It wasn’t, however, because he was moderating in front of a full house, or because Turkle is an esteemed sociologist and psychologist who was there to accept the sixth annual Zócalo Book Prize for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. It was because Turkle’s book argues “that our fixation on technology is making us less empathetic,” and that an “empathy gap” has opened up between human beings as a result of our obsession with being digitally connected.

Turkle didn’t disagree that our decreased capacity for empathy can be scary. Studies have shown, she said, that even having a silenced, turned-off phone on a table between two people “disconnects us, because it reminds us symbolically of all the other places we can be.” Researchers have found a 40 percent decline in empathy in college students over the past 30 years, with the majority of the change taking place in the past 10 years.

So why, asked Rodriguez, is Reclaiming Conversation ultimately optimistic about our chances of overcoming the empathy gap? After all, he himself missed having his phone on, even while speaking onstage.

“I think people sense that we’re in trouble, and they’re not happy with where they are,” said Turkle, citing a recent Pew study showing that 89 percent of Americans said they took their phone out during their last social interaction—and 82 percent said that doing so somehow diminished the interaction. “I think we’re in a moment of inflection,” she said, “a kind of tipping point” in which we can change our behavior and seize control back from technology.

Turkle recalled interviewing a father of 11-year-old and 2-year-old girls. The conversations he had with his older daughter in the bathtub when she was a toddler formed the basis of their relationship. Today, he checks his email while he bathes his 2-year-old. “We love our phones; we’re going to live with them,” said Turkle. “But we’re going to live with them better in ways that are better for us and better for our children.”

“What compels the father to take out his iPhone in that moment?” asked Rodriguez.

Turkle said that phones, like benevolent genies, offer us three gifts: We will always be heard. We can put our attention wherever it wants to be. And we will never be bored. But just like fairy tale genies, phones bestow curses along with the gifts.

“Constant stimulation is not good for you,” she said, adding that boredom is necessary for us to be creative, to learn how to listen to others, and to achieve a stable sense of self.

Our sense of who we are is also plagued by being constantly connected. Thanks to social media, “we know in excruciating detail what other people are doing,” said Turkle. But it’s “a glamorized version of what they’re doing.” Turkle said she herself might post on Facebook that she’s in Los Angeles to accept an award. But what she won’t post is a photo of her dressed “in a sweatsuit, coming off the plane from Boston to L.A. looking like a bag lady.” As a result of these glamorous social media lives, we become jealous of other people, and even of ourselves. It’s alienating, said Turkle.

Rodriguez asked about Turkle’s notion “that we have edited lives, that we’re always performing.”

The trouble, Turkle replied, is that when we rely wholly on performance to connect with others, we “shy away or find ways around a certain kind of conversation.” We don’t go off on tangents, make spontaneous jokes, or free-associate.

Young people today, she said, fear real-time, unperformed, unedited conversation. The college students she studied “get together and write romantic texts in groups” to make the messages perfect.

But, Turkle argued, it is showing weakness and vulnerability that helps us be more empathetic. “The experience of empathy basically comes in situations where you get to see someone thinking, and you get to be able to learn how to project yourself in the mind of the other,” she said. Turkle added that, in her book, her ideas are at their most polished—but seeing her talk about them in person offers a different window into her way of thinking.

“You’re arguing for engaging with imperfection, messiness,” said Rodriguez.

“I’m engaging with human beings, because that’s who we are,” said Turkle.

If we go back a half century or so, asked Rodriguez, were we more centered, more connected, because we were less distracted by technology?

“I don’t want to paint a golden era,” said Turkle. There are plenty of people who never liked being alone, or whose families didn’t have deep conversations well before the onset of these technologies. But “what’s going on now is undermining our ability” to empathize, she said. “Visibly around us, we’re seeing our children not developing that capacity. I don’t want to say it used to be perfect. Let’s just get a grip on how we’re behaving ourselves and with our kids.”

Turkle took questions from the audience that ranged from asking about parallels between the digital divide and road rage (which she likened to cyber bullying) to her inspiration for Reclaiming Conversation (it arose from her previous book, Alone Together).

One audience member asked Turkle about how to make digital life less overwhelming. Trader Joe’s, the audience member noted, originally became successful because the store didn’t offer a ton of choice—it carried just one kind of black beans. “How do you make a Trader Joe’s experience for people so they don’t feel overwhelmed with all of the possibilities?”

Turkle thinks that a consumer movement could grow out of our dissatisfaction with all our choices, one that’s similar to the way our eating habits have changed over the past half-century.

