

We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble - trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together.
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But then these same children deny each other their full attention. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. (Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done.

People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go. And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem.Īctually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. Getting that text was like getting a hug. Her text said, "Mom, you will rock." I love this. Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck.
