These days, there’s an app for everything.

Even the politically-incorrect-yet-raucous card game Cards Against Humanity is now available online.

As shopping, dating, communicating and making crude jokes become digital pursuits, is technology bringing humans closer together or farther apart?

“Our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection,” wrote Sherry Turkle in an op-ed in The New York Times in April, 2012. Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T., and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”

“These days, social media continually asks us what’s ‘on our mind,’ but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective,” Turkle argues. “Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.”

While social media certainly fosters a type of connection, research shows that close relationships with peers are built through sustained, in-person relationships, where people slowly open up to each other. Earlier this year The New York Times published a quiz, featuring “the 36 questions that lead to love,” based on a study by psychologist Arthur Aaron and others, which explored how mutual vulnerability affects intimacy.

The 36 questions are broken up into three sets, each set features questions more personal than the previous one.

This week, a team of social entrepreneurs from Boulder, Colorado launched a Kickstarter campaign to launch a card game, Connect, inspired by these 36 questions that will feature their own increasingly vulnerable conversation starters.

“People in the modern world increasingly suffer from loneliness and depression, and there’s research that shows ‘connectivity’ is to blame,” explains Cesar Gonzalez, one of the creators behind the Connect card game. “Humans are deeply social animals, and it’s incredibly important to take the time away from technology for meaningful and sustained connection with other people.”

Gonzalez and his colleagues have tested their Connect questions at StartingBloc, a nonprofit fellowship program that brings together dozens of young entrepreneurs and changemakers for a five-day Institute for Social Innovation designed to build community and create personal transformation. StartingBloc has been using these types of questions at their programs for nearly a decade.

When I attended StartingBloc in 2012, I participated in an icebreaker exercise facilitated by Professor Scott Sherman, who asked questions similar to those featured in the Times quiz. I was paired with a partner, and she and I were both instructed to describe our ideal day. My partner’s ideal day involved waking up at 6:00 a.m., designing solar panels that provide clean water to remote villages in Africa, and meeting with her mentors and investors. I thought to myself, “Who is this insane 19 year-old?!” My ideal day was sleeping in till 11:00 a.m., eating a bagel with lox and cream cheese, and watching episodes of Seinfeld.

As the questions progressed, my partner and I became more and more vulnerable and more and more emotional.

I learned that, like me, she was very close to her family. After 30 minutes, I felt like we had known each other for years.

It turns out the only app for authentic connection is looking someone in the eyes and having a real conversation.

 

Relephant Read:

The 36 questions that offer a path into Love.

 

Author: Adam Smiley Poswolsky

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Kickstarter