Sherry Turkle is a great believer in empathy. With empathy can come better relationships with clients and a stronger company culture for employees. But to build empathy, companies need to welcome uncertainty — and even a bit of friction, she says. That’s the challenge Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, set out for corporations when she spoke with Signal360 in 2021: Were they willing to be a little uncomfortable to create better opportunities for their people — and their brands.
“For a business to embrace the empathic understanding of employees and clients, they have to be willing to change their culture, to embrace friction within their organization,” she said. “What will it take for your organization to embrace friction, to not run from it as though it’s the worst thing in the world that could happen to your culture?”
You can hear more from this two-part conversation below or read our lightly edited transcript.
Signal Conversation Part One:
Signal Conversation Part Two:
TRANSCRIPT PART ONE:
John Battelle
Welcome to another Signal Conversation. I’m very excited about this one because my guest is Sherry Turkle. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, and a founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She’s the author of many thought provoking books, almost all of which I have read, I would say consumed really, and she’s one of my favorite authors on the subject of technology, human psychology and its impact on our lives. She’s an expert on culture, therapy, mobile technology, social networking, socialble robotics, we’re going to get into all of that. But first, we’re going to start with her memoir, recently published earlier this year, “The Empathy Diaries,” which ties together her personal story with groundbreaking research that she’s done on technology, empathy, and ethics. So Sherry, welcome, it’s so good to have you here.
Sherry Turkle
It’s so good to be here.
As an author myself, I have to say that when I read the review of your book in The New York Times, I was gobsmacked for you, it you know, it’s very rare, you get such a rave. So congratulations. Can you explain why it is that you chose to center this work, which is a personal interweaving of your personal story with your research on the term empathy?
One of the findings of my most recent work about our lives on the screen is that it has constituted a kind of assault on empathy. Because if you’re looking down at your screen, if children are looking down at their screens, and not making eye contact from the earliest ages, they’re not being trained to do this wonderful, simplest things that humans know how to do, which is to make eye contact, to connect, to read other people’s faces, and to have this relationship where you really can put yourself in the place of the other and experience that and therefore form a relationship. It was because empathy had become so central to my work, it had become kind of a calling. I realized, there was so much in my personal background, that had emotionally prepared me to not just do this work as a job, but really to do this work as a calling. I wanted to tell that story behind the story. I think that researchers don’t do that enough to say why their work is a passion. This book is really about why my work is my passion.
In a way, that’s an expression of empathy, you’re allowing us in, you’re allowing us to have a personal relationship with you. In one of the interviews that I listened to, in preparation for this, you mentioned that you felt there was sort of an incomplete definition of empathy that sometimes people feel like they’ve checked a box, they’ve heard you, and so they boom, they’ve been empathetic, and now they can move on. Can you explain that a little more, because I then want to turn that to business, because it really reminds me of how a lot of us interact with each other as colleagues at work.
Yes. Empathy has gotten a bad name. Whereas really empathy is not saying I know how you feel. It’s saying, I don’t know how you feel, but I’m listening, and I’m here for the long haul, and I’m committed to whatever comes out of this conversation. What does it take for the people, for management and employees, for employees among each other, to really listen to each other, and to really make commitment to what they hear, to really be willing to hear what they hear. What I’m looking for is taking empathy out of a kind of cliche box, and really saying, it’s not just putting yourself in somebody else’s place, it’s putting yourself in somebody else’s problem. I think that’s central for business today.
How could a deeper understanding of empathy change how a business functions for the better?
The first thing is that the prime directive in engineering and in business is to create a world that’s as friction free as possible. Empathy is not friction free. It’s filled with friction. When you really have a conversation with somebody where you’re really getting into it, it’s tearful, it’s difficult, it’s painful. Because things that somebody tells you about themselves, cause you to question who you are. For a business to really embrace the empathic understanding of employees and clients, they have to be willing to change their culture, to embrace friction within their organization. That really is part of what my emphasis on empathy says to the business community. What will it take for your organization to embrace friction, to not run from it as though it’s the worst thing in the world could happen to your culture?
When I think about what’s happened in the past 18 months, both through the lens of your work, and through the lens of what we’ve been discussing, it strikes me that we’ve just had what could have been the greatest Sherry Turkle research project ever. Two of your works, almost could be codas for the pandemic, one was called “Alone Together,” another “Life on the Screen.” Those two titles define how people have been working, particularly white collar knowledge workers for the past 18 months. Do you find that companies and businesses, in your experience have been empathetic to the position that people are in living literally on a screen, you know, 12 hours or more a day, when you include engaging with family and friends in the same environment that you’ve studied so closely? Are companies empathetic to that, because it strikes managers and executives are of course doing the same thing? Or is there something that you’ve noticed that maybe we could learn about this that we could carry forward?
