How Smartphones Alter In-Person Connection

[Dr. Sherry Turkle]: When you put away your phone to have a conversation, that decision counts. People care more about your offer of attention. Empathy is built on such small gestures. The ones that communicate that you don’t know what someone else has to say, what you want to learn. Consider this classic study that even a phone turned off and turned face down on the lunch table does two things to a conversation. First, it moves the conversation to more trivial matters because no one wants to anticipate an interruption while talking about something important. Second, the people having lunch somehow feel less invested in each other because even a silent phone, a turned off phone, a turned on its back phone, disconnects us.