Simulate or Stimulate?

Adding the word “virtual” before an otherwise neutral noun makes it not only sound hipper and cooler, but allows us to pretend that none of the aspects of responsibility that tether us to unpleasant reality apply.  With law, but with interactions as well.  MIT professor  Sherry Turkle explains in the New York Times :

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

The perfect way to foster and grow a virtual world around us, with exactly as much (or little) interaction as we desire, and offering only the succor and comfort we seek. It’s a wonderful, addictive experience, but for one problem. It’s a virtual lie.


We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Lawyers are no less engaged in living this lie than anyone else, but unlike those who merely delude themselves into believing they are surrounded by supportive friends, many lawyers use it in lieu of professional growth and the often harder, and harsher, process of learning that a lawyers’ life isn’t easy, pleasant and fuzzy. 


Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

At a time when the economy and job market suck, when the once-rosy prospects of a future as wealthy, or at least financially stable professional, lawyer seem at best a fond memory of a past age, technology swoops in to make young lawyers feel better about themselves, or at the very least provide company in their misery.  As they search for answers, they find the answers they want to find, “sips” from people who they have never met, know nothing about, with only avatar pictures to ground them, but who say the words you want to hear.

Take a look at the people with whom you twit, who you follow and engage.  Are they people who will tell you when you are about to do something questionable, or will pat you on the back and tell you how much they care about you?  Does it make you feel important and worthwhile to be acknowledged by someone you think is more worldly and well-regarded than you?  And if they say a kind word to you, do you take that as approval?

The cult of positivity online has already been discussed at some length, reflecting everyone’s desire to establish themselves as a virtual force in their virtual world.  When the cold, hard real world doesn’t provide you with the ease and comfort of the digital one, do you log out of life and wrap yourself with Facebook friends?


And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.

It’s long been my suspicion that many young lawyers know that they’re skirting the fundamental rules they learned in kindergarten, about competence and ethics, about obligation and responsibility.  They know that there is no magic bullet that will transform their misery to fabulous wealth and success overnight, if only they fabricate an internet existence that stands in stark contrast to reality.  But they can avoid self-reflection by immersing themselves in a world that will never say anything meaningful, but will always tell us what we want to hear. 

While Turkle suggests that connection and trust are unrelated, thus inhibiting true self-reflection, she ignores the cult of positivity aspect of the internet.  Your 3,000 Facebook friends will tell you the dress doesn’t make your butt look fat, just because no one wants to be mean.  Of course, that doesn’t help alter the fact that your butt looks fat, and diminishes trust because no half-wit thinks they can trust the always-positive, never-mean friends to tell the truth.  Or, if you want to wear the dress, then it merely confirms what you want to hear and you walk away wearing the dress you want with your fat butt behind you.


WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

With this brave new world of the internet, we can find someone to tell us whatever we want to hear, to comfort us when we’re down and rub our tummies when they need a sweet rub. But it’s a self-indulgent fantasy.  The real world, like real communication, isn’t always easy or happy, comforting and comfortable.  And what we do as lawyers is as real world as it gets.  Enjoy the toys, but never forget what’s real. Your clients won’t.

23 thoughts on “Simulate or Stimulate?

  1. Scott Allen

    My experience has been utterly and completely different. I suppose, all other things being equal, I think some face-to-face interaction adds strength and value to the relationship, but the fact of the matter is, all other things are never equal, and working with the right people on the right projects is far more important than working with them face-to-face.

    With both of my books, my coauthor(s) and I completed the books without ever meeting in person. We did eventually, but not til after the big chunk of the work was done.

    And those people have remained friends and collaborators to this day, while co-workers from a couple of failed startups, I rarely speak to any more.

    And yes, a select subset of the people I spend time with on Twitter and Facebook ARE the very people who I consult with before doing something questionable, and many of them I’ve never met face-to-face. And they are the ones who give me a virtual pat on the back. Why? Because my face-to-face friends don’t really seem to have an interest in my business life.

