Golis: Pardon me while I multi-task

'Empathy: the feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions . . .'

— From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

You know how this goes. You're offended by a friend who can't take his eyes (and thumbs) off his smartphone, and then one day, you're doing it, too.

'We're getting used to a new way of being alone together,' Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, told an audience at Ted Talks. She was describing our penchant for turning away from people to find out what our phones have to offer.

From Turkle we learn there is a new word in the dictionary — phubbing. It means ignoring people around you while using your mobile device.

In her new book, 'Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age,' Turkle warns that obsessive use of smartphones and similar devices undermines our capacity to empathize, communicate, make friends and exercise our responsibilities as parents and citizens. In a recent New York Times book review, the author Jonathan Franzen called her 'a singular voice in the discourse on technology.'

New studies show that 'the mere presence of a phone' interferes with our ability to engage in meaningful conversations, she reports. The latest research reveals a 40 percent decline among college students in tests that measure empathy. In one experiment, she recounts, college students preferred electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts.

I think about how I use my smartphone. But at least I'm not alone. The Pew Research Center on Thursday reported that 68 percent of U.S. adults now own smartphones. It's almost double the number of people who owned smartphones just four years ago.

Eighty-six percent of the people between ages 18 and 29 own them, and 83 percent of the people between 30 and 49. As one measure of the power of smartphones, the number of people under 30 who own desktop or laptop computers is declining.

From the beginning, I loved my smartphone. I've lost count of how many ways I use it to make my life better every day. Emails, texts, news feeds, weather reports, Facebook, Twitter, contacts, calendars, maps, to-do lists, photographs, music and more.

I am not giving up my smartphone.

Still, I'm aware of those moments when I get distracted. I could be reading a book, taking a walk or seeking the inspiration that can be found in a few moments of reflection. Instead I'm fooling with my phone, and when I finally put it down, I don't know why I picked it up in the first place.

'Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy,' Turkle wrote in a New York Times commentary in September. 'We've gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable.'

Most of us have been there. In meetings, restaurants, coffeehouses, checkout lines, at stop lights, people can't stop looking at their phones.

Our capacity for distraction also turned up last week in a published conversation between President Barack Obama and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson.

In a discussion about novels, political dysfunction and the fragile state of American democracy, Obama begins by mentioning the loss of empathy, which he defines as ' the notion that it's possible to connect with someone else even though they're very different from you.'

'It's not so much, I think, that people don't read at all,' he continues, 'it's everybody reading in their niche, and so often, at least in the media, they're reading stuff that reinforces their existing point of view.'

The absence of a 'common conversation,' he says, promotes isolation, cynicism and conflict. 'It's not interesting,' he says, 'to hear a story about some good people in some quiet place that did something sensible and figured out how to get along.'

In the conversation published in the New York Review of Books, Robinson worries that Americans have stopped understanding that democracy survives only when people value it. 'So I do think that one of the things that we have to realize and talk about,' she says, 'is that we cannot take it for granted.'

Whatever your political beliefs, it's become a truism that Americans spend a lot of time talking past each other. We have become too busy, alienated or distracted to try and understand why other people believe what they believe.

In 'Reclaiming Conversation,' Turkle doesn't argue for abandoning technology. Rather, she says, we need to understand how it can affect us — and then learn to manage 'the unintended consequences of technologies to which we are vulnerable. … '

This sounds like good advice, but it remains for each of us to decide what big and small strategies will make our lives better. Are our smartphones becoming a distraction from real life? And if so, what do we intend to do about it?

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.