Reclaiming Conversation (19 page)

P
hones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. For the same young people who complain of inattention from their friends “in person,” being a friend means being “on call”—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online. From middle school on, children describe this as a responsibility. They sleep with their phones for many reasons—one of which, they say, is to be available to friends in case of what many refer to as “emergencies.”

This sense of urgency extends from bad news to good. You always want to know who is reaching out to you. Your phone is your view onto that. When a friend sends a text and says it is urgent, you will stop whatever you are doing and attend to your friend on the phone.

Here, a fifteen-year-old explains why she worries about forgetting her phone. She sees herself as family to her friends.

During the school year if I forget my phone anywhere—going out anywhere—it really puts me on edge. Because a lot of my friends trust me for helping them feel better if they are upset. And so I worry when I am going out: What if someone is really upset and they need someone to talk to but I can't because I don't have my phone?

Another fifteen-year-old says she sleeps with her phone because only its constant presence allows her to meet her responsibilities to her friends. But then again, only her phone could create such demands. She explicitly refers to what she owes her friends as being “on call.” And indeed, she describes her responsibilities as close to those of a small dispensary.

I've had to be on call for a friend during the school year. She was out using questionable substances and I messaged her—“Hey what's up?”—and I could tell by the text she sent back that she was quite obviously out of balance, like, completely. And so I talked to her—I got her to go to bed. The next morning I knew to bring aspirin to school and saltines and a water bottle. And I still—I'm always worried I'll miss something like that. And that someone might get hurt because of it.

A fourteen-year-old says she “is never completely relaxed,” even when she sleeps with her phone by her side. Any bad news will show up first on her phone.

I feel like there's always something nagging me. There's always drama or something stressing me out—that I am always worried about. Most of it starts because of phones; the expectation is that when something big happens, you'll tell, like, your best friends right away. Because you can.

Even at night, she worries that she might be left out of some big development in her circle of friends. To miss that “would become a big deal.” In large measure, she determines her worth by how much she
knows about what is going on with her friends. And by how rapidly she is there to support them. In her circle, it is expected that you respond to a text from a friend within a few minutes.

And then consider Kristen, a junior majoring in economics who follows the rule of three during meals and then, after meals, continues to keep the conversation light if she is with people who have phones with them. Although I meet her during finals week, she is not under much stress. Her own classes are for the most part graduate economics seminars. She has a close relationship with her professors. After our interview, she will be off to proctor a freshman calculus exam. We talk about texting in classes. She shrugs. “It's a problem.” Texting is a commitment. When you text, you are promising your friends that you will be there for them. She thinks that when you get a text from a close friend, it should be responded to within “about five minutes.”

So, Kristen checks her phone periodically during classes. If she gets a text from a friend that in some way signals an emergency, “I leave class and go to the bathroom in order to respond to the text.” I ask Kristen what would count as an emergency, and I learn that, in her world, the bar for emergencies is set fairly low. “My friends need me. I'm the one they see as the stable one. They'll text for boyfriend things. For when they feel a crisis. I need to get back to them.” And so, a few times a week, this young economist walks out of her advanced seminars to go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, and text her friends.

“That's what friends do, respond to a crisis,” says Kristen. That is why she is often in the bathroom, missing class.

When friends are together, they fall into inattention and feel comfortable retreating into their own worlds. Apart, they are alert for emergencies. It is striking that this often reflects how they describe the behavior of their parents: When their children are not at home, they become hovering “helicopters”; when their children are in plain sight, parents give themselves permission to turn to their phones.
This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.

Perhaps on-call friendship, primed for “emergencies,” begins as
children's way to deal with parents who are less available than children want them to be—and indeed, than parents themselves might wish to be.

R
ecall Holbrooke, the middle school in upstate New York, where I have been called in to consult with a faculty worried about students' lack of empathy.

At a meeting, we go around the table and over twenty teachers voice their concerns: Students don't seem to form anything but superficial friendships. In the past few years, faculty conversations with students have become increasingly strained. And students don't seem much interested in one another. Teachers eavesdrop on student conversations: “Among themselves, they talk about what is on their phones.” And the teachers worry whether students are learning the rudiments of conversation: listening and turn taking.

At the first break, teachers say over coffee what they were not ready to admit around the table:

Students don't make eye contact.

They don't respond to body language.

They have trouble listening. I have to rephrase a question many times before a child will answer a question in class.

I'm not convinced they are interested in each other. It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger's spectrum. But that's impossible. We are talking about a schoolwide problem.

Holbrooke is not a school for emotionally or cognitively challenged students. It is a private school with competitive admissions that finds that the academically promising students it admits are not developing as
expected. Ava Reade, the school's dean, puts her concern in the strongest possible terms: “Even as ninth graders, they can't see things from another person's point of view.” Many students don't seem to have the patience to wait and hear what someone else has to say. Three teachers back her up; students have trouble with the empathy that conversation both teaches and requires.

They are talking at each other with local comments, minutiae really, short bursts, as though they were speaking texts. They are communicating immediate social needs. They aren't listening to each other.

The most painful thing to watch is that they don't know when they have hurt each other's feelings. They hurt each other, but then you sit down with them and try to get them to see what has happened and they can't imagine things from the other side.