    In both physical space and online, you can have fans, fair-weather friends, and true confidantes. The virtual world may lend itself more easily toward the “light” end of that spectrum, but that doesn’t mean the cream can’t rise to the top.

    The reason we tend to have stronger relationships face-to-face has very little to do with touch and eye contact, and much more to do with the fact that the shared experiences we tend to have face-to-face are more emotionally intense. But when you start to seek out those kind of experiences virtually — collaboration on a big project, successful virtual volunteering, shared learning experiences, genuine emotionally intimate sharing, etc. — guess what? You start to build strong relationships virtually as well.

    If you want stronger virtual relationships, do the things that make relationships stronger…virtually.

    As Clive Thompson wrote in The New York Times back in 2004:

    “Our culture still fetishizes physical contact. . . . Executives and politicians spend hours flying across the country merely for a five-minute meeting, on the assumption that even a few seconds of face time can cut through the prevarications of letters and legal contracts. [But] as more and more of our daily life moves online, we could find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in which lies have ever more serious consequences. . . . In its unforgiving machine memory, the Internet might turn out to be the unlikely conscience of the world.”

  2. SHG

    At least there’s no chance that your occupation causes any confirmation bias. Have you considered the possibility that the problem isn’t “a culture still fetishizes physical contact,” but that people in real life just don’t like you?

  3. Scott Allen

    I got into this occupation because I had success with the practices of it before — as a field consultant, a professional service practice manager, a VP of Professional Services, and a VP of Product Management. My company did a multi-million dollar merger as a result of a conversation I had a on a Yahoo Group. I managed a team of 30+ consultants, spread from San Diego to New Brunswick, many of whom were hired without a live, in-person interview. In fact the couple of people who DIDN’T work out were ones who had been most heavily recommended & interviewed in-person.

    What you see as “confirmation bias”, I see as “what’s possible when you know what you’re doing”. Everyone can have strong, productive virtual relationships, if they acquire and develop the skills for them — just as with face-to-face relationships.

    In our culture, we have a significant disparity of experience. As we wrote in The Virtual Handshake in 2005:

    “By age 30, you have likely spent roughly 130,000 hours in face-to-face interaction. Now consider a typical businesswoman. She has been using e-mail perhaps ten years and the Internet approximately five. The average Internet user is only online approximately 11.1 hours a week. Her entire experience with virtual interaction is probably not even 5,000 hours.”

    Those numbers are a little different now, but there’s still a huge disparity. Furthermore, for face-to-face communication, we have speech as a required class in high schools, we have Toastmasters, we have a myriad of learning opportunities on better communication for people in sales, marketing and leadership positions.

    And we go online, and everyone assumes “Facebook and Twitter are easy — just be yourself”, rather than considering the possibility that there are some specialized skill sets, tactics and strategies that will make one more effective in a virtual context, and going about acquiring and developing those skills.

    Perhaps chief among those skills is being gracious to those who have a different opinion than you, rather than making thinly-veiled insults. I can see how it might be difficult to build strong virtual relationships when you attack people who comment on your blog with the intention of a friendly debate.

    Maybe you just forgot the smiley face? 🙂

  4. SHG

    Ah, I see the problem. You not only believe your claims of greatness are meaningful to others, but that you are owed graciousness.  Here’s the problem. You come off like a smarmy bullshit artist, a typical social media pathological liar with unverifiable personal anecdotes, and assume that because you said so, others should give a shit.

    Sorry, but this is a law blog, not an opportunity for self-important blowhards to get on their soapboxes and demand that others be nice to them. For someone who “knows what he’s doing,” you come off as a total loser. Go sell used cars.

    By the way, you’re boring.

  5. BRIAN TANNEBAUM

    “And we go online, and everyone assumes “Facebook and Twitter are easy — just be yourself”, rather than considering the possibility that there are some specialized skill sets, tactics and strategies that will make one more effective in a virtual context, and going about acquiring and developing those skills.”

