The APA Monitor has an interview with Dr. Sherry Turkle who has documented how iphones, blackberries and other mobile devices have reduced the amount of attention users pay to people who are physically present. I love the technology as much as the next person, but there is something sad in reading that fathers are emailing during Sunday football game breaks during which they used to talk to their sons and some moms are texting while breastfeeding instead of focusing on their infant (which many mothers tell me was one of the most intimate experiences of their lives).
In my first week working at the Executive Office of the President, I was shocked when I saw someone was clearly sending email during a face to face meeting of only 4 people, but I soon adjusted to the norm. In the West Wing there is a photo of an oval office meeting of President Obama and some of his key advisors, and David Axelrod is Blackberrying away.
The technology is here to stay but I wonder if we can’t develop better social norms around it. Few of us are getting emails along the lines of “Doctor the patient has lost 2 pints of blood — get to the hospital now!”. Are we so narcissistic that we can’t admit that most of our email is spam or real but trivial, and certainly not something that can’t wait long enough for us to interact with people we care about who are sitting right next to us?
I have a friend who, every time we get together for lunch, puts his iphone next to his fork and reads it every time it buzzes. This behavior bothers me enough that I tend to arrange shared meals in places that do not allow cell phone use. Why I haven’t said “Would you shut that off?” I am not sure, but I think it’s because I think I shouldn’t have to anymore that I have to tell my dining companions not to pick their nose in front of me or chew with their mouth open. My social norm preference would place the burden of asking on the person who wants to disconnect from face to face interaction through technology rather than making that the default expectation. But I am not sure if my wishes are widely shared enough for that to ever become the social norm of how we use these new technologies.
Are we so narcissistic that we can’t admit that most of our email is spam or real but trivial, and certainly not something that can’t wait long enough for us to interact with people we care about who are sitting right next to us?
Yes. And our cell phone coversations are life-or-death matters also. All of them.
There’s a lot of lovely intimacy when nursing, but it’s also just a heck of a lot of hours.
Baby one, born in 2005? I read a lot, and even managed to knit sometimes.
Baby two, born in 2009? Kicked a lot harder and with better aim. Wouldn’t let me read books or newspapers; pointy sticks would have been unsafe. BUT, she did let me read on my iPhone — which works in the dark, and also makes a great little nightlight/alarm clock/etc. etc.
(I don’t know when else I would ever have been able to develop a serious Trollope habit…)
Narcissism? Maybe a desire to be at least partly in some other moment? I’m not sure what to call that. And I think for people who’ve grown up with that possibility, it’s a mode of being they and others around them of the same cohort are used to.
I don’t like it myself and find it rude. But then I’m old, and I’ve read a little bit on the impossibility of doing actual multi-tasking, at least for most people (we do task-switching instead, and badly). I tend to think directed attention is a good thing. A philosopher friend tells me, though, that his observation of present-day college students is that they don’t have that as a phenomenological skill. It’s just lacking.
The nursing aspect is beyond my competence or experience, alas.
I haven’t quite gotten use to people who make and take phone calls while on the toilet.
In the days of yore (say as recent as the dark ages of the 1980s), people would pass each other by in the street, and if they were in a small town or just polite people, they would be up for salutations. Something like: “Good morning!” “Good Morning!” “How you doing?” “Well, thank you, and yourself?” “I’m fine, thanks for asking!”
Nothing too thick and heavy. Nothing smacking of some Thoreau response taking 20 or so minutes. But a far cry from what we almost certainly need to say when passing other people today, especially if we care for their safety! What I find myself saying as I pass many a person these days is a sincere warning
“You’ll run into a pole that way!”
And many a reply has been, “I already have!”
It wouldn’t hurt to say how you feel. I remember how, when I first got a cell phone, I was using traveling and using it extensively in restaurants without any thought as to my conversations might be annoying other patrons. When I waiter asked me to to desist, I only wished he’d said something sooner.
Keith, the polite approach would be to suggest in the most cordial and sincere way to your friend that you will excuse yourself so as not to interfere with his business. From Judith Martin.
Emma Jane: Dr. Turkle isn’t talking about reading (of a book or on a device) but actually being in communication with someone else. One of her key findings is that the attentional demands of being in Internet conversation is much greater than reading (see the linked article about how it’s easier to connect with someone who is reading the Sunday paper next to you than someone who is texting). The other thing she noted is: “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.”
