Face to face

By Marco Buscaglia

Brian Lowell says he talks to his friends from high school nearly every day. OK, he says he texts his friends from high school nearly every day. “It’s similar to talking,” acknowledges Lowell, 67, “but it’s not the same.” Lowell’s “pack,” as he refers to his friends, are graduates of Leto High School in Tampa, Florida, and range in age from 64 to 68. “We all graduated in the late 1970s and early 1980s and always stayed in touch because everyone stayed in the area, but when people started moving out of Florida, it got a little harder,” Lowell says. “We’ve had this group text now for the past three years. Guys check in usually every morning, tell a joke or write something about their kids. It’s nice.”

Despite the sharing of information,

Lowell admits it’s not exactly a conversation. “How can it be? I ask a question about something at 8 in the morning and I might not hear anything back for an hour or a day. Sometimes a week,” he says. “I know the guys on the other end but really, if it weren’t for the personal stuff, they might as well be robots.”

So last year, Lowell, one month into a 26-week severance package he received after losing his job, convinced his friends that they needed to get together “before we forgot what we all looked like.” To his surprise, it was an easy sell.

“What’s one or two weekends a year to get together? That’s nothing,” Lowell says. “We found a cottage and were fishing in Tennessee within a month.”

Lowell’s chat group includes Lowell and a friend in Florida, a “real estate king” in Atlanta, a teacher in Tennessee, twin brothers in Ohio and a recently retired police officer in Costa Rica. “We’re all mildly successful, I guess, so there’s no reason we can’t get together for a weekend or two a year just to hang out and talk. Lots of laughs, too.”

Simplified conversation

Psychiatrist Mark Goulston, author of “Talking to ‘Crazy’: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life” (AMACOM, $18.95), which will be released in paperback in July, says it’s easy to discount the importance of in-person conversations, especially with so many forms of communication. But that doesn’t mean it’s good practice to only engage in technology-enabled correspondence. “It’s wonderful to keep in touch with friends and family on your phone or computer but it’s not like the real thing,” says Goulston. “Those conversations that take place face to face—those are the ones that strengthen us and sustain us. They’re the real thing. They’re not limited to a few lines of text or a quick photo. People speak to each other, listen to each other and build on their conversations and when they do that, they build their relationships.”

Sherry Turkle, professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” (Penguin Books, $17), spoke about the differences between digital and inperson communication in a popular TED talk, emphasizing how the convenience of texts and emails can create a sterile, limited conversations. “Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection,” Turkle said. “We shortchange ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.”

Tuned in

Lowell says his favorite thing about the face-to-face conversations is that he gets a chance to listen to his friends. “And I mean, really listen,” he says. “A guy texts about his divorce and yeah, you feel bad for him but it’s just words on a screen. When you’re sitting across from him, you see it in his eyes. You see that pain. And you can be a better friend, you know? You can listen. You can offer your support. I’m not a touchy guy but when he was telling us about how hard it was,

I kept putting my hand on his shoulder, you know, just giving him some support.”

Helen Walters, 66, says like Lowell, she appreciates human contact. “I moved to a new place last year and was thrilled when I saw all the activities they had that revolved around conversation,” says Walters, who lives in a retirement community in Huntley, Illinois. “Book clubs, trivia contests, journaling groups.

I love sitting across the table from someone and talking about movies and books because you always end up talking about your kids, your husband, your job, your life, basically. It’s sharing information and it’s sharing yourself. And it’s all very real—your voice, your hands, your eyes. It’s not confined to the screen on my iPhone. I’m talking to real people and they’re talking back.”