Growing up in post-World War II Brooklyn, Turkle ate fruit and vegetables from cans. “We didn’t have anything fresh,” she said. But she fed her own daughter a different diet, with fresher foods. That shift, she said, didn’t come from the food industry. “It was a hard-won fight,” said Turkle, about obesity, diabetes, and our health. We need to ask designers of technology to create phones that don’t try to keep us glued by our screens but that let us do what we want to do, then turn away. That would include phones that don’t let us text while we’re driving.

“These are simple things we can ask for,” she said.

The post Can We Close the Empathy Gap? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even as candidates vying for the nomination of the party associated with big business call for walls separating us from our supposedly scary southern neighbor, big business itself is treating Mexico more as an organic extension of the U.S. market, and less as a foreign country.

This has long been true in how companies treat their U.S. and Mexico manufacturing operations as part of one integrated supply chain. And now consumers are on the verge of benefiting from a more tangible indication of corporate America’s embrace of Mexico. In a move that will save travelers, immigrants and cross-border businesses a fortune, telephone companies are rushing to acknowledge that Mexico isn’t just another foreign country, but part of our North American home.

In July, T-Mobile announced its “Mobile Without Borders” initiative, under which most of its plans will cease treating Canada and Mexico as foreign markets. If you are in Los Angeles and your mother is in Guadalajara, you can now call or text her using the same minutes or flat rate you have to call your friends across town, or in neighboring states. If you are an American businessman in Mexico City or a tourist in Cancun, bring your phone, and use it down there as you would on a trip to Chicago. No more fumbling with separate SIM cards or astronomical roaming charges—or feeling disconnected.

In pitching “Mobile Without Borders,” T-Mobile CEO John J. Legere told USA Today that his rivals were on track to make $10 billion in foreign roaming charges—a windfall he called one of the wireless industry’s “dirtiest little secrets.” This is a tax on connections with our closest neighbors, since Mexico is by far the number one destination for foreign calls out of the United States. Together with Canada, it accounts for some 35 percent of all foreign calls originating in the U.S. and 59 percent of all cross-border minutes.

Bravo, T-Mobile, says this subscriber. I have many friends and work collaborators in Mexico, and find it absurd how difficult it is to talk to them, especially when away from an office landline. I often can’t answer calls from Mexico, and have written countless apologetic emails about not being able to call anytime soon because “mi celular no puede llamar a México.” Similarly, when I am visiting Mexico, my phone is useless for communicating with folks back home.

T-Mobile may have been first off the block to erase the border for callers, but it acted in reaction to AT&T’s far more consequential $4.4 billion acquisition of two Mexican mobile carriers this past year. AT&T is now in the process of spending billions more to upgrade its Mexican network, and rolling out its brand to Mexican consumers, as it seeks to take on the overwhelming leader in the market, Carlos Slim’s América Móvil. Both AT&T and América Móvil plan to make the North American market one seamless calling zone for more than 400 million consumers.

This all amounts to a belated fulfillment, on the communications front, of the greater interconnectedness between our societies recognized by the adoption two decades ago of North American Free Trade Agreement. Why is this happening now? Two reasons: The first is the increasing power and influence of Hispanic consumers on this side of the border. The second is the determination by the Mexican government that it is time to even the playing field for new competitors willing to take on Slim’s once-protected phone monopoly.

Canada, for its part, has long felt closer to home when it comes to making calls. Thanks to the old AT&T’s North American Numbering Plan devised more than a half-century ago, Canada and some small Caribbean nations were included in our shared area code system, precluding the need to dial the dreaded “011” prefix for international calls.

Although you would never know it from listening to U.S. politicians, Canada and Mexico are linked to the United States to a different degree than other countries. We are in extreme denial of this reality when it comes to Mexico, our neighbor with whom we have unique geographic, economic, cultural, and demographic overlaps. It was always bizarre that our phone companies would treat (and price) calls to Mexico as if they were calls halfway around the world.

The reflex to push Mexico out of our consciousness, and pretend it isn’t right here, is pervasive across government (our immigration laws don’t acknowledge our special interconnectedness with Mexico either, which is why they are so dysfunctional) and broader society. About once a week I send notes to major media outlets gently pointing out that Mexico, contrary to their reporting, is not a “Central American nation.” I usually get an immediate appreciative “Oops, of course, we’ll correct” note back. But there’s a troubling powerful cultural undertow that leads to these repeated “oops” moments.

It is fitting that carriers are now acknowledging that there is a single cohesive North America market that includes Mexico, no part of which is as “foreign” as the rest of the world. And that’s true no matter what Donald Trump and his imitators on the campaign trail tell you.

The post Why is Mexico Still an International Call? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.