    How much are those “specialized skill sets, tactics and strategies?” And do they come with a set of ginsu knives all for $19.99?

  6. SHG

    More effective at what? Collecting twitter followers? Getting phone calls from “leads” asking whether I can represent them in their Des Moines shoplifting case pro bono? Becoming dear, close friends with social media gurus?

    Pass.

  7. BRIAN TANNEBAUM

    Still angry that you can’t undercut me on the Des Moines shoplifting cases, huh? Maybe you should just concentrate on the Plano, Texas disorderly conduct cases. I hear there’s a non-stop from Islip once a month.

  8. AP

    Having spent way too many hours playing NBA Jam in the 90s I have to confess that your comment left me cheering, “he’s on fire! Boomshakalaka!!” Man I sure wish I could attach a link to the YouTube clip of a backboard shattering from that video game. I do however respect your rule against links in comments.

  9. shari

    I am commenting on this site for the first time, just to say that I appreciate the reference to NBA Jam. FROM DOWNTOWN!!!

  10. Scott Allen

    Call me old-fashioned, but I was raised to believe that basic civility should be extended to everyone, in any context — has nothing to do with the social media space or who I am. I’m a human being. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners? I think she’d be ashamed at your behavior.

    Seriously, would you talk like this to me at a cocktail party? Or at your office?

    And my personal anecdotes ARE verifiable — I’ll be happy to give you names of people with whom you can verify them. Just because it’s not worth it to you to verify them doesn’t mean they’re NOT verifiable.

  11. SHG

    You’re very special, teacup. Now grow up and get a life.

    I’m dumping the rest of your string of comments because they are pathetic. No wonder you love the internet, as your reality must totally suck. As a courtesy to you (and for the benefit of anyone who cares), I will sum up your deleted comments: I’m special, social media is the most fabulous thing ever, and you should respect me.

    You rock. Now go away.

  12. Scott Allen's Mother

    I apologize for my baby’s wasting your time with his pathetic cries for attention. His father and I have tried over and over to explain to him that other people do not love him or care about his fragile self-esteem, but he still wanders the internet in search of validation.

    We hoped he would become a doctor or lawyer, maybe even a nice carpenter, but instead he became a social media marketer, stringing together meaningless words in the hope of finding someone stupid enough to be impressed. We still hope that someday he will find gainful employment, maybe at the local McDonalds, and move out of the basement.

    We are so ashamed. We ask ourselves every day, where did we go wrong?

    [Ed. Note: No, this comment did not really come from Scott Allen’s mother.]

  13. SHG

    This is cruel and uncalled for. And likely to compel him to engage in years of intensive psychotherapy. You should be ashamed.

  14. Scott Allen

    See, that’s the great thing about being a member of the cult of positivity — nothing fazes me. I’ll leave the psychotherapy to the cynics and the haters who obviously need it.

    Who needs to “get a life”? Self-evident.

  15. SHG

    Nothing fazes you, yet you obsessively return to try to salvage your lost dignity from the cynics and haters. We’ve had our share of social media marketers here, but you are the poster boy.

  16. Scott Allen

    My dignity’s perfectly in tact.

    If I’m obsessing over anything, it’s not salvaging my dignity, it’s holding out hope to find some redeeming quality in you.

    Seriously — what was the bit about my mother? Who’s obsessing, making jokes for their own amusement after the conversation was otherwise over? I was ready to let it go, but then you brought my mother into it.

    WTF is wrong with you, seriously?

  17. SHG

    We’re cynics and haters, man. You said so.  No need to find some redeeming quality in me. I’m just a hateful hater who hates. Move along.

    By the way, I would figure that a sharp social media guru such as you would understand how blog comments work. Don’t blame me for the mother thing. I can’t help it that others think you’re too funny.  (And it’s not really your mother. I promise.)

Comments are closed.