I’ve got another proposal: for many people, the world around them is a miserable place. Economy, environment, political climate — you name it, and it sucks. Cyberspace, even if it’s partly about the real world, is generally clean, well-lit, free of stinks and hunger (albeit sometime full of backbiting and bullying) and in general rather more elegant than the physical world. So why would people want to escape there, and to the illusion that by reading their email, sending texts or answering calls they were getting things done and exterting some kind of control over their lives? Then, of course, once those habits are established they’re hard to break even at times when a person wants to be present.
20 years ago Mark Weiser, on of the inventors of ubiquitous computing, argued that integrating computers and communication devices into the physical world was much better than retreating into a sensually impoverished virtual reality to take advantage of all the neat things that cycles and bandwidth can do for us. I don’t think he anticipated that we might end up with the worst features of both worlds, where our actual lives are impoverished to make room for our virtual selves.
I ask my friends snidely, “How’s your phone?” Don’t try with non-friends, or the humorless.
While feeding my son midnight bottles I watched Jacques Pepin’s Cooking Techniques. He’s only 3, I’ll be very curious to find out whether it had any subliminal impact when he’s old enough to try his hand at a proper brunoise.
was my comment deleted as inappropriate? Because I said that concern-trolling mothers is a problem on the Internet and you shouldn’t do it? Really? It’s true, concern-trolling moms on the Internet because they aren’t having sufficiently profound relationships with their infants is an actual problem, and should be avoided.
Tyler, maybe it was deleted because it wasn’t in English. What does “concern-trolling” mean? “you shouldn’t do it”-Who shouldn’t do what? _What_ is “because they aren’t having sufficiently profound relationships with their infants”? What is an actual problem — concern-trolling moms (whatever they are) or not having sufficiently profound relationships with infants? What should be avoided?
So maybe my next comment will be deleted too. Perhaps it was deleted because I referred to “Keith” rather than Prof. Humphreys. I’m honestly not sure.
In any event, breastfeeding does take a lot of time. Breastfeeding can be intimate, but it can also be tedious. I wonder if talking on the phone would count as disturbing that. What if a mom received negative information on a phone call while nursing that made her tense? What if she reads news that made her tense (even if we accept the distinction between reading and texting)? What if someone in the room told her something that made her tense?
I think “trust women” is the proper motto here. It’s not as though mothers are not very concerned with having intimate relationships with their babies. Many many mothers experience a lot of anxiety that their relationships with their babies may not be intimate enough. Many many mothers also experience intense isolation while raising small infants, which would seem to counteract the benefits of intimacy with the child. Raising a small child can be tedious, and lots of boring and imperfect things happen during that time. Breastfeeding is not something where mothers should have to be monitoring whether they are having a sufficiently intimate experience with their child (let alone an “emotional exchange on the most primitive level,” as Turkle puts it, in superlative terms that I am confident are much more destructive than productive). So mothers are already interested in having profoundly intimate relationships with their infants. We should *trust them* to make the right decisions about how to structure those relationships.
Not doing that, and raising first-principle questions of basic human nature as being at stake, only serves to intensify the climate of judgment and anxiety that mothers are already constantly subjected to. I maintain that you should stop doing it.
Henry:
“concern trolling” is expressing criticism in the guise of concern for the subject’s well-being. The moms are the subjects of Keith Humphrey’s concern trolling, they are not themselves concern trolls. It is a common enough term in blogging that I think it counts as English, though I understand that people might not be immediately familiar with it. If that’s the case I apologize. The “problem on the Internet” is wide-spread criticism of moms for not having profound enough relationships with their children, criticism that is masked as “concern.” Admittedly that noun phrase was complex. Hopefully my next comment clarifies.
Well what do you know: I just read an article on Huffington Post that uses the term “concern troll.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/13/cass-sunstein-obama-ambivalent-regulator-czar_n_874530.html I guess that I owe Tyler at least a partial apology.
I am an old guy. I do not mind people using their cellphones. I don’t understand the problem. When a waitress comes to the table, it’s ok to take you attention from me and talk to her. If you drop your fork, you can ignore me while you pick it up. Having a screen posting little bulletins while we talk is, in my experience, harmless.
What I do object to is when a person is not paying enough attention to me. If there are a lot of pretty girls in the place and my dining partner has constantly wandering eyes, I feel like he’s not interested in what I say. Replies to text messages or answering phone calls can both become offensive when they make it so that the conversational flow is broken. People, mostly young, that receive texts while dining seem able to read and keep the conversation going.
