Now, San Franciscans are, on average, younger and more prosperous, and when they ride the bus they are looking at their phones, where they can track the 22 Fillmore in real time. They can also probably see a digital readout of arriving buses at a stop, or receive texts and social media updates from San Francisco’s municipal transit agency. Any traveler can also open up all sorts of other smartphone and desktop apps to navigate the system, like Google Maps, Moovit, Rover, and Routesy. These days, when you ride the bus, you ride with Big Data.

The world of apps for transit started with a great deal of promise. Evidence from Seattle suggested that merely letting riders know when the next bus would arrive could actually make people happier with their bus and more likely to take another trip. Fully integrated apps now let people plan trips that move from trains to buses and private cars or bicycles at the ends. Eventually, this data-rich universe may encourage city dwellers to give up their cars, reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse-gas emissions. So on a recent trip back to San Francisco, I tried using some of the local apps to see how they changed my experience.

I was taking part in a big civic—and economic—experiment. Though there aren’t yet any studies showing whether apps increase transit ridership, apps themselves are much cheaper than buses and trains and tracks and drivers. When apps are used to pay for fares (as they are in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, among other cities) they shift the cost of fare machines from the transit company to the riders. These complex changes in investment, risk, and time will continue as 10 percent of the world moves into cities in the next 15 years, and as self-driving cars start to prowl the streets. Uber has raised $15 billion in venture capital to move into the space between public and private transit around the world. And in the long run, these changes could create a richer transit universe for everyone, or a poorer one accessible mainly to the rich.

Munimobile’s ‘Rate My Ride’ feature.

I first pulled out my $29 Android smartphone along the T line on Third Street. The app produced by MUNI, the local transit system, required that I give it my email and create a password. Even though I’d given up my anonymity, the app didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. So I walked towards where I thought the stop was, only to find a digital readout saying that the next trains were coming in 12 and 14 minutes. Aha! Poorly spaced trains are a problem no app can fix.

That problem is important. As nice as information is, what riders really want is service. Candace Brakewood, assistant professor of engineering at CUNY, did research across three boroughs of New York from 2011 through 2013 and found that lines giving riders accurate information on arrival times increased ridership by as much as 2 percent on an average day. “When you aggregate that across NYC it’s very significant,” she told me. But she also looked at the impact of the weather, the economy, service changes, and multiple other factors and found what really increased ridership was more frequent buses and shorter trip times. This is hardly a Moneyball-type revelation from the crunching of Big Data. “Yeah. Commonsense,” Breakwood said.

Once the T arrived it was pleasantly crowded, with a mix of ages and ethnicities, and the ride on the tracks was mostly smooth. Some older black folks in suits were still enjoying Juneteenth, singing a song from another era. A younger woman with pink hair was drinking from a can. And a guy with long arms was waving them exuberantly as he talked on the phone. As we rolled past the ballpark it occurred to me that the city had spent a lot of money establishing itself as a party town, and the crowd of us here on the train was a truer reflection of that happy civic spirit—the 22 Fellini of it all—than many of the recent expensive infrastructure investments. An Asian grandmother with two little children boarded. The train lurched, they all nearly fell over, and then started giggling. The arm-waving man shot out of his seat and offered it to them. Our civic project rolled along.

What does this all have to do with apps? SF MUNI plans to release a new app component this summer that allows passengers to comment on the etiquette of fellow riders, along with train cleanliness, trip time, crowding, and comfort. Rate My Ride encourages readers to swipe right or left—in homage to Tinder, I guess. MUNI employees will monitor these swipes and “target specific train routes and bus lines” for improvements, according to Paul Rose, spokesperson for MUNI. “It’s one way to make it easier for riders to let us know how we can improve their transportation experience and further engage our riders,” he explained.

I tried to imagine myself swiping my fellow passengers on my phone, but to me the beauty of the bus is enjoying the way everyone gets along and ignoring the ways that we don’t. The singing was nice. I had no problem with a quiet drink. The seat hog at 23rd Street was an angel by Fourth and King.

So how do people rate other passengers’ etiquette, and how should the transit agency react to them? “There’s an idea that because apps are software they’re non-discriminatory and egalitarian. And if you put them in the hands of people they’ll naturally lead to good,” said David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Arizona State University. But, King worries, it’s likely that the app will be hijacked by racist, sexist, or anti-poor opinions—just like platforms including Nextdoor.com, AirBnB, and Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, which became a raving fountain of hate-talk within hours.

What’s more, in the world of public services, some voices—particularly those perceived as white and middle class—are more powerful than others, attracting more sympathetic policing, more funding for potholes, more municipal love. MUNI’s app will be available only in English to start, even though bus announcements are often in English, Spanish, and Chinese. The agency says they expect to release the app in other languages. It could be harmful to only collect complaints from English speakers, but wouldn’t the very idea of the city itself be challenged if we all secretly complain about each other in multiple languages?

