Book Review Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

 Book Information

Book Tittle : Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Author : Sherry Turkle

Pages : 436 Pages

Publisher : Penguin Press

Year of Publish : 2015

Image source: Goggle Books

Conversation is the container of a human being's existence.

You speak, then you are heard, you are heard then you are noticed, you are noticed then you are noticed, so being noticed means you exist.

The era of digitalization brings so many changes, the way humans communicate, think, and act changes according to the digital situation in this era.

These changes bring positive impacts, but it's like night and day.

There are also negative impacts, such as the conversation crisis.

In this book, we will see that the conversation crisis in this era is a phenomenal issue.

People seem to be constantly connected through technology, but avoid in-person conversations.

Social phenomena such as playing cellphones on the side of the road, scrolling through social media when gathering with others are examples that often appear in our daily lives.

There is also flight from conversation, many people run from deep talks or important discussions, they prefer to deal with interactions in the form of digital communication.

This book explains these two fundamental points clearly and in detail. The next section explains the importance of face-to-face conversations.

Face-to-face conversations build empathy, improve listening skills, and enable self-reflection.

Explains that the presence of another person as a whole, meaning the physical and psychological presence of another human being is the essence of meaningful human relationships.

The book reviews these important points in depth, and can make a great impression on the reader.

The empathy gap is also one of the interesting topics of this book. Teenage children who are interactive with technology show a decrease in empathy skills.

This is influenced by dependence on digital communication and lack of direct social interaction.

It hurts the nature of humans as social beings, diluting the true values of life.

Solitude is also one of the topics available in this book, that solitude is a necessity.

Healthy solitude is important to build self-understanding, personally I am interested in this topic.

I feel that when we are alone we have free time to talk to ourselves, the freedom to recognize and understand our feelings without wanting to cover everything up. We are free to laugh, get angry, get sad, reflect, and so on.

Our dependence on technology, however, makes it difficult for us to enjoy silence, difficult to focus on ourselves, difficult to self-reflect, and ultimately difficult to self-evaluate.

When we are unable to evaluate ourselves, we will then find it difficult to improve ourselves, which will bring us so many challenges and negative impacts in our own lives.

The next topic of the book teaches us about the influence of technology on relationships. In family life, friendships, and love the use of devices often becomes a barrier to true communication.

Many people will tend to text because they can control what they want to say. Indirectly making us live in hypocrisy, we organize everything and anything especially in the context of our communication, disappearing the element of spontaneity that is a unique part of human beings.

Next, about Thoreau's three chairs as a metaphor.

One chair for solitude, two chairs for friendship and love, three chairs for society. This metaphor becomes a framework to discuss the impact of technology on various aspects of life.

Then, Talking cure invites us to reclaim conversation as social healing. As well as cultivating conversations at home, school, work, and public spaces.

And the last topic of this book talks about parents. Where parents must be an example in building a culture of conversation, must be able to educate children to be able to listen and be emotionally present in every communication process.

Benefits for readers:

This book gives us an understanding of the importance of conversation, helping readers to reflect on how technology has affected personal and social relationships, whether intentionally or not.

Readers will also be motivated to reduce dependence on cell phones, helping us to be able to filter things, manage our time, set goals, and give us effectiveness in our productive processes in our lives.

Not only that, this book also provides practical solutions that we can implement in our lives. Useful for education and parenting, and building good quality relationships.