As Sherry Turkle perceptual notes in her new book, "Alone together", these are examples of the ways technology is changing, how people relate to one another and build their own inner life. She is not here concerned with the political uses of the Internet — as manifested in current democratic uprisings in Egypt and other countries of the Middle East — but with his psychological side effects.
In two previous books, MS. Turkle — a Professor of social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and clinical psychologist — put considerable emphasis on the plethora of opportunities for exploration of identity that computers and networking offer people. In these pages, let's take a significantly darker view, arguing that our new technologies — including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, exchanges of Skype, games, Internet message boards and robot — have made it the convenience and control a priority while decreasing the expectations we have of other human beings.
MS. Turkle's argument here — some of which will sound too familiar, but some of which is to be savvy and insightful — is that even though more and more people are projecting qualities on robot (i.e., digital toys like the Furby and computerized companions like Paro, designed to provide comfort and entertainment for the elderly), we have come to expect less and less by man meets as mediated by the network.
Instead of true friends, we are not "friend" on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we have text and tweet. Technology, writes, "makes it easy to communicate and when we want to release." In writing this book, MS. Turkle interviewed hundreds of children and adults about the technology and its anthropological generalizations seem to sometimes depends largely anecdotal; We often never really his examples are representative. Still, the author has spent decades examining how people interact with computers and other devices — his first book on computers and people, "the second Self," was published in 1984; Next, "Life on the Screen," in 1995 — and by situating her findings in a historical perspective, she is able to provide context to its ballast case studies.
Many adolescents mentioned in his book expressed a strong aversion to using your phone. A high school sophomore says calls means you have to have a conversation and conversations are "almost always too indiscreet, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say ' farewell '."Another student said: "when you talk on the phone, you don't really think what you're saying, in a text. On the phone, too might show. "
Texts, in other words, offer more control — and the possibility of maintaining one's feelings from a distance. Many young people prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the network, "MS. Turkle writes. "It gives them an alternative to processing of emotions in real time."
While teachers must contend with students who can be distracted, texting or surfing the Internet in the classroom, says MS. Turkle, young people must compete with parents distracted — who with their blackberries and mobile phones can be physically present, but "mentally elsewhere." Noting that the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson viewed game identity as part of the work of adolescence, she argues that the network not only supplies teens with lots of opportunities to explore who they are and what they aspire to but also generates added anxiety, increase peer pressure and encouraging many to construct, modify and perform a "self" in an effort to win friends and influence.
A subject interview she called Brad, MS. Turkle writes: "Brad says, only half jokingly, that he cares about forever ' confused ' between what he ' made up ' for his life online, and that he is ' actually '. Not yet confirmed in its identity, which makes him eager to post things about himself that he did not know really are true. It burdens him that the things which concern people treat says online like him in reality. People already refer to him is based on things said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more ' self ', but this is difficult. He says that even when he tries to be "honest" on Facebook, he can't resist the temptation to use the site to make the right impression. ' ”
As MS. Turkle sees, life online tend to promote relations more lazy, superficial, emotionally as people are "designed for connections that appear to be low risk and at your fingertips." This tendency to treat other people as objects that can be readily discarded, she says, is embodied in its extreme by the social Web site Chatroulette, "that randomly connects you to other users around the world":
"You can see each other on live video. Can you speak or write notes. People mostly hit ' next ' after about two seconds to call another person on their screens.
There are other consequences of constant network as well. When we are always related to our offices, our families, our friends — even when hiking in the woods or walk by the ocean — then loneliness becomes increasingly elusive and creative, contemplative, carefully considered increasingly thinking gives way to reactions, sometimes reckless.
Sometimes, MS. Turkle may seem primly sanctimonious, complaining that the view in a local coffee people focused on their computers and Smartphones as they drink their coffee disturbs her: "these people are not my friends," he writes, "yet somehow I miss their presence". These whining sentimental mina points larger and important that she wants to do in this volume — the notion that technology offers the illusion of the company without the required intimacy and emotional risk communication without actually making people feel more overwhelmed and lonelier it gets.
"Once we remove form the flow of physical life, messy, messy — and do so both Robotics and life on the net — we become less willing to get out there and take a chance," he writes. "A song that has become popular on YouTube in 2010, ' do you want to date my Avatar? ' ends with the lyrics" and if you think that I'm not the one, log off, log off, and there will be done. " ”
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