IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 12

Miller. Published in 2006, before the
iPhone era, you can find here, for
example, both Charles Dickens and
Mrs. Trollope, complaining in the
19th century, of Americans' failures
as conversationalists vis-à-vis speakers back home in England. Miller discusses conversation in 20th century
America and observes that Hemingway and Norman Mailer privileged
the closed mouthed reticent male
as a symbol of masculinity. While
Turkle is concerned with what she
perceives as the decline of conversation, it is surprising that she lets pass
this remark from a college junior,
[school not named], "If me and my
boyfriend fight, and we are talking
and he stops to text someone back,
even if it is for two seconds, I'm like,
'What are you doing...I freak out.'"
There is a larger concern here that
has nothing to do with texting: English grammar that might have a college teacher "freak out."
Turkle's major concern is what
she perceives as a decline in empathy brought on by mobile devices
causing a shrinking of face to face
conversation. She refers to various
papers in scholarly journals read
by psychologists and sociologists.
One in particular she cites several
times, and it is worth reading in part
because it explains to a layman,
like me, how empathy is said to be
gauged [3].
The paper describes an experiment in which 51 children who are
11 or 12 years of age are sent for
five days to an overnight nature
camp where television, computers, and mobile devices were not
permitted. At the start of camp, the
kids' capacity for empathy is evaluated: they were shown photographs
and videotaped scenes. There is no
accompanying sound. The students
were asked on the basis of what they
saw to evaluate the emotions of their
subjects. The children took a similar
test at the end of the camping period.

It was found that their ability to visually read emotions had improved. At
the same time, a control group was
used - a group of children of the
same age who remained at their public school and continued with their
devices. They took the same tests
over the same interval and, strange
to say, their scores improved too but
not by as much. The ratio was about
two to one. The authors are quite
open about the defects of their experiment: if you send a bunch of kids of
this age to a nature camp for 5 days
it can be a wrenching experience and
the absence of their devices might
be the least of their adjustments.
For some, it may their first time away
from home or their first away from a
city or their first living with a group.
Turkle never alludes to the shaky science of this experiment.
The question of whether empathy
can be measured remains I think
an open one. During the period in
which Americans have been using
smartphones it appears - from
studying the public sector - that
empathy may have increased. We
have seen a growing compassion
for lesbians and gays made evident
in legislation, and court decisions
resulting in increased gay rights.
There is also a growing empathy for
animals. Meat consumption is falling in the U.S. and there is increasing concern about the treatment of
farm animals. Of course there are
contrary trends in American life -
a growing selfishness that has surfaced in the 2016 presidential race.
Turkle's own capacity for empathy
is sometimes thrown into question.
She describes young people who say
that if a friend of theirs were to lose a
parent or loved one then they would
express condolence with an email or
text message. Turkle is distressed
because they won't use a real telephone. She seems not to know that
for a century books on etiquette dissuade one from telephoning. CondoIEEE Technology and Society Magazine

lence requires a written message, not
a potentially jarring phone call. You
don't know what your friend might
be doing in this period of grief. The
occasion calls for written words on
paper - carefully chosen. Of course
a message on a screen doesn't have
the same gravitas as a handwritten
note, but it is closer to the written
message than telephoning.
She is similarly distressed that
certain students don't want to talk
to her during office hours but would
rather use email, perhaps forgetting that some young people are
quite intimidated by being alone
with their professor in her office.
Students should learn to use office
hours, and email can become a way
to persuade them to overcome
their reluctance.
We are in the early days of devices and connectivity, and the changes are so rapid that already parts
of Turkle's book seem dated - her
jeremiad about online teaching for
example. In 2013 Clayton Christiansen of the Harvard Business School,
speaking of massive open online
courses [MOOC's] and their capacity for disruption, predicted about
American colleges, "I think even five
years from now these enterprises
[colleges] are going to be in real
trouble." Three years later the statement looks quaint. It seems that
almost once a month The Chronicle
of Higher Education carries a story
about some big, distance learning
course having crashed and burned
[4]. And we see that there is still no
shortage of high school students
struggling to get into the better colleges. Turkle's plea for the importance of face to face learning is
dated - we know this stuff.
And yet distance learning has its
place and we're figuring out what
place that is. As a college freshman I
struggled to understand the Riemann
(continued on page 49)
∕

DECEMBER 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016