No need to call sherry turkle article

MICHAELA CULLINGTON

4. Cullington focuses on how texting affects on writing, whereas Sherry Turkle is concerned with the way it affects communication more broadly (pp. 373-92). How do you think Cullington would respond to Turkle's concerns?

5. Cullington "send[s] and receive[s] around 6,400 texts a month" (paragraph 21). About how many do you send and receive? Write a paragraph reflecting on how your texting affects your other writing. First write it as a text, and then revise it to meet the standards of academic writing. How do

the two differ?

No Need to Call

SHERRY TURKLE

"So MANY PEOPLE HATE THE TELEPHONE," says Elaine, seventeen. Among her friends at Roosevelt High School, "it's all texting and messaging." She herself writes each of her six closest friends roughly twenty texts a day. In addition, she says, "there are about forty instant messages out, forty in, when I'm at home on the computer." Elaine has strong ideas about how electronic media "levels the playing field" between people like her-outgoing, on the soccer team, and in drama club-and the shy: "It's only on the screen that shy people open up." She explains why: "When you can think about what you're going to say, you can talk to someone you'd have trouble talking to. And it doesn't seem weird that you pause for two minutes to

SHERRY TuRKLE teaches in the program in science, technology, and

society at MIT and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

She has been described as the "Margaret Mead of digital culture." Her

books include Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology

and Less from Each Other (2011), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age

of the Internet (1995), and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) . This essay is from Alone Together.

SHERRY TURKLE

think about what you're going to say before you say it, like it would be if you were actually talking to someone."

Elaine gets specific about the technical designs that help shy people express themselves in electronic messaging. The person to whom you are writing shouldn't be able to see your process of revision or how long you have been working on the message. "That could be humiliating." The best communica- tion programs shield the writer from the view of the reader. The advantage of screen communication is that it is a place to reflect, retype, and edit. "It is a place to hide," says Elaine.

The notion that hiding makes it easier to open up is not new. In the psychoanalytic tradition, it inspired technique. Classical analysis shielded the patient from the analyst's gaze in order to facilitate free association, the golden rule of saying whatever comes to mind. Likewise, at a screen, you feel protected and less burdened by expectations. And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encourag- ing feeling of already being together. In this curious relational space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic com- munications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, suc- cumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. 1 It is a seductive but dangerous habit of mind. When you cultivate this sensibility, a telephone call can seem fearsome because it

reveals too much. Elaine is right in her analysis: teenagers flee the telephone.

Perhaps more surprisingly, so do adults. They claim exhaustion and lack of time; always on call, with their time highly lever- aged through multitasking, they avoid voice communication

3 7 4

No Need to Call

outside of a small circle because it demands their full attention when they don't want to give it.

Technologies live in complex ecologies. The meaning of s any one depends on what others are available. The telephone was once a way to touch base or ask a simple question. But once you have access to e-mail, instant messaging, and texting, things change. Although we still use the phone to keep up with those closest to us, we use it less outside this circle.2 Not only do people say that a phone call asks too much, they worry it will be received as demanding too much. Randolph, a forty-six-year-old architect with two jobs, two young children, and a twelve-year- old son from a former marriage, makes both points. He avoids the telephone because he feels "tapped out .... It promises more than I'm willing to deliver." If he keeps his communications to text and e-mail, he believes he can "keep it together." He explains, "Now that there is e-mail, people expect that a call will be more complicated. Not about facts. A fuller thing. People expect it to take time-or else you wouldn't have called."

Tara, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer who juggles children, a job, and a new marriage, makes a similar point: "When you ask for a call, the expectation is that you have pumped it up a level. People say to themselves: 'It's urgent or she would have sent an e-mail."' So Tara avoids the telephone. She wants to meet with friends in person; e-mail is for setting up these meetings. "That is what is most efficient," she says. But efficiency has its downside. Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs. In friendship, things can't always wait. Tara knows this; she feels guilty and she experiences a loss: "I'm at the point where I'm processing my friends as though they were items of inventory ... or clients."

