I share, therefore I am…

Texting, e-mail and posting promote a “flight from conversation.”

“We’re always communicating,” yet “we’ve sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”

These observations come from Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and M.I.T professor, who has spent the past 15 years studying the technologies of mobile connection.  She recently provided a survey of her insights in a provocative article in the New York Times, “The Flight from Conversation.”

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

The “Goldilocks effect” is Turkle’s term for the resulting paradox:  “In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.”

After years of observation and reflection, Turkle concludes “that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.”

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.