone wants to communicate.' The phones are on the dining table, interrupting family or friend communication.

CEO's are already complaining that their new hires have to be coddled and given warm fuzzies throughout a project. These new-hires have grown up on Facebook and need constant positive regard and encouragement. Facebook encourages positive postings; the members have become addicted to getting positive reinforcement from others.

The new horror in our culture is 'being bored.' So our digital devices give us an out - so we have no quiet time or boring minutes. Huh? Thinking and creativity requires one to quietly think. Creative solutions come from realizing that we need to do (think, say) something differently.

As I was reading this book, I looked out over the restaurant where I was having lunch. Parents were ignoring their children while they checked their phones, called or texted. Teens were partially-listening to their companions while they constantly interacted with their phones. Please note: This wasn't at a table or two; it was throughout the building. I've learned three major things from this book and my observations:
1) Thank goodness I'm retired and am not in this rat-race of constant communication.
2) It is a shame that I've retired because a good many of these people (the smart ones) are going to wind up in therapy for phone addiction. (I was a therapist.)
3) Bizarre behaviors and serial killings will only increase; children are routinely ignored because their parents are interacting with their phones and not their children. Granted, most children will just emulate their parents and become part-time friends/members in a relationship/parents to a new crop of ignored children. (Remember Harry Chapin's song 'Cats-in-the-Cradle?'*) But there are enough fragile personalities who will rebel against such inattention and do the unthinkable.

Relationships are going to become more fragmented. Teens and college students already talk about not being interested in communication without their devices. They break up by texting because they don't want to get into messy emotions. What a scary world.

I downgraded the book because the author was so wishy-washy about solutions. What about cellphone-free meals? What about device-free classrooms? The problem is that the adults are unable to control themselves and they are afraid to be the ogre-in-the-room limiting phone usage in their children. No one wants to be the 'mean parent in the neighborhood.' When did parenting become a popularity contest? I shudder for the next generation. 3.5 stars

* "Cat's In The Cradle"

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew
He'd say "I'm gonna be like you, Dad
You know I'm gonna be like you"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home, Dad
I don't know when, but we'll get together then
You know we'll have a good time then

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw", I said "Not today
I got a lot to do", he said, "That's ok"
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home, Dad
I don't know when, but we'll get together then
You know we'll have a good time then

Well, he came from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while"
He shook his head and said with a smile
"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son
I don't know when, but we'll get together then, Dad
You know we'll have a good time then

I've long since retired, my son's moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"
He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu
But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad
It's been sure nice talking to you"

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
When you comin' home son
I don't know when, but we'll get together then, Dad
We're gonna have a good time then

This book was a profound disappointment. It is basically 416 pages of anecdotes, without a single illustration, graph or table.

The question addressed is important. Is non-verbal communication by e-mail or texting, in the absence of verbal communication, much weaker than more direct verbal forms of communication? I believe that it is. However belief is not enough. There are more scientific tools that lift the examination of this question to a form that is much more persuasive and more likely to be correct. Sometimes those tools surprise us and show us, with our views on what is common sense, to be mistaken, so we can change. Sometimes they show us to be right, and then they may lift things to a plain where we can change the minds of others.

This book would have been much better if it had used those tools and presented more detailed data and results.

Incidentally there is an old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" which really is in part an argument for more than conversation, but for the inclusion of data that you can evaluate for yourself.

The publisher's dry description of the book, while accurate, does not do this book justice. It's an eloquent, impassioned, and often moving examination of the consequences of our device addiction to ourselves, our children, our friends, and our colleagues. Prof. Turkle has put her heart and soul (plus five years of research) into this convincing call to stop paying attention to our devices and start paying attention to each other.

The questions about the downside of digital culture have grown during its short but all-encompassing life, as more studies indicate a loss of genuine connection in the face of superficial connection. Sherry Turkle's fine new book addresses this issue in depth, and her conclusions are disheartening, to say the least. Disheartening, but vital for anyone who cares about a humane & caring society to read, absorb, and understand.

