In the News (from The Guardian): “As our meeting places fall silent, save for tapping on screens, it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing

“I first noticed it in a restaurant. The place was strangely quiet, and at one table a group seemed deep in prayer. Their heads were bowed, their eyes hooded and their hands in their laps. I then realised that every one, young and old, was gazing at a handheld phone. People strolled the street outside likewise, with arms crooked at right angles, necks bent and heads in potentially crippling postures. Mothers with babies were doing it. Students in groups were doing it. They were like zombies on call. There was no conversation.

“The MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle claims that her students are close to mastering the art of sustaining eye contact with a person while texting someone else. It is like an organist playing different tunes with hands and feet. To Turkle, these people are “alone together … a tribe of one”. Anyone with 3,000 Facebook friends has none. …

“Psychologists have identified this as “fear of conversation”. People wear headphones as “conversational avoidance devices”. The internet connects us to the entire world, but it is a world bespoke, edited, deleted, sanitised. …

“There is now apparently a booming demand for online “conversation” with robots and artificial voices. Mobiles come loaded with customised “girlfriends”. People turn to computerised dating advisers, even claim to fall in love with their on-board GPS guides. A robot seal can be bought to sit and listen to elderly people talk, tilting its head and blinking in sympathy.

“We have, says Turkle, confused connection with conversation – “the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship”. Human friendship is rich, messy and complicated. It requires patience and tolerance, even compromise. As we push other people off into a world of question and answer, connection and information, friendship becomes ersatz virtuality.

“All that said, the death of conversation has been announced as often as that of the book. …

“A hundred online universities are no substitute for a live campus any more than Facebook is a substitute for sex or Twitter for debate. …

“Those obsessed with faddish connectivity and personal avoidance are not escaping reality. … Deep down they still crave friendship. They just want a better class of talk.!”
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