Dialogues of the Dammed

Something recently ruptured the currents of air that I always pictured surrounding conversation. Helping my teenage son make plans to see his friends helped me see how texting about hanging out on the weekend puts you in a different stance than you’d have taken if you were calling about hanging out on the weekend. We’ve sworn fealty to the practice of tapping words onto a screen, usually very few, to chart our real lives. We should reconsider why- and how texting fractures the thoughts we humans share.

Before smartphones and apps intervened, when we primarily spoke, ideas emerged and built on each other in a flow. (Sometimes.) Now that we primarily text, an idea burbles out from one of us and crashes into a dam when the other one replies with an “ok” or a cartoon. Kids in my orbit learn how to talk on the phone over the course of their teens, like teens in the 1980s would have learned to pop a wheelie or bake a blueberry pie. For any kid, the test of your daily intake of sunlight and audible laughter begins with how fully you can shake off the “nah” in a text chain and hatch another plan - or just go outside.

This change plays out every day. Say you take a notion to meet your neighbor, who once mentioned having competed in double-Dutch as a kid, for a jumprope meetup in the park. You write your neighbor, evoking the walking-the-dog tricks you’ll learn, the shade on the oval where you’ll gather, the butter seeping through the bearclaws you can pick up afterward. The text goes at 9 am. 14 hours and 11 minutes later, you get a “busy” and a shrug emoji.

Do you call the person? Then or the next day? Or do you say to yourself and anyone in earshot that if the person weren’t too busy for another meetup, the person would have said so? When in fact the person didn’t say anything?

You’re left with no plan and no knowledge of how you’d have learned or grown closer. Without dialogue, the prospect of fresh double-Dutch memories dips and disappears like the sun in the picture you see below of a conversation I was lucky enough to have in real life a couple of years ago.

Once upon a time, your busy friend would have been on the phone and you would have said: huh, well, how about next Sunday? And your friend would have hemmed and hawed and gradually owned up to not liking double-Dutch anymore, indeed to having piercing memories of a coaching barking at her in the rain the night before her senior Prom.

I know you can play all that out on text if you stick with it, but we rarely do - and when we follow up on texts the conversation splinters into emojis and blurts faster than we can track. And we spend more time not making plans, not making memories, and not making progress at the requisite scale on climate.

Yes, climate. From agreeing on where we bury electric transmission lines to hearing out priorities about where we limit parking to investing time and program-design iterations to employing people who will build the physical bulwarks and shade trees we’ll need, a whole lot of back and forth needs to flow before billions of dollars and millions of lug-nuts move forward. And I keep thinking that the fractured grammar we use to talk blocks that dialogue’s ability to spawn fresh approaches.

That’s because building renewable energy at scale, or reusing land so it can soak up the carbon in the overheating air, requires tradeoffs and messy math. Any decision with force to replace a chunk of our energy source or heal a swath of our fractured landscape will cue some major inconvenience and will carry some environmental harms. Wind turbine towers displace trees. Solar arrays contain chemicals and fossil fuels. And on we go. Perfection won’t wait around the corner - but dialogue and survivability imbue the rooms where we meet to talk through how to evaluate and how to iterate the future we choose to bear.

(For context, Energy Innovation’s Sonia Aggarwal recently told clean-energy pundit Dave Roberts that clean energy production involves less than a fortieth of the pollution that comes from building new energy on fossil fuels. That’s a talking point that can blossom into a talking volley, if people keep talking.)

So saying what you “have to say” and assuming your account closes there leaves you in the dark about who has heard you, what the hearer brings to your words, and how you can embolden the hearer to sharpen or exalt your idea.

And if this disjoint slew of statements defines how we’re teaching our kids to talk, imagine how they will rely on that staccato voice in future floods, heat waves, and fires. And I keep thinking that this vocabulary will exalt the imaginary world of the phone at the expense of the real world, a real world whose soil and forest and coast all need TLC if humans are to keep feeding off them. Nature doesn’t interact in bursts. Neither do peacemakers.

The great psychological scholar Sherry Turkle discussed navigating the whitewater and weakening the dam with my colleague Julie Scelfo at a recent All Tech is Human event that you can watch here. They don’t tie the pathology that Turkle has named to the danger of climate cocooning, but I hope you will. And then I hope you’ll take your phone and use the keypad, and call someone, dig into the and-then-what-and-then-what, and go with the flow.

My son, when texting runs to inertia, has set it up with certain friends that calling makes optimal sense for planning social time. He’s also learned to take a basketball to the park when text chains snap, and ends up having fun with other kids for whatever amount of time.

Any word, indeed any glance, can open a dialogue if the person receiving it detects a hint of invitation or the prospect of empathy. Those hints can splat against the screen, leaving you in the company of your shadow like the image above.

There’s too much to talk about in too little time to entrust our plans and promises to those stingy text balloons. I wish us all patience, good fortune, and long conversations.