Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
In this 2015 book, Sherry Turkle argues that face-to-face conversation — including the unstructured, sometimes boring conversation of family dinners and solo downtime — is a skill children build through practice, and that a phone's constant presence is associated with fewer chances to practice it. Drawing on classroom and family observation, she describes students who struggle to sit with silence or read a friend's expression without a screen as backup, and teachers reporting shorter attention spans and more surface-level classroom discussion. Rather than arguing for abstinence, the book proposes concrete 'device-free' zones and times — the dinner table, the classroom, the bedroom before sleep — as ways to protect space for conversation. TechKids Foundation includes it as a solutions-oriented companion to Turkle's earlier work, directly relevant to schools and families weighing practical phone-use rules.
Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press, 2015.