The most troubling discovery is one that many studies have already found & explored: the tremendous loss of empathy among those born into the digital generation, due to the facile nature of wired relationships. In short, the illusion of complete connection is powerful ... but the reality is deeply unsettling, as many people seem to have no real grasp of true intimacy born of the complexities & difficulties of the face-to-face encounter with other human beings. This is especially pointed in the chapter about romance in the digital world, which as described is an avoidance of any human vulnerability & trust, where potential lovers hide behind idealized (and unreal) projections of themselves. While there's clearly emotional sensation involved, there seems to be very little passion & mystery. Everyone wants to glide over (or swipe past) anything uncomfortable, challenging, upsetting, i.e., the raw stuff of actual life.

Equally revealing & troubling are the chapters on education & work. In each case, it's clear that the perception of increased efficiency & productivity is more illusion than reality. The so-called connections between people, for all their instantaneous & worldwide reach, tend to be very thin threads indeed, often no more than thistledown when it comes to deeper & enduring bonds.

Let me address a complaint repeated in many of the negative reviews of this book, because that very complaint actually makes Turkle's point. The complaint is that she doesn't provide enough data, enough studies, enough scientific evaluation, preferring instead to use personal interviews & anecdote to describe the problems she sees. But one of the vitally important things she's saying is that real life isn't just a matter of data, metrics, algorithms -- real life is messy, complicated, sometimes painful -- but ultimately far more rewarding for anyone willing to become a more whole human being. It's not something to be reduced to & controlled by an endless stream of apps ... although for many, that seems to be the ideal state of human existence, one basically untouched by human hands & human qualities.

(For those who still want to see the data & the studies, Turkle refers to plenty of them, providing links in her footnotes, as well as referring to earlier books on the same subject, such as "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr -- to my mind, one of the seminal books of the past few years.)

Mind you, Turkle isn't suggesting a wholesale rejection of modern technology. Obviously this is impossible, given the world as it exists now. But she is suggesting learning better ways to live with & in the digital culture, without letting it take over & flatten our lives. She does note that such a project would not only be difficult, it must of necessity be ongoing -- the siren song of the smartphone is powerful & never-ending. To tell the truth, I'm not quite as sanguine about the success of such a project as she is, but I very much hope I'm wrong.

As to her concerns about the loss of human conversation, in which we learn both to read other people & empathize with them, as well as truly listening to them? I've encountered this inability to converse on a meaningful level many times over, as I'm sure readers of these reviews have as well. Increasingly shorter attention spans, increasingly superficial interests, people thinking & speaking in pre-imagined & pre-digested memes -- we've seen all this & more in our everyday lives. It's why I've avoided Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, smartphones, and all the other digital "aids" to modern living -- because the life they create for their users is so often a one-dimensional imitation of life, forever fleeting, never grounded -- or so it seems with each new day.

Highly & urgently recommended reading!

I have never been an active participant in the cellphone/Facebook/Twitter/ Instagram/Texting world and consequently I found Sherry Turkle's conclusions in this book a little disturbing. Her thesis is that the more our culture relies on technological communication, the more we are losing the ability to engage in face to face conversation with accompanying human traits like empathy and compassion. (How much easier is it to break up with someone in a text than in person?)

Turkle is not a Luddite, recommending that everyone toss their cellphone in the nearest trash bin. Rather, she suggests that we all be aware of the dark side of new technologies and take rational, reasonable steps to prevent these technologies from taking over our lives. She recommends things like a no cellphone rule at family dinners, devise free classrooms, ending relationships in person and don't text while driving an automobile. All of which sound like good ideas to me.

My only complaint with the book is that the author did hundreds of interviews and most of her subjects tended to say the same thing and make the same points. As a result, the book becomes repetitious in places. Cellphones are changing our definition of manners, generating an abnormal fear of boredom and loneliness and costing us some of the fundamental attributes that make us human. I would highly recommend Turkle's book to any serious student of 21ist century American culture or anyone who wonders why everyone else in the room has their head down, punching and swiping on their cellphones rather than talking to each other.

Informative and helpful to remind many of us that we are on our devices too much, that they negatively impact our relationships, and we should enact change in ourselves and model that behavior for others.

