“Staying connected” is the silent refrain of smartphone users. Now, we have the ability to rapidly connect with nearly any information source through Google, and draw on a live look of what’s happening in our social set.

Critics, however, warn that this constant volley of news and details is certainly distracting, thus making it more challenging to maintain the single-minded attention needed for sincere communication.

Sherry Turkle, a professor in the program of Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T., has much to say about this subject in her recent book “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”.

She has studied the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years, focusing for the past five years on the demise of face-to-face conversation in a “texting” world. Turkle has looked at families, friendships and romance, and school, university and workplace settings. Her findings show a troubling trend.

According to her research, when together, many college students use the “rule of three”. “In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.”

Also, young people have voiced to her that they want their parent’s attention when they are with them; they do not want their parents smartphones out Googling during meals, time in the park and school sports events. What they do want is “plentiful family conversation”.

Turkle sites a major concern found by researchers, (a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath also conducting long-term research) is a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

She maintains that, over the past several generations, technology is linked to this attack on empathy. “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. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are”, she writes.

She observes that, although empathic conversations can occur today, the trend is that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones at the ready.

Turkle feels, “The trouble with talk begins young.” A teacher reports “Students were not developing friendships the way they used to.” For example it was described to her “how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event.”

Although an age-old problem, when the student was asked about her behaviour she didn’t have much to say: “She was almost robotic in her response. She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt.”

The teacher went on: “Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like 8-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way 8-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children.”

Turkle writes, “In our hearts, we know (all) this, and now research is catching up with our intuitions. We face a significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.”

As a private English teacher or tutor, this is an issue I feel passionately about. Reclaiming face-to-face conversation is a worthy goal for us all.