The Flight From Conversation

(Okay it’s past midnight. Can’t sleep Need to comment)

“We think that our sips of online connections
add up to a gulp. They don’t” Sherry Turkle

Lead story Sunday Review NY Times.

If you remember, some time back I wrote a blog about same subject. The NY. Times considered the issue important enough to give it the whole front page of the Sunday Review and another inside half page. Man this has got to be big news. Really?

The author Sherry Turkle is a Psychology Professor at MIT. leaves out a most important loss from Text messaging. I’ll get to that in a minute. There was a book published back in 1950 called “The Lonely Crowd.” It too was a big eye opener re. relationships. Revealing the fact that back then all those guys rushing to and fro on the commuter trains into Grand Central from their manicured lawn homes in Connecticut were a “Lonely Crowd,” In that book Reisman argued that the emergence of the “other directed” personality was a real threat to a democracy based on the need for social cohesion. You wonder what happened to social cohesion? Look around our present political scene.

The present Facebook, Twitter, Linkdin, Tweeter et.al present another danger. It is not just the loss of conversation but more important the loss of emotion, feelings in our relation with each other. At no point in this long, Turkle article does the experience of the text recipients feelings, emotions gets dealt with. Yes of course there are adjectives galore for describing feelings.(Cyrano De Bergerac) That’s not the same as that very same experience live, face to face communication. Look at it this way.

You want to propose to your loved one. You could send it on your Blackberry between a meeting and a coffee break or a pee. Benefit could be if rejected you wouldn’t have to deal with what the face of the rejector looked like or expressed. No pickup of feeling or emotional expression. How did he look when he popped the question. Could the receiver look into his eyes and see the love she’s looking for. Anybody could be writing text messages for their friends. In the same way as smart kids were being paid in Long Island to take the SAT tests for admission to State Colleges, Admitted feelings are of know consequence in that situation. However in personal texting, I am told 95 percent is strictly personal stuff. In that case feelings are critical to understanding,

When I think of all the conversations I have had in my life you could never understand the arguments that Carl Marzani and I had on the beach at Fire Island unless you could take in the decibel level of the yelling. Inevitably we would attract a crowd and before long there could be a crowd of 20-30 people arguing the cold-war. abortion, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and any other subject that someone would start. That was conversation on a mass scale. Personally I preferred a one on one exchange in a place where I could read the other persons feelings. At times the feelings and the talk where in conflict. Then it was necessary to help the other figure out what they really wanted to say, That’s a learning process, This does not exist in texting.

What is lost in texting is the personal intimate messages that each of gives off in a conversation called emotions. Why does it matter? It is in our felt, I emphasize the word FELT because that’s where our creative and learning juices dwell. Yes that’s the place of poetry, music, and yes love and hate and all the emotions in between. Texting tends to cripple our emotional life because it transfers a message but not the emotion as well, or not at all, as a face to face or belly to belly encounter. So there.