My students can build websites, but they can't talk to teachers. And students don't want to talk to other students. They don't want the pressure of conversation.

Because Holbrooke is a small private school, its teachers are given the time to be both emotional and intellectual mentors to their students. This is why they enjoy teaching at Holbrooke. But now they say they are unable to do their jobs as before. For the first time, they feel they must explicitly teach empathy and even turn-taking in conversation. One says, “Emotional intelligence has to become an explicit part of our curriculum.”

The teachers have theories about what stands behind the changes they observe. Perhaps their students grew up playing video games instead of reading and didn't develop their imaginations. Perhaps video games kept them from the playground, where they would have developed their social skills. Perhaps students are overscheduled. Or perhaps they don't get enough practice with conversation when they go home.
Their parents may be preoccupied with work—on their own phones and computers. The teachers' talk circles back many times to technology. A history teacher sums up how powerful he feels it to be: “My students are so caught up in their phones that they don't know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other's eyes and see what is going on.”

One Holbrooke teacher is distressed that, at least in her view, student friendships have moved from an emotional to an instrumental register. Friendships seem based on what students think someone else can do for them. She calls these “Who has my back?” friendships. In these kinds of connections, she says, “[Friendship] serves you and then you move on.” A friendship based on “Who has my back?” is the shadow of friendship, just as time alone with a phone is the shadow of solitude. Both provide substitutions that make you think you have what you don't. Perhaps the substitutions make you forget what you have lost.

Reade, the dean, comes to the group meeting with the results of a small exercise, a small experiment, really. One of Reade's jobs is to run advisory groups of about twenty students each. She asked members of her groups to list three things they want in a friend. In the more than sixty responses she received, only three students mentioned trust, caring, kindness, or compassion. Most of the students say they are interested in someone who could make them laugh, who could make them happy. One student writes, “As long as I'm with somebody, I'm happy.” Reade says that she has to conclude that these students don't understand or value what a “best friend” can be. Best friends are more than amusements or insurance that you won't be alone. Best friends are people you care about. They are people to whom you reveal yourself. You learn about yourself as you learn about them. But Reade notes that these lessons are hard to learn online.

Reade sums up her “What do you want in a friend?” exercise: “I feel that these kids have a sense that friendships are one-sided. It is a place for them to broadcast. It is not a place for them to listen. And there isn't an emotional level. You just have to have someone there. There is no
investment in another person. It's like they can turn the friendship off.” She doesn't say so, but the implied end to this thought is “the way you can turn off an online exchange.” After Reade's exercise, she came to fear that children are treating other children as “apps,” as means to an end. She observes that her students are quick to say to each other, “Can you do this for me?” and then, she says, “they just ‘toggle' to another friend once the job is done or
if they don't get satisfaction
, either way.”

Reade worries that the habits developed with online “friending” have become the habits of friendships in face-to-face, everyday life. She says:

When they hurt each other, they don't realize it and show no remorse. When you try to help them, you have to go over it over and over with them, to try to role-play why they might have hurt another person. And even then, they don't seem sorry. They exclude each other from social events, parties, school functions, and seem surprised when others are hurt. One time, everyone was talking about a concert that one student hadn't gone to, right in front of this girl—she didn't have the money for the tickets—but they went on and on. She had tears in her eyes.

They are not developing that way of relating where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other.

By middle school, the Holbrooke teachers hope to see children content to quietly work on projects—in art, science, or writing. Teachers talk about becoming teachers for the thrill of watching children discover a gift and the capacity to concentrate on it, both during school hours and in their spare time. But at this meeting, teachers mourn that they no longer have this pleasure. Their students can't concentrate, don't have any downtime, and actually can't tolerate it when they do. As early as sixth grade, students come to school with smartphones and tablets, caught up in a constant stream of messages to which they feel the need to instantly respond. Teachers know the student culture. At Holbrooke, a text from a friend requires a response within minutes.

What children are sharing, of course, are tokens that they belong—a
funny video, a joke, a photograph, the things that happen to be circulating that day. “It's all about affiliation,” says one teacher. Another reflects: “It's as though they spend their day in a circle exchanging charms for their charm bracelets. But it takes place in a circle where they never get time off.”

The teachers know that students text under their desks and take bathroom breaks to respond to messages on their phones, and now the phones are even making their way onto the playing fields. The teachers want to make school a time when students can take a step away from the pressure to be sending and receiving. But more and more course content is delivered electronically, so students are never away from the medium that distracts them.

At a meeting with another group of middle school teachers, I hear similar concerns: Students have long, heart-to-heart text conversations online and then meet in school the next day without acknowledging the person with whom they have been sharing intimacies. It seems more important for students to get reinforcement from a large number of online “likes” than to have in-person conversations. But teachers worry that without face-to-face conversation, students aren't developing empathic capacity or listening skills.

A middle school teacher says, “One girl told me: ‘I always keep thirteen unanswered texts on my phone. I have thirteen people who are trying to reach me.'” The teacher found this exchange disturbing. The phone was not there to communicate but to make this girl feel good about herself. The teacher asked the girl about how the people who had left the unanswered texts might feel. The girl seemed puzzled. She said she had never really thought about their feelings.