Leonora, fifty-seven, a professor of chemistry, reflects on her similar practice: "I use e-mail to make appointments to

375

I . SHERRY TURKLE

see friends, but I'm so busy that I'm often making an appoint- ment one or two months in the future. After we set things up by e-mail, we do not call. Really. I don't call. They don't call. They feel that they have their appointment. What do I feel? I feel I have 'taken care of that person."' Leonora's pained tone makes it clear that by "taken care of" she means that she has crossed someone off a to-do list. Tara and Leonora are discontent but do not feel they have a choice. This is where technology has brought them. They subscribe to a new etiquette, claiming the need for efficiency in a realm where efficiency is costly.

Audrey: A Life on the Screen

... Audrey, sixteen, a Roosevelt junior[,] talked about her Facebook profile as "the avatar of me." She's one of Elaine's shy friends who prefers texting to talking. She is never without her phone, sometimes using it to text even as she instant-messages at an open computer screen. Audrey feels lonely in her fam- ily. She has an older brother in medical school and a second, younger brother, just two years old. Her parents are divorced, and she lives half time with each of them. Their homes are about a forty-five-minute drive apart. This means that Audrey spends a lot of time on the road. "On the road," she says. "That's daily life." She sees her phone as the glue that ties her life together. Her mother calls her to pass on a message to her father. Her father does the same. Audrey says, "They call me to say, 'Tell your mom this .... Make sure your dad knows that.' I use the cell to pull it together." Audrey sums up the situa- tion: "My parents use me and my cell like instant messenger. I am their IM."

376

No Need to Call

Like so many other children who tell me similar stories, Audrey complains of her mother's inattention when she picks her up at school or after sports practice. At these times, Audrey says, her mother is usually focused on her cell phone, either texting or talking to her friends. Audrey describes the scene: she comes out of the gym exhausted, carrying heavy gear. Her mother sits in her beaten-up SUV, immersed in her cell, and doesn't even look up until Audrey opens the car door. Some- times her mother will make eye contact but remain engrossed with the phone as they begin the drive home. Audrey says, "It gets between us, but it's hopeless. She's not going to give it up. Like, it could have been four days since I last spoke to her, then I sit in the car and wait in silence until she's done."3

Audrey has a fantasy of her mother, waiting for her, expect- 10 ant, without a phone. But Audrey is resigned that this is not to be and feels she must temper her criticism of her mother because of her own habit of texting when she is with her friends. Audrey does everything she can to avoid a call.4 "The phone, it's awkward. I don't see the point. Too much just a recap and sharing feelings. With a text ... I can answer on my own time. I can respond. I can ignore it. So it really works with my mood. I'm not bound to anything, no commitment .... I have control over the conversation and also more control over what I say."

T exting offers protection:

Nothing will get spat at you. You have time to think and prepare

what you're going to say, to make you appear like that's just the way

you are. There's planning involved, so you can control how you're

portrayed to this person, because you're choosing these wQrds,

editing it before you send it .... When you instant-message you

can cross things out, edit what you say, block a person, or sign off.

A phone conversation is a lot of pressure. You're always expected

377

I

SHERRY TURKLE

to uphold it, to keep it going, and that's too much pressure ....

You have to just keep going ... "Oh, how was your day?" You're

trying to think of something else to say real fast so the conversa-

tion doesn't die out.

Then Audrey makes up a new word. A text, she argues, is better than a call because in a call "there is a lot less bound- ness to the person." By this she means that in a call, she could learn too much or say too much, and things could get "out of control." A call has insufficient boundaries. She admits that "later in life I'm going to need to talk to people on the phone. But not now." When texting, she feels at a reassuring distance. If things start to go in a direction she doesn't like, she can eas- ily redirect the conversation-or cut it off: "In texting, you get your main points off; you can really control when you want the conversation to start and end. You say, 'Got to go, bye.' You

Teenagers plugged into their devices but not each other.