Perhaps more important, if the core issue with increasing transit ridership is train frequency and travel time, should MUNI spend its precious resources tracking and responding to passenger etiquette? Transit needs to be more rider-focused, but the meaningful difference comes when public transit is more plentiful and convenient. And citizens change that through engagement in the budgeting and planning process, not by writing bad Yelp reviews. At the moment, apps offer riders an illusion of control. In the long push-pull over transit service, though, the apps aren’t automatically a force for good.

On a trip back from the East Bay, I used Moovit to calculate my route. Taking BART and bus, the app said, would take 86 minutes, while an ad offered a button to call an Uber that would cost $21 and take 56 minutes. As it turned out, the app was wrong, and between BART and the 5 Fulton bus I got back home in 72 minutes for about $6. And of course, I got the whole Fellini too.

The post When You Ride the Bus, You Ride With Big Data appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

 
These days, we want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to wherever else we want to be, because what we value most is control over where we put our attention. Our manners have evolved to accommodate our new priorities. When you’re out to dinner with friends, you can’t assume that you have their undivided attention. Cameron, a college junior in New Hampshire, says that when his friends have dinner, “and I hate this, everyone puts their phones next to them when they eat. And then, they’re always checking them.”

The night before at dinner he had texted a friend sitting next to him (“ ’S’up, dude?”) just to get his attention. Cameron’s objection is common, for this is the reality: When college students go to dinner, they want the company of their friends in the dining hall and they also want the freedom to go to their phones. To have both at the same time, they observe what some call the “rule of three”: When you are with a group at dinner you have to check that at least three people have their heads up from their phones before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds—but with different people having their “heads up” at different times.

I meet with Cameron and seven of his friends. One of them, Eleanor, describes the rule of three as a strategy of continual scanning:

Let’s say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something—like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever.

It’s my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they’re pretty, well, fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, “Wait, what . . .” and sort of have people fill you in a bit when you drop out.

The effect of the rule of three is what you might expect. As Eleanor says, conversation is fragmented. And everyone tries to keep it light.

 
Even a Silent Phone Disconnects Us

Keeping talk light when phones are on the landscape becomes a new social grace. One of Eleanor’s friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to “lighten things up.” And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you’re not at the dinner table. When “eyes are down” at phones, she says, “conversation stays light well beyond dinner.”

When I first planned the research that would lead to this book, my idea was to focus on our new patterns of texting and messaging. What made them compelling? Unique? But early in my study, when I met with these New Hampshire students, their response to my original question was to point me to another question that they thought was more important. “I would put it this way,” says Cameron. “There are fewer conversations—not with the people you’re texting, but with the people around you!” As he says this, we are in a circle of eight, talking together, and heads are going down to check phones. A few try not to, but it is a struggle.

Cameron sums up what he sees around him. “Our texts are fine. It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”

It was a powerful intuition. What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

So it is not surprising that in the past 20 years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past 10 years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.

Why do we spend so much time messaging each other if we end up feeling less connected to each other? In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation.

If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right.

But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiencies of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. And we forget that is a difference or that things were ever different. Studies show that when children hear less adult talk, they talk less. If we turn toward our phones and away from our children, we will start them off with a deficit of which they will be unaware. It won’t be only about how much they talk. It will be about how much they understand the people they’re talking with.

Indeed, when young people say, “Our texts are fine,” they miss something important. What feels fine is that in the moment, so many of their moments are enhanced by digital reminders that they are wanted, a part of things. A day online has many of these “moments of more.” But as digital connection becomes an ever larger part of their day, they risk ending up with lives of less.

The post To Start Talking, Stop Texting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last month, when renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking joined Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, he racked up more than 2 million followers in two days. His first post, which appeared in both English and Chinese, read: “In my physical travels, I have only been able to touch the surface of your fascinating history and culture. But now I can communicate with you through social media.”

Yet, as the platforms for communication have multiplied, and with the means to connect now constantly available on our ubiquitous mobile devices, these “connections” can come with a cost: the loss of real-life human interaction. Why meet in person when you can converse on Facebook? Why answer a call when you can send a text? For every Hawking, there are countless hawkers. On social media, marketers of everything from corn chips to cruises invite us to “join the conversation.” But how much actual conversation is taking place?

As a preview for Zocalo’s sixth annual book prize event, “Why We Must Relearn the Art of Conversation,” we asked communications scholars and linguists: How has the emergence of digital technology changed the way we communicate with one another? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

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Smartphones have long been heralded as pocket-sized gateways to fitter, happier, and more productive versions of ourselves, but whether they’ve improved our health is debatable. When we actually take advantage of what they offer, smartphones can do amazing things: They count the number of stairs we’ve climbed, put boundless medical knowledge at out fingertips, even ward off postpartum depression. But at what cost? They also may be wrecking our spines and our sleep. And they’ve been estimated to cause up to a fourth of America’s car accidents.

So how much good are smartphones doing for us, really? When do they cross the line from being helpful to being excessive? In advance of a March 28 Zócalo/UCLA event on the dangers of our tech obsessions—“Is Digital Technology Destroying Our Health?”—we posed the following question to people who think a lot about our favorite handheld companions: Are smartphones bad for your health?

The post Smartphones Make Us Sick, No Matter How Many Health Apps We Download appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.