The only reason I gave it 4/5 stars instead of 5 was because of the overuse of anecdotal stories about children/teenagers on social media. While relevant, I personally became a bit tired of hearing about teenage girls giggling over phones and would have preferred more science. This is a common complaint as many science based books add too many stories to make them interesting and to fatten the number of pages.

Altogether though, the book is really a great read and highly recommended. Read the paper version of course, and not a digital one ;)

This is an important and critical book. Let me explain with a vignette:

The CEO across the table from us was furious. He was seeking to consummate a deal with the CEO of another company and wanted to get confirmation that the deal with “on.” He had used his mobile device to send an email to the CEO asking for a status report. No response. He sent a text message. No response.

Embedded in this executive’s anger are the following assumptions.

1. If I send an electronic communication, it will be sent to the right address.
2. I my electronic communication is sent, it will be received.
3. My electronic communications will be read shortly after my having sent it.
4. My electronic communications will not be accidentally deleted.
5. Electronic communications are the appropriate communications vehicle to discuss something that might require a conversation.

These individual assumptions when shared by others tend to guide corporate culture.

Are We Managing Our Mobile Devices or Are Mobile Devices Managing Us?

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Her book Reclaiming Conversation is a well written, lucid, and research-oriented exploration about people’s relationship with their mobile devices.

Consider this: those who are entering the work force in the developed world today have never been without mobile devices. Does constant exposure to mobile devices as an extension of each employee change thinking patterns?

Talking Versus Conversation:

It is easier to send an electronic message than to arrange a face-to-face meeting or a telephone call. Most employees automatically go with the easier form of communication. Professor Turkle agrees that this is a way of talking. But it is not communication.

Talking is about sending information one way. Confirming a date for a meeting is a good use for emails. Communication, on the other hand, is to be “fully present to one another. It is there we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the job of being heard, of being understood. And conversation advances self-reflection.”

Texting is not conversation.

The paradox of mobile devices is that it allows us to hide from each other even as we are constantly connected to each other.
She sees young people actively engaged in a “flight from conversation.” And yet it is in conversations that the creative collaboration of work thrives.

Your Mobile Devices: Symbol of Non-Conversation.

A client sent me an email as she was in the playground with her eight year old daughter. For her this simple act is an example of good multitasking. How long would it take for the daughter to realize that her mother was not “with” her?

The very sight of a silent mobile devices on a table sends a signal to others around the table that you are less connected to the real people around you. If we think we might be interrupted, we tend to keep the conversations light.

The most effective communicators we know take out their mobile devices and show us that they are turning it off. They then put it into their brief cases. This is symbolic communication for “I am truly with you.”

A client proudly spoke about his new digital watch that had a blue tooth connection to his mobile device. Instead of picking up his mobile device and examining the screen every time he got a call, there would be a slight buzz on his wrist. He could discretely gaze at his watch to see if the call was important enough to interrupt the conversation he was having with the person in his office. What assumptions does the client make to assume that the person on the other side of table can’t figure out the chilling impact on conversation of a raised left elbow?

Crisis of Empathy.

Talking is not conversation. Using a team meeting as an opportunity to empty your email inbox is not conversation. Limiting your sources of information to news feeds that happen to provide only the information that interests you only empowers intellectual isolation.

As we isolate ourselves we begin to lose empathy for others.

In our work, we see the evidence of lack of empathy every day: people in accounting who sincerely fail to understand problems faced by manufacturing, underwriters who sincerely fail to appreciate the problems of sales professionals.

Mobile devices may re-wire our brains to make us less empathic.

Dr. Turkle calls this the “Goldilocks effect.” Face-to-face communication increases the chances of getting too close, too personal, or disrupting one’s deeply held beliefs. Online communication avoids these things from happening. Digital relationships are not too close, not too far, just right.
The problem with the Goldilocks effect is that true innovation and new ideas require human relationships. And human relationships are information rich, messy, and demanding. Technology moves us away from meaningful conversation to the efficiencies of connection.

