Conversation Between Actual People – A Dying Art

Ms. Turkle highlighted a question from a genuinely exhausted and harassed woman in the audience who explained that as a working mother, she had very little time to talk to her friends, to e-mail, to text, to keep up. “Actually,” she confessed, “the only time I have is at night, after I’m off work and before I go home, when I go family shopping at Trader Joe’s [a supermarket]. But the guy at the checkout line, he wants to talk. I just want to be on my phone, into my texts and Facebook. Do I have the right to just ignore him?”

Most of the panel speakers responded with sympathy and confirmed that this woman did indeed have the right to privacy and shouldn’t be disturbed as she used her smart phone during a checkout procedure.

But Ms. Turkle had a different perspective. She wrote, “I said that we all know that the job that the man at the checkout counter was doing can now be done by a machine. But until he is replaced by a machine, I think he should be treated as a person, with all the rights of a person. And that includes a bit of human exchange, since that is clearly what makes his job tolerable for him, makes him feel that in his job, this job that could be done by a machine, he is still a human being.” [Emphasis added.]

Needless to say, her answer was not exactly greeted with cries of enthusiasm and warm empathetic understanding. Instead, people didn’t want to hear it.

The fact is, people have lost the art of polite chitchat. Many people do indeed view checkout clerks and other service personnel as invisible machines, there to silently and efficiently perform their service function and nothing else.

It reminds me of a line from Bill Bryson’s excellent book At Home, a fascinating history of domestic life (largely from an English perspective).

It’s an uncomfortable observation and an attitude which we, today, in our modern times, would like to claim we would never have. Until, of course, we encounter a checkout clerk or a hotel chambermaid or a garbage collector or other person whose job is to make our existence more comfortable, sanitary, or efficient.

And how do we treat them?

“What once would have seemed like ‘good service,’” notes Ms. Turkle in reference to checkout clerks making polite chitchat, “is now an inconvenience… We also want technology to step in as we invite people to step back. It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.”

Yikes. I don’t know if I like the direction this is taking. At what point do we lock ourselves in a room with our technology and deny all human interaction because our smart phones and laptops offer us a window into the outside world?

Politeness and manners — and a human touch — is the lubricant that makes our society tolerable. If we’re too tired and exhausted after a long day’s work to engage in polite chitchat with a checkout clerk — and thus make his job more tolerable and enjoyable — then we need to examine our attitude and whether or not we consider the checkout clerk to be merely a human “appliance.”

“[S]mitten with technology,” concludes Mr. Turkle, “…we don’t much want to talk about these problems. But it’s time to talk.”

I agree. Talk.  Don’t text.

Thoughts?