I think we’re all stumbling towards how are we going to be more empathetic? I think that in a moment of shock, the first impulse was everybody retreats, everybody hides everybody does the best they can. I think you see that companies were not empathic in the way it counts. So many women, for example, have dropped out of the workforce, because they simply could not take care of their families, and do remote work. Just because you’re working remotely doesn’t mean that you’re not working, which is something that we’ve all learned. Yet women took on the brunt of educating, of childcare, of elder care, of often taking care of a one or two ill relatives. It was a very difficult time.
Corporations did not really rise to the occasion in this environment. I think you see, again, this relates to my theme of do you want your company to be friction free or will you accept friction? You get a sort of, now we’re going to go back to normal as a sort of mythology or a sort of hope for mythology or an image of what’s going to happen. I think that’s really the wrong metaphor, I think now is an opportunity for not just individuals but corporations to rethink what kind of new culture we can build on the basis of what we’ve learned. That different people are different, different families are different. Different cultures are different. Different communities are different. I think now is the time for a lot of flexibility. That is really running up against the first instinct of corporations, which is to make rules. These people wear masks, these people don’t. I think it’s really a moment of reckoning. It’s too soon to tell exactly how it’s gonna go, because I think people are making a lot of false steps, and then saying, “Oh, no, that was realizing that was a false step.” I think it’s I think the jury is still out. But I think now really is the time to rethink whether we can have a more flexible corporate environment going forward, an environment that’s more open to uncertainty, which is really not the corporate culture that we’ve built, where you build in uncertainty. So I think that some of the mandates for how things are going to be in the new normal, are not helping out, no.
Sherry Turkle, thank you so much for joining us for the Signal Conversation. I look forward to continuing to read your work and converse with you.
Thank you. My pleasure.
TRANSCRIPT PART TWO:
John Battelle
You’ve covered in your work really since the 70s, the entire digital revolution. That is an area that at Signal we spend a lot of time talking and thinking about. You’ve always been on the vanguard. In the past year, really six months, the technology industry has adopted a new term, which is really an old term you and I met back in the days of Wired. Back then the idea of the metaverse was something that I was quite familiar with, because I read a lot of science fiction. Many of our authors at Wired were science fiction authors, including the creator of that term, Neal Stephenson. Metaverse has now been adopted by the CEOs of Facebook and Microsoft as the next big thing in computing, this world of blended digital and physical realities. How do you react to the ideas of the metaverse, which is now quite the buzzword in the technology industry?
Sherry Turkle
I react like a sociologist to it, which is to ask the question, ‘Why now, when the climate crisis is coming to really public consciousness in a way that reveals its obscenity, that reveals its cruelty and our negligence. Is this really the moment when the technology industry wants to declare, and why that the thing to focus on is a world where you can escape from that into a kind of hybrid zone where you can be surrounded by the world and the environment you’re not really living in?’
You could write a treatise on why it makes sense that they would do that. But I also think it has its dangers, and it has its poignancy, and I think it’s a direction that needs to be challenged. Because you could argue this is the moment when the people who were best at bringing us together when we’re alone, should focus on how to use that capacity to build real community, physical community, to organize our reinvigoration of our physical planet and saving our physical planet. And instead to say, the hot thing is rockets to touch space with some sense that will be space tourists. Space tourists as the planet implodes? There’s something about the combination of the metaverse and space tourism at the same time, that the most richest and most brilliant minds in technology should be looking at. Is it an abandonment of earth, of the reality of our physical environment of our day to day? It just feels to me that I’m not I’m not altogether on board.
It reminds me of when Google Glass first came out many years ago. I think I interviewed 50 or 60 people who were early adopters. They talked about it as a way to end racism. Because you could put yourself in the perspective of a Black person, a person of color, and you could sort of see the world through their eyes. You could see people crossing the street to avoid you. You could sort of project yourself into the experience of someone very different than you and that was well and good. But there was no politics. There was no activism. There was no community organizing. There was no engagement with the systemic racism. It was something you did and then you put away. So I think that we have problems that technology wants to help us escape to make our lives seem more friction free. But that we need to address.
I love the fact that you raise the solution of community and because some of the earliest excitement in the technology industry was how you could build community. And how near new relationships formed so effortlessly and important relationships formed. But at some point we seem to have lost part of that. Your call back to community, back to empathy. certainly rings true with me. Sherry Turkle, thank you so much for joining us for the Signal Conversation. I look forward to continuing to read your work and converse with you.
Thank you. My pleasure.