Bring People “Home” to Work:

Dr. Turkle describes the experience of Rador Partners, a high tech consulting firm. Since the 1990’s it had encouraged telecommuting as a method of reducing costs while improving employee morale. This is the “common sense” of the management today.
The CEO, on the other hand, saw the extensive use of virtual meetings as people talking without really communicating. Real communication takes place in over dining room tables, in parking lots, in hallways, in bathrooms, and by copy machines.
Radnor Partners did away with virtual commuting and required office presence. Physical proximity sparked new conversations. When analysts, sales people, and consultants began working in the same space, Radnor began to grow at five times its former rate.

Do You Live in a Binary World?

The digital world is based on a technology involving splitting data into binary forms. Information is often presented in the digital world as a succession of binary decisions called Menus. Over time, this way of looking at the digital world influences the way we look at the real world. The middle ground disappears. We cannot see the gray spaces. There is polarization of options. It is the job of leadership to assure that this binary perspective does not infect business.

Encourage your team to focus on the gray spaces and the middle ground.

The digital world is designed to be binary. The real world is sloppier.

“Tools Down.”

We all have had the experience of being at team meetings where participants are monitoring their mobile devices. If challenged they might state that they are perfectly competent to multi-task despite the research evidence that the cerebral cortex is designed to be poor at multi-taking. Dr. Turkle suggests we think of “unitasking as the next big thing: in every domain of life it will, increase performance and decrease stress.”
Consider people who open their lap tops at team meetings and take notes.

According to Dr. Turkle, these people have moved from participants to transcriber roles. If called upon to make a comment about the ideas in the room, they often get angry because they have been “interrupted” in their task of taking down notes.

Do not ask participants turn their phones off. Ask them to deposit their computers and mobile devices on a table away from the desk. Resist the impulse to assume that good intentions will overcome years of learned habit.

At the same time, do not put your employees in a situation that they are away from their phones for sixty minutes. They cannot tolerate being away from their devices for 60 minutes. Have a ten minute break after forty minutes of conversation.

Have Conversions with People You Don’t Agree With.

The internet allows us to limit interaction to people we agree with and only hear information we wish to hear. Life may be cozy that way but it does not help your effectiveness. You need to reach out and have conversations with the people you disagree with and appreciate their perspective.
For example, when we give a seminar at a conference, we ask people to sit next to someone they do not know and arranger for exercises where there will be communications between thenm.

Reach for the gray spaces of life.

This is obviously an important and critical book.

###

I was incredibly impressed by this book at first. Sherry Turkle was hitting on so many of the things I fear are happening to people, particularly to children, due to the constant wired state of the world. One of the most important issues being that children can no longer deal with solitude, which is crucial for learning how to think on one's own and for knowing oneself period. So, I'm happily reading and reading, agreeing with so much being said, until I'm almost 30% through the book, at which time I have to quit reading. I couldn't go on. This book is like one long lecture, with story after story, all interesting and insightful, but it's like it's never going to end. Or maybe all the distressing stories of technology addiction killed my desire to read this book on my Kindle Fire. Maybe I need to go check the book out of the library, if it is there. Or maybe I strongly suspect Ms. Turkle is not going to suggest getting rid of smart phones, only having phones that allow talking, and not giving cell phones to children at all, which would greatly help reclaiming conversation. I don't know. I only know reading about individuals addicted to cell phones and other electronic devices, as well as the internet, is almost as horrid as being around such individuals in person. I'm making a run for it . . . .

(Note: I received a free e-copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

So glad Professor Turkle wrote this invaluable book that everyone should read. See the simple review by American Scholar above and you will understand:

" In having fewer meaningful conversations each day, Turkle argues, we’re losing the skills that made them possible to begin with—
* the ability to focus deeply,
* think things through,
* read emotions,
* and empathize with others.”
—The American Scholar"

Thank you Ms. Sherry Turkle, on behalf of the future generation as well!

Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle is a free NetGalley ebook that I read during an evening in early October. I was extremely intrigued to read this book, due to my not-so-recent reliance on a smartphone and what felt like an entire teenagerhood spent in front of a computer, playing RPG's with people I would never meet face to face.

