This article appeared on the Sunday Times Technology Supplement on th 27th of February 2011 with the title of Only Disconnect.

 

Sherry Turkle has been together alone, although to be fair, we all have been. Appearing on the Colbert Report on the 17th of January 2011, Turkle said that Alone Together is based on a singular moment, that moment when you are physically with someone, then they pull out their iPhone/iPad, laptop, Blackberry or Android phone, and there’s that feeling; together alone.

The “we” from the book’s subtitle, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, refers to people who are bombarded by snippets of information from multiple connections and feel lost when disconnected from their smart phones and laptops.

In the book, Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our perceptions of intimacy and solitude while warning us of the pitfalls of embracing what she terms “pseudo-techno relationships” instead of lasting emotional connections.

Turkle is woman of many facets. She studied poststructuralism in Paris in the 1960s, and trained in anthropology, personality psychology, and sociology. Perhaps ironically given her views on technology, she is a celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar and has lectured there for the past thirty years. She insists she does not at all hate technology, but that it can be, and often is, a disruptive agent. She believes that we are losing our balance, and ‘need to put technology in its place’.

In her famed ‘Who Am We?’ interview with Wired Magazine, Turkle expounded the idea that our identities are now not one, but several, according to what information channel we are ‘plugged into’ and, that many of us have trouble separating ‘real world’ and ‘online’.

In a 1996 interview with pol.it, the Italian Psychiatrist Online Magazine, Turkle said that ‘It is easy to blame technology for our ills.’ It is our usage of technology that may be problematic, not the technology itself. In a 2006 article, entitled ‘Living online: I’ll have to ask my friends’, Turkle said: ‘When technology brings us to the point where we’re used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.’ This idea is also echoed in Alone Together
which has taken 15 years of writing, so one can see that Turkle stands by her convictions.

 

So where exactly is this damage being wrought? Where is it exactly that technology is letting us down?

For a start, our information digest is now much larger than ever before. How many times a day do you check your email? When you wake up? Before going to bed? A dozen times in between? Add Facebook, Twitter and the multitude of news sites we visit daily, and a fuller picture of the scale of the information we digest on the daily is uncovered.

Another pitfall of our complete connectedness is that the long form of communication is being lost. While brevity is indeed the soul of wit, and may be fitting or desirable in many situations, some arguments really do need a book to be fully developed. Can you imagine discussing serious topics of a moral nature such as euthanasia in the 140 characters allowed on Twitter? It probably wouldn’t work very well. The long form is still necessary, although it may appear to be unpopular.

When it comes to our communication, Turkle says that we are now using inanimate objects to convince ourselves that even when we’re alone, we feel together, however when we’re with each other, we put ourselves in situations where we feel alone by being constantly occupied with our mobile devices. According to Turkle, we have created a perfect storm of confusion about what’s important in our human connections.

 

The harm in this communication breakdown is that there are times and places when we need to give each other our full attention, and yet we don’t.

The technology we use has accustomed us to immediacy, and we now expect a quick response, so we write shorter emails with simpler questions to get rapid and simple answers that can be easily digested and understood. We are losing volume in our communication, which may inhibit our complete comprehension with each other.

However, perhaps it is the philosophical question of what is real and what is not that should be of most concern. If we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we will need a new language for talking about simple concepts and we must all ask: “Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces?” These questions are are also central to our communities. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?

 

People can get lost in virtual worlds; while many think life in cyberspace as insignificant, or simply an escape or meaningless diversion. This is not the case, and playing down our cyber-existence is risky.  Our experiences there are serious play and we should understand the dynamics of virtual experience so as to foresee who might be in danger and to then put these experiences to best use. Without understanding the many selves we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real.

Turkle believes that as in many other areas, moderation is key. After all ‘you live for your communication with people, not for your communication with technology.’

 

 

Doing it for the kids:

Children are forever being dragged into arguments about technology and its improper use. The internet is not an exception, although in this case, this may indeed be a realistic fear.

According to Turkle and her decades of research, many children being ignored, not that in that they are not being fed or abandoned, but rather feel they don’t have their parents’ full attention as they grow up.

Children need solid family relationships, values, education, and their parents’ full love and presence to develop into humans with healthy brains and minds. Children are programmed to form social synapses, first with their parents, and then with other people, that feed them the rich data that organizes and shapes their brains and humanity. We do not know how their development is affected by humanity’s increasing interactions with our online devices and information streams. After all, are any of our ‘online’ feelings on a par with the kind we feel when engaged in real, face-to-face intimacy? Online, you can easily ignore others’ feelings. In a text message, you can avoid eye contact. A number of studies have underscored that the current generation of teens is less empathetic than ever. That isn’t a disaster in and of itself, says Turkle, although it does mean we may want think about the way we want to live. “We’ve gone through tremendously rapid change, and some of these things just need a little sorting out,” she says.

 

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