Quotes About Interaction

These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation.

The new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.

In all of these cases, we use technology to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

We are shaped by our tools.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)

The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects—treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps.

people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation.

Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke.

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

It used to be that we imagined our mobile phones were there so that we could talk to each other. Now we want our mobile phones to talk to us.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the better idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other's breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

When habitual structures dissolve, so do boundaries between people.

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.

This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things. I

Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly.

Again, there is psychological risk in the robotic moment. Logan's comment about talking with the AIBO to "get thoughts out" suggests using technology to know oneself better. But it also suggests a fantasy in which we cheapen the notion of companionship to a baseline of "interacting with something." We reduce relationship and come to see this reduction as the norm.

Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in

In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as "sort of" alive—a

What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.