Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015) is a non-fiction work by Sherry Turkle. A clinical psychologist and professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, Turkle specializes in human-technology interaction and has decades of experience writing on technology’s problematic effects on human connection. In Reclaiming Conversation, the book’s premise is in the title: Turkle believes that technology has detrimentally taken over human conversation and that we ought to reclaim that conversation, partly through redeeming the lost art of face-to-face conversation. The work extends the arguments from her earlier book, Alone Together (2011), which sternly scrutinizes human relationships in the digital era.

Summary

Like with Alone Together, Turkle crafts Reclaiming Conversation through interwoven empirical research and anecdotal reports from interviews. However, she also cites artists and poets, and she frames her arguments using Henry David Thoreau’s idea of “Three chairs.” In Walden, Thoreau said, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Before Turkle dives into Thoreau’s chair metaphor, however, she recounts a consultation she had with the staff of Holbrooke Middle School; teachers were concerned about the lack of

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