Most of the people I have heard tell me this is a bad thing seem to be basing their view on some internal dogma. “This is bad.” QED “This is bad.” As if, in some distant past, their pregnant mother was frightened by a Blackberry. I don’t mind as long as the conversation flows in interesting directions. If it doesn’t, whether because of a device or a boring mind, I’m outta there.
I wish this site had a “Like” button — just for kevo.
I like to think of this simply as Incontinence of the Telephone.
Tyler: As a parent I like to know about research findings that are relevant to children’s well being, if you don’t that’s up to you of course, but this is the reality-based community…we discuss scientific findings here whether they make people feel good about themselves or not (the climate is changing too, BTW).
The wait staff shouldn’t be interrupting a table with a conversation. Passing close by will be enough to allow them to summon the server if anything is needed.
EVERY time I go out to eat, my partner and I are interrupted by a server. It doesn’t matter if you’re animatedly chatting, leaning close in and absorbed by conversation, holding hands, or explaining a business diagram on a napkin, they INTERRUPT.
Time for the polite to refuse rudeness.
Really? Science? My comments are like climate denialism? Really? This is a like a new version of Godwin’s law — someone disagrees with you about how to interpret some research findings and the first response (well, the second, after deleting my comment) is to compare that person to climate change skeptics. Awesome.
But, seriously, where did I dispute any “facts”? I’m specifically disputing the *values* expressed here.
So, for starters, Sherry Turkle is not an expert in child well-being, parenting, child psychology, the relative “primitiveness” of the emotional exchange between mothers and children, etc. That’s fine, I don’t thing the point is to argue from authority. But calling the intimacy between mothers and nursing children an “emotional exchange at the most primitive level” is making a superlative statement of fundamental human values. It *could* be framed as an empirical claim of, say, evolutionary or developmental psychology, but at minimum it’s not the sort of claim that we have really strong evidence for one way or another. So, no, that’s not a strong scientific claim that we can base the anxious (concern-trolling) conclusion upon. It does, however, set up a discursive context that is extreme, where not only texting, but really *any* activity that might interfere with the intimacy of breastfeeding should be actively monitored and policed. That actively monitoring nursing for sufficient intimacy might *increase* tension, with no interpretive ambiguity about whether it’s has to to with the baby’s relationship to its mother, seems like a reasonable, and not anti-science, point to make in this context. Which is to say that by your own measure it matters how scientific findings make people feel about themselves and their parenting, since you (not me) have identified tension-during-breastfeeding as an important potential problem.
Facts. My later comment raised *facts* that are relevant (as did Emma Jane’s): especially that nursing often is tedious and time-consuming, and not necessarily emotionally primitive in every instance, regardless of the presence of technology. No this isn’t a claim based on research, but then Turkle’s research isn’t about nursing practices, it’s about communication technology, so my anecdotal but not very controversial statements about common breastfeeding experiences are, at minimum, relevant sorts of information. Stronger data would be great, but for now I don’t here you disputing that nursing is often tedious and time-consuming.
Then if the introduction of tension into breastfeeding is a problem, I asked whether other sources of tension are also problems. Your response is to call me a climate denier. But the only harm anyone has identified is this tension, not technology itself, then presumably mothers should be policing their environments for sources of tension. Of course breastfeeding is itself a major source of anxiety and stress and tension for many families, and one which babies would rightly interpret as coming from their relationship with their mother.
So absence-of-intimacy seems to me to be a red herring, since (again I’m asserting this without “scientific” evidence, but I think it’s uncontroversial) many everyday instances of breastfeeding are simply businesslike and not emotionally charged in a “primitive” way. And a tension particular to ICT also doesn’t seem to specifically implicate ICTs, since tension is also a very common experience in families with young children.
