Jonathan Haidt and Sherry Turkle are both in agreement that there is a major problem with the overuse of smartphones that is negatively impacting future generations in their ability to learn and attain new information. In “The Empathy Diaries”, Sherry Turkle addresses the importance of communication and how the use of technologies is leading to students not being able to have thoughtful, knowledgeable, and interactive conversations which is degrading their learning. She explains this importance by saying, “In the classroom, conversations carry more than the details of a subject; teachers are there to help students learn to ask questions and be dissatisfied with the easy answers. More than this, conversations with a good teacher communicate that learning isn’t all about the answers. It’s about what the answers mean. Conversations help students build narratives – whether about gun control or the Civil War – that will allow them to learn and remember in a way that has meaning for them. Without these narratives, you can learn a new fact but not know what to do with it, how makes sense of it” (Turkle 347). For Turkle, the ability to have conversations is a major factor in the learning process. The problem here is that to have these thoughtful conversations you need to be present and not distracted. In “Get Phones Out of Schools Now”, Jonathan Haidt shares some facts that show that students who have their phone and use it during class will not be able to engage in conversation well enough to learn anything. He writes, “The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on the adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changed in the brains reward system, including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs” (Haidt 2). These two authors share similar views which is shown in what they preach in their writing. The connection between Turkle’s insight on conversation and Haidt’s information on how smartphones are distracting students connects the two authors perspectives. My own view on this topic is that I agree with what both authors have to say. I believe that excessive smartphone usage inside and outside of the classroom are negatively affecting students’ performance.