As my face-to-face conversations share the same space with so many digital ones, I’m beginning to wonder, are we becoming more connected to each other or less? Is my desire for twenty people at one holiday table just my antidote to the fragmented way that we all live?
I’m standing by the corner of the fireplace, still in my green plaid pajamas, surveying our dining room from a new angle. It’s late morning and I’ve left my laptop open on the table overnight, my cellphone lying beside it. I pick up my phone to see that my son has left me a message about his car. I quickly text him back.
“We only have room for sixteen chairs,” I yell in the direction of the bedroom.
The phone vibrates in my hand and I look down to read a new DM on Instagram from my friend Bill. I text him back, too.
“What did you say? I couldn’t hear you,” says my spouse Janyce, who is walking toward me from the other room.
“We don’t have enough chairs,” I say. “And not enough glasses, and I don’t know how to make one big table fit.”
I’m not looking at her as I talk. Instead, I watch a squirrel through the window as it climbs up onto the overturned lounge chair in the backyard.
“And the tablecloths don’t match either, so I need to order all new ones.”
I typically start planning for a holiday a few weeks in advance by voicing out loud every possible thing that isn’t right and announcing how we are already behind schedule. Janyce responds to my doom and gloom by offering up a practical way to downscale the plans. Today is no exception.
“We don’t need more chairs, people can sit on the couch,” she says.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
My phone alerts me to a new message on WhatsApp. It’s my BFF in the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia sending me a cool video of an erupting volcano. I hit play and watch it for the six-second duration.
“I remember holidays when we were growing up,” Janyce says. “The house was full of people and we ate on TV trays. Nobody cared. It’s just about us all getting together, anyway.”
We generally agree about entertaining. Our shared philosophy about holidays goes something like this: the more the merrier, cooking from scratch tastes better so let’s cook, we can pull anything off as long as we are doing it together. But something isn’t sitting right with me when it comes to downscaling the Thanksgiving seating arrangements. Something isn’t sitting right with her, either. But I don’t think it’s about the holiday planning.
My phone erupts in a flurry of rolling text messages one after the other. It’s the tinywins email chat with two of my college girlfriends. I start texting instantly, until I catch myself mid word. I look up at Janyce. She’s still leaning against the corner of the fireplace brick wall, not talking, and her mouth is a thin straight line. This is the expression that means we might actually be having an argument right now.
As my face-to-face conversations share the same space with so many digital ones, I’m beginning to wonder, are we are becoming more connected to each other or less? Is my desire for twenty people at one holiday table just my antidote to the fragmented way that we all live?
There is a social psychology professor at MIT who has written many books about the intersection of our digital lives with our personal lives. In her newest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age, Sherry Turkle makes the compelling argument that there are damaging consequences to our obsession with our phones and our digital screens. She posits that by living our lives so closely tethered to our devices, we are losing the ability to come together and to be fully present with each other. Our technology is keeping us so fragmented that we’re never wholly in one place or the other.
“I’m going back in the office for a bit,” says Janyce. “I have a call with work in about ten minutes.”
She leaves the room and the dog walks over to sit on my foot. It’s a signal to me that maybe my next best move is to go for a walk.
It’s a misty Saturday morning in November and my favorite suburban garden, the one planted along a shiny wrought iron fence, is all dried up and brown, the black-eyed Susans have lost their sunny crowns, with only the button eye left punctuating the tops of thin sticks. As I walk through the town common, I pass a man from the recreation department on a ladder hanging Christmas lights in the towering spruce trees. A group of sparrows, hidden deep within a row of hedges, cheep loudly, while across the street in an open expanse of lawn, a flock of birds rises up all at once, like an instant black cloud that appears suddenly, then disappears— a bird or two left trailing behind in the sky.
My cellphone vibrates in my jacket pocket and I take it out to see that my mom in Florida has just texted me a coffee cup emoji. It’s our shorthand to each other to mean that, morning coffee now in hand, we’re ready to spend some time chatting in text on our phones.
I think what Janyce means when she says that nobody cares about the seating arrangement, is just that nobody is really thinking about the little details in the same way that I am. But to me, the little details create the overall gestalt. If the host doesn't try to create some cohesion somewhere, like all of us sitting together at one holiday table, I worry that the whole event will fall apart.
I read somewhere that each starling in a murmuration pays attention to the movements of only six or seven neighboring birds— not necessarily the closest ones. Only a few birds within the entire flock will initiate movement and this is what ends up causing the spreading and undulations that makes the wavy cloud moving in the sky. It’s a beautiful sight.
My phone usage seems to be causing a rift between me and Janyce at the same time as it is helping me stay connected to my friends and family. To her, it seems like a lot of fragmentation, but to me, it’s really only a small amount of people who have my attention throughout the day— like six or seven, same as the starlings.
Janyce is in the kitchen washing a cup in the sink when I open the door from the garage and walk back into the house. I stand behind her and wrap my arms around her waist.
“I’m going to use the tablecloths we have,” I say. “And I’ll get Jim and Aidan to help me move some furniture downstairs. The table will fit.”
Janyce turns to face me, wiping her hands on the towel she grabbed from off the hook on the wall.
“I just ordered four more chairs from Amazon,” she says. “They’ll be here in two days, and you’re right, I think it’s worth it to have everyone at one table. Do you want more coffee?”