378

No Need to Call

just do it ... much better than the long drawn-out good-byes, when you have no real reason to leave, but you want to end the conversation." This last is what Audrey likes least-the end of conversations. A phone call, she explains, requires the skill to end a conversation "when you have no real reason to leave .... It's not like there is a reason. You just want to. I don't know how to do that. I don't want to learn."

Ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences separation as rejection; she projects onto others the pang of abandonment she feels when someone ends a conversation with her. Feeling unthreatened when someone wants to end a con- versation may seem a small thing, but it is not: It calls upon a sense of self-worth; one needs to be at a place where Audrey has not arrived. It is easier to avoid the phone; its beginnings and endings are too rough on her.

Audrey is not alone in this. Among her friends, phone calls are infrequent, and she says, "Face-to-face conversations happen way less than they did before. It's always, 'Oh, talk to you online."' This means, she explains, that things happen online that "should happen in person .... Friendships get bro- ken. I've had someone ask me out in a text message. I've had someone break up with me online." But Audrey is resigned to such costs and focuses on the bounties of online life.

One of Audrey's current enthusiasms is playing a more li social, even flirtatious version of herself in online worlds. "I'd like to be more like I am online," she says. As we've seen, for Audrey, building an online avatar is not so different from writ- ing a social-networking profile. An avatar, she explains, "is a Facebook profile come to life." And avatars and profiles have a lot in common with the everyday experiences of texting and instant messaging. In all of these, as she sees it, the point is to do "a performance of you."

379

SHERRY TURKLE

Making an avatar and texting. Pretty much the same. You're cre-

ating your own person; you don't have to think of things on the

spot really, which a lot of people can't really do. You're creating

your own little ideal person and sending it out. Also on the Inter-

net, with sites like MySpace and Facebook, you put up the things

you like about yourself, and you're not going to advertise the bad

aspects of you.

You're not going to post pictures of how you look every day.

You're going to get your makeup on, put on your cute little outfit,

you're going to take your picture and post it up as your default, and

that's what people are going to expect that you are every day, when

really you're making it up for all these people .... You can write

anything about yourself; these people don't know. You can create

who you want to be. You can say what kind of stereotype mold you

want to fit in without ... maybe in real life it won't work for you,

you can't pull it off. But you can pull it off on the Internet.

Audrey has her cell phone and its camera with her all day; all day she takes pictures and posts them to Facebook. She boasts that she has far more Face book photo albums than any of her friends. "I like to feel," she says, "that my life is up there." But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life. Audrey is preoccupied about which photographs to post. Which put her in the best light? Which show her as a "bad" girl in potentially appealing ways? If identity play is the work of adolescence, Audrey is at work all day: "If Facebook were deleted, I'd be deleted .... All my memories would probably go along with it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of that would be lost. If Face book were undone, I might actually freak out .... That is where I am. It's part of your life. It's a second you." It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar: "It's your little twin on the Internet."

380

No Need to Call

Since Audrey is constantly reshaping this "twin," she won- ders what happens to the elements of her twin that she edits away. "What does Facebook do with pictures you put on and then take off?" She suspects that they stay on the Internet forever, an idea she finds both troubling and comforting. If everything is archived, Audrey worries that she will never be able to escape the Internet twin. That thought is not so nice. But if everything is archived, at least in fantasy, she will never have to give her up. That thought is kind of nice.

On Facebook, Audrey works on the twin, and the twin works on her. She describes her relationship to the site as a "give-and-take." Here's how it works: Audrey tries out a "flirty" style. She receives a good response from Facebook friends, and so she ramps up the flirtatious tone. She tries out "an ironic, witty" tone in her wall posts. The response is not so good, and she retreats. Audrey uses the same kind of tinkering as she experiments with her avatars in virtual worlds. She builds a first version to "put something out there." Then comes months of adjusting, of "seeing the new kinds of people I can hang with" by changing how she represents herself. Change your avatar, change your world.