Reclaiming Conversation works to turn a mirror back onto ourselves and the transgressions of avoiding spoken word and tactile contact. It really can be painful to read, in that it allows you to look back and see all the times when a piddly email, text, or social media update got in the way of a real personal moment or what could have been a valuable lesson.

The cultural gulf between older generations and the younger digital natives finds a new battlefield – texting. Turkle cites the phrase younger people are using with greater regularity: ‘I’d rather text than talk.’ Her book is about the value and importance of conversation, and although her examples are drawn mainly from the younger generations, the inclination to text rather than talk can afflict older people too. It afflicts anyone who is addicted to the cell phone. ‘American adults check their phones every six and a half minutes’.

Turkle explains the anxieties that lead people to increasing use of the cell phone as well as the anxieties that develop as a result of using them. We are now much better connected through technology, but we are using technology to hide from each other. We now feel that it is conversation – not texting – that is intrusive. Turkle gives the example of a boy who said he had text his condolences to a friend on the death of the friend’s father. When asked why not phone and express his condolences instead, he replied that he felt that that would be interrupting his friend in his time of grief.

This book goes beyond the gripes about texting. The twenty-first century sees the emergence of the phenomenon of ‘hyper attention’, which not only results in greater distractibility but also a loss of the ability for ‘deep attention’; people are constantly thinking of other things even when they are doing something else. Turkle examines the effect of all these problems in home and office, in a wide range of areas most deeply affected. These include, friendship, romance, education and work. She explains the importance of solitude, and time for self-reflection.

In the final parts of the book, Turkle talks about illusion of privacy (and how Snowden has changed the rules), and the irony of treating machines as people and people as machines. ‘We declare computers intelligent if they can fool us into thinking they are people. But that doesn’t mean that they are.’ We should take our human life back.

A word of caution is necessary. Do not read this book at the dinner table. For some reason it will affect your moral authority.

Sherry Turkle writes about the unintended consequences of always being connected. And one interesting point she makes is that even people “who work for social media companies send their children to technology-free schools in the hope that this will give their children greater emotional and intellectual range.” Interesting food for thought! One of many points Trukle makes is that being constantly connected impinges on solitude – a most interesting chapter on how this is harming our children’s maturation. She also points out that across the board adults are spending more time on their phones than in watching or talking to their children. When our infants are hungry we feed them, but when our older children what to be listened to, do we put down our phones and listen to them? Trukle’s point: “If we don’t engage our children in conversation, it’s not surprising they grow up awkward and withdrawn.” What a reader learns from this book is that “phones are seductive.” If you are teaching your children (by example) that what is on your phone is more important than they are, that message will be received. The moral of the story – don’t let your devices isolate you. When you are with your family, be with your family!

Turkle observes closely the preferring text over face-to-face conversation. Those close anecdotes and interviews capture well, especially for those who are not millennials and don't text as much. Turkle seemed to suppose text is bad for developing empathy. However, if it's really so bad, wouldn't those who prefer text would get worse jobs?

The book is a very long sequence of anecdotes, each followed by shallow analysis, and then a final-thoughts section. The anecdotes and "analyses" are almost all minor, even trivial, variations on each other. It's as if someone posted one of these anecdotes and then friend after friend posted "me-too" stories. The author laments the lack of depth in conversations, but there is no depth here. Similarly for adapting what is said to the anticipated audience ("empathy").

How shallow and redundant? If you have seen/read one of the author's interviews or short articles from the promotional tour for this book you will likely not encounter anything even vaguely new until page 162. Similarly if you had a short discussion at a social gathering triggered by the someone's observation about how smartphones have changed communication. If you have had a deeper conversation, you are unlikely to start find some of those ideas until you get to page 221.

The final-thoughts sections (pages 294-362) is largely disconnected from what came before. For example, it begins with a nice, but breezy, overview of privacy concerns (for those who have never heard about them). And it has a shallow presentation of having conversations with robots and other artificial entities. I have a background in Artificial Intelligence, thus I didn't expect any new insights for me, but I did expect to find at least a few instance where I would think "nicely said" or "interesting perspective". Instead, it was very bland -- suitable for an easy-A undergraduate survey course.