So, no, I don’t find these concerns to be very compelling, or very “scientific” for that matter. In fact, from what I see the specific *research finding* in Turkle’s data is simply the fact *that* women text while nursing. *Not* that texting is actually harmful — that’s not what her study addressed, and we could easily imagine the longitudinal research that *would* actually get at this question. So the idea that texting *might* be harmful is just an interpretation, based on this claim of the primitive importance of the emotional exchange of nursing, and a secondary claim that that intimacy is fragile. None of that is “research findings.” I never disputed the actual research findings, I’m disputing the values that the interpretations are built on. In fact I’m a bit surprised that you have such difficulty distinguishing between research-supported facts and the values that inform their interpretation, and instead just jump to name-calling about climate-denialism. Turkle’s statement reads to me as boiler-plate researcher-gesturing-around-for-popular-hook. And, thinking that perhaps I’m being ungenerous and Turkle might actually address these issues in detail in the book itself, I found that, instead, the word “breastfeeding” does not seem to appear once in that text (and the only time it comes close is an a discussion of robots):
http://books.google.com/books?id=_Dhf5xEZZD0C&dq=alone+together&q=breastfeeding#v=onepage&q=breastfeeding&f=false
So, instead, what I get from your and Turkle’s off-handed comments about nursing mothers either “forgetting what’s important” (Turkle) or that the whole situation is just “sad” (Humphreys) is just a lot of pearl-clutching about other mothers not doing it right, with in fact zero basis for that evaluation. That’s not good enough, and it’s certainly not science.
So, since there’s not much “science” here, but a whole lot of values, I do think it matters how mothers “feel”. I think the pervasive commentary from experts like yourself and Turkle about mothering that are presented as coming from authority but that are not in fact well-grounded is a sociological fact that has a significant impact on people’s lives. I’m also arguing that until “scientists” like yourself actually start making better-grounded claims and stop presenting statements of value as scientifically grounded statements of fact, they should refrain from concern-trolling mothers on the internet for living their lives the best they can.
“science”? climate denialism? What gives?
Keith: It’s all in the spin.Obviously for some women texting while breastfeeding will diminish the bonding experience, but equally obviously for others it will make extended breastfeeding (with all of its documented effects improving immune system function, IQ and so forth) possible. You have to know what the alternatives and the opportunity costs are. It’s not even clear whether a study to sort all this out would be logistically or ethically feasible.
Of course, now I’m feeling terribly guilty about having carried my son in a sling while reading blogs and doing freelance work at the computer. If only I hadn’t neglected him so shamefully he’d be reading at an even higher grade level.
Betsy: thanks for the Judith Martin reference. Stupid LAT for not carrying her column anymore. As if people had outgrown politeness or something.
One option is to interpret it as a signal that the person is somewhat disengaged from the interaction.
My response is generally say something to someone else that gets the attention (in a positive way) of the individual using the device.
So Keith Humphreys dismissed me with: “we discuss scientific findings here whether they make people feel good about themselves or not”
I couldn’t remember talking about self-esteem anywhere, which bothered me so I looked back, and it turns out the only thing I see where I might have pointed to “feel good about themselves” was the phrase “serves to intensify the climate of judgment and anxiety that mothers are already constantly subjected to”. Is that what Humphreys is responding to? Do you think that intensifying a climate of judgment and anxiety is a perfectly fine outcome of discussions of scientific findings? Like, say, if the data pointed that way, more judgment and anxiety would be a perfectly okay outcome of discussions of research into parenting? Especially when you yourself profess concern for children’s well-being, that seems pretty horrible.
Again, I’m astonished at this weirdly small-minded distinction between “science” and everything else that disagrees with you. Your discourse is super sophisticated.
Until fairly recently, my job involved a heavy first-responder technical support component. (It still does somewhat, but it’s a much smaller part of my job now.) Having a smartphone allowed me to leave the office for hour-long lunches on occasion, because I could monitor alerts. 99% of what comes in is not urgent; the 1% that is, is crucial. Even for the stuff that’s not strictly urgent, there’s a fair amount where dealing with it quickly makes it better. This is especially true if you administer a staff-sometimes e-mail discussions that will spiral into nonsense, or fights, can be kept in the realm of sanity if tackled early.
Which isn’t to say the ‘phone isn’t distracting. But it’s liberating as well.
NCG: You’re welcome. I find it’s almost always time for a Judith Martin reference.
Thanks, Tyler. I find your comments very much to the point and very well-supported.
Shorter Keith Humphreys “get off my lawn”.
I joke, but this is old curmudgeon talk. Smartphones have helped to eliminate boredom. You know what, life is really boring. Waiting at the dentist? Boring. Waiting for a train or a plane? Boring. Waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store? Boring. So people are now eliminating those terribly boring moments in life. Some people might think it is rude. Well I think making small talk with strangers is pseudo polite Midwestern bullshit. Maybe we just have different cultural values.
I wish people weren’t so narcicistic to think that summoning half a dozen people for a meeting was actually a valuable use of time.