Alone Together by Sherry Turkle - Research Paper Example

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (Research Paper) Introduction The modern age is the age of IT or information technology. One can see the predominanceof the tools and gifts of IT in the sphere of medicine, engineering, politics, marketing, business and society. In the beginning the internet was predominantly an immobile zone, but with the advent of social media, the web has become more flexible and user-friendly. Today we can do our shopping, pay our bills, read the latest news, watch movies and TV-shows, and even socialize with our contacts using the internet. The internet today has ceased to remain a passive facilitator, and has transformed into a social medium and an active platform for interaction with the rest of the world. Forming social networks is an inherent trait, rather an inherent need, of all human beings. Such social networks may include our family, our friends and our colleagues. Today we can share any kind of information with our social network using social networking websites such as Face book, Twitter and YouTube through blogs, forums, video, audio, photos, online profiles and status updates. In the last few years social networking and social media sharing has gained immense popularity amongst millions of users worldwide. (Kaplan, 2010) Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together The presence of IT has revolutionized each and every aspect of our lives. Not a single aspect of modern man’s life has been left untouched by the sweeping presence of IT in the form of the computer, the internet and the social media. Despite the uncountable gifts of the IT age, the over-involvement in the use of IT as a social ambassador has a flip side to it, which has been discussed at length in Alone Together, a remarkable work by MIT technology specialist Sherry Turkle. The work sums up the author’s fifteen-year-long study of human lives in the digital age. The arguments presented by the author are based on her interviews with hundreds of children and adults regarding their use of technology and its impact on their interpersonal relationships. The book discusses the instabilities that have crept into the modern day relationships owing to digitization and how they have modified the aligned concepts of privacy, relationship and community. The thesis of this paper is that Sherry Turkle is convincing in her argument that our growing dependence on social media technology has eventually led to the destruction of our humanity. Dependence on Robots for Companionship In the first half of her book, Turkle talks about social robots, or the sci-fi machines that apparently possess all human-like qualities required to facilitate our day-to-day chores. But the author is not so much interested in the automated machines as in our relationships with them and our dependence on them. She expresses her concern over the human tendency of using the robots as a remedy to our own limitations and as an escape route from the difficulty of engaging in real human relationships. The robots themselves are not dangerous, but they symbolise a greater danger in terms of the derogatory impact they have on their users. For instance, a few minutes with the popular “digital pet” Tamagotchi are enough to extract the empathy of kids (Turkle, 2012, p. 32); the charm of a robotic doll is enough to compel 82-year-old Edna to override her affection for her 2-year-old great-granddaughter (Turkle, 2012, p. 116-19); and interaction with the talking sex robot Roxxxy is satisfactory enough to suppress the urge and temptation of a real blind date (Turkle, 2012, p. 65-66) As Turkle writes, “Dependence on a robot presents itself as risk free. But when one becomes accustomed to ‘companionship’ without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming.” (Turkle, 2012, p. 66) The reason that makes the robots such a potential threat for humanity is the fact that they exploit our profoundly human instincts. They corrode our power of perception of others’ minds, by making us vulnerable of showering our affection on the most lifeless, inanimate beings. Addiction to the Web for Social Affiliation Turkle says that the world of the internet had originally invaded our lives by offering a platform for freedom and liberty of expression. But with the passage of time, it ceased to be so as our lives got confined in the Facebook profiles and the Google searches. Our range of expression is increasingly constrained by the reach of our IT gadgets, online platforms and their metaphorical jargons like “delete” and “erase”. The online world has enabled us to figure out “ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects”. (Turkle, 2012, p. 168) Today we express our thoughts and feelings over blogs and online forums, instead of penning them down in letters or jotting them down in diaries. Today we exchange text messages instead of talking to one another over phone. We no more experience the true feeling of happiness, but resort to smileys and emoticons to tell the world that we are “happy”. The author also recalls the regret of a high school student who felt that over the internet, “you can never escape what you did” (Turkle, 2012, p. 260) because everything one has ever written online is preserved forever over the internet, ruling out any option for us to erase or modify it. The problem of online identity is not the only issue that draws the author’s attention. She is worried over the fact that today we rely on technology and online networks to arbitrate social relations. Such use of technology breeds selfishness and encourages self-centric behavior and thinking. It makes us treat other people either as a resource to be harnessed or as a menace to be tackled. We create “friends” over social networks; use them to reduce our solitude or to feed our sense of affiliation, without having to adhere to any obligations in return. But when these friends turn impulsive and demanding, we choose the easy way out by diverting their calls, blocking their emails, or “unfriending” them over Facebook. Despite all these deteriorating impacts, the trend of reliance on the internet is ever rising, people are getting more and more inclined toward the technology of virtual socialization, and this trend is gradually emerging as a warning sign of impending roboticism in mankind. Groundwork in Empirical Research Some readers might dismiss Alone Together and Turkle’s arguments as luddite paranoia, one-sided bias or personal anecdotage. But it would be reassuring to know that the points put forward by the author are grounded in fifteen years of thorough empirical research. During the course of her research, Turkle carefully studied the patterns of human interaction with gadgets and socialization on online networks. She observed the odd changes that had crept into human behavior due to the use of technology, none of which existed a generation ago. “The average American teenager sends thousands of text messages every month, and spends hours each day on Instant Messenger, MySpace and Facebook... Email is considered old-fashioned by most under-25s… Adults are matching the pace of digitization set by their children, eking out proxy lives on blogs, in multi-player games and chat rooms.” (Behr, 2011) Children nowadays have to contend with mobile phones for their parents’ responsiveness. The sense of proximity and randomness associated with the telephone creates a sort of fear, disgust and sullenness in the kids. But we still seem to overlook these issues because simulations of life have probably become more appealing than real life to the modern man. We are so deeply engrossed in the digital world that a world without computers is something we can barely imagine. Support from Existing Cyber-skeptic Literature In our desperate and unscrupulous attempt to keep up with technological advancements, we are probably assuming that technological advance is synonymous to human progress. Many authors have tried to draw our attention to this alarming fact. In fact the views expressed by Turkle in Alone Together are corroborated by a series of pre-existing writings on the negative impacts of cyber advancement. For instance, The Net Delusion (2012) by Evgeny Morozov refutes the stylish, yet vague, ideas of using the web as a tool for improving the working of a democracy (Morozov, 2012). Similarly, The Shallows (2011) by Nicholas Carr warns us of the irreversible damage caused to our cognitive abilities by the over-dependence on the internet (Carr, 2011). Turkle’s book not only contributes to the existing lot of cyber-skeptic literature, but also adds a new dimension to it. The author begins the book with a clinical approach by basing her arguments on empirical evidence. But eventually she elevates the theme to a philosophical plane by asserting that technology has not only changed the way we communicate, but also altered altogether the meaning of being human. Conclusion Technology has today become the designer of our social relationships. The online world of illusionary friendship has bred a generation of social media users who fail to differentiate between the casual wall posts and genuine information. Though superficially they lend us the feeling of an emotional life and the sense of affiliation with our social circles, they actually pull us away from the real social world, and push us into a new form of solitude. And this message has been convincingly captured and conveyed by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together, through an artistic blend of empirical evidence and personal anecdote. References: Behr, Rafael. “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle – Review”. The Guardian. 2011. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/alone-together-sherry-turkle-review Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company, 2011. Kaplan, Andreas M., and Michael Haenlein. "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media." Business horizons 53.1 (2010): 59-68. Morozov, Evgeny. The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. Public Affairs. 2012. Turkle, Sherry. Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic books. 2012. Read More