Normally, I give a book 50-100 pages to demonstrate it has merit, and failing that, I skip through the remainder sampling to see if there are any subsections with merit. Such a sampling approach would have also found this book without merit because the mildly interesting portions are likely to be missed: too scattered and only 0.5 to 1.5 pages long.
So why did I keep reading? In talking with people about this *topic*, they often cited this book very positively. What I came to realize was that they had not read the book, but had been exposed to the thumbnails (from the promo tour) and were projecting their experiences and thoughts onto the book. Their comments were typically more insightful and interesting than what is in the book.

Why 1-star (the store's "I hated it")?
This book has two basic failings, either of which alone would have reduced it to (only) 2-star (the store's "I disliked it"):
1. It does not respect the reader's investment of time in reading it. A 362-page book should have more content than what would fit into a mediocre medium-length magazine article. This book is akin to a long series of support group meetings, but without the benefit of wine and cheese.
2. The title (and promotion) is highly deceptive. There is very little about "reclaiming" in this book beyond telling the reader that they need to figure out for themselves how to reduce the negative behaviors they see themselves as engaging in. That is, it barely nudges over the line from "First you need to admit you have a problem." In addition, the book's argument for change is almost exclusively of the form "what you are doing is bad" -- the mentions of the benefits are slight in both number of instances and in the advocacy (logic, data and passion). While "pain" can sometimes be a motivator by itself, showing "gain" is often an important, even crucial, addition.

CREDIBILITY: I have problems with the credibility of the accounts and analyses.

1. One of the problems of a discussion based on anecdotes is that the reader doesn't know how representative these stories are (many reviewers have made similar complaints about this book). I live in the heart of Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) and, as a reality-check, I looked at what was going on around me. Yes, there are plenty of instances of what the book describes, but there are also a great many instance of the opposite. For example, the book talks of parents at playgrounds as being immersed in their phones and largely ignoring their children. At my local playground, I see the opposite: Parents actively involved with their children and with the other parents, and largely ignoring their phones -- while they do briefly check messages, the only ones they respond to are from the spouse about coming home (inferred from what they then say to their children). Similarly, the groups of teens that I encounter are engaged in far less phone use than portrayed in this book.

2. The book presents meetings as being diminished by attendees having their attention elsewhere. But if you consider the descriptions of various of the meetings, you may well infer that the problem was with the meeting's organizer/leader and that the attendees were well-justified in tuning-out. This behavior pre-dates networked devices: Before conference rooms had network connections, people would bring laptops to meetings to do work or play games. And before that, they would bring hardcopy to read, or spend their time writing/editing reports, programs, ... You would expect an academic to be intensely aware of the problems of bad meetings -- if the author misses this aspect in her analysis, this argues that you should be highly skeptical of her analysis of other situations.

3. The interpretation of the events. It is expected and accepted that anecdotes be stories that have been greatly simplified to illustrate a point, but you always need to worry about over-simplification "getting it wrong". This over-shoot can result from over-enthusiasm or from not listening carefully and probing what the informants are reporting (The admonition "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"). I was deeply involved in one situation mentioned very briefly in the book: The culture of programmers in the era of time-sharing computers (at MIT 1969-73 and UMichigan subsequently). While the author accurately describes the basic situation, she is entirely wrong about the motivations/purpose of that behavior and thus the conclusion/lesson that she offers is also wrong.

4. The book is overwhelmingly focused on the negative impacts of electronic devices on conversation, and almost entirely ignores the positive. For example, electronic communications can prime face-to-face conversations and make them much more effective and satisfying. For example, two of my pet peeves are meetings that are wastes of time because the participants are unprepared and ones where the person calling the meeting is too lazy to write an email (there is an award ribbon for the victims of that). A running joke among like-minded friends is to email each other "talking points" or "agendas" before getting together for dinner, but this actually has been beneficial by producing more robust conversations (and by having duds dropped faster).

-- Douglas B. Moran