“Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead?” Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
The name of this book spoke volumes to me…Alone Together…what an accurate and terrible way to describe our technology generation. Just recently some friends and I were talking (all early to mid-30’s) of how much we wonder what things would be like if email and smartphones had never been invented. It’s interesting to note that our conversation took place over the Christmas holidays while our email had away notices turned out and we were actually unplugged for a few days. It’s in the midst of detoxing from technology that we find rest and peace in our real life connectedness with family and friends.
I usually read books on the Kindle app for my iPad. I’m really glad I ordered the physical copy of this book because I wasn’t tempted to flip back and forth between email, facebook, and reading. In realizing this…I do think I will make more of an effort to read physical books this year as often as possible. I particularly like the ease of the e-reader when I am travelling as it saves me having to pack several books. When I am not travelling, I want to stick with traditional books to save my eyes from unnecessary screen time and also to really allow myself to connect with the material I am reading.
I truly am grateful that smartphones weren’t around during my high school and college years. I see how much this generation of students is missing out on when it comes to knowing how to have a face-to-face conversation or even engage conflict. Twitter, Facebook, and texting aren’t evil…but they have become a sad substitute for meaningful interaction. As a Christian, I fully believe that we were created to live in community and to “do life together”. The pervasiveness of technology causes us to miss out on so much that God intended for us to notice.
I would recommend this book for all parents and for anyone that has the privilege of investing in students. I am grateful for the opportunities God has given me with my daughter sitting on the floor in the kitchen playing PlayDoh or just talking without the interruption of technology. I’ve enjoyed those types of connections with students as we sit together at a meal or join together in worship. My hope and prayer is that those moments will far outweigh the ones that are stolen by choices we make to intentionally engage technology over people.
I highlighted several things while reading and have posted them below…
- Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.
- The idea of sociable robots suggests that we might navigate intimacy by skirting it.
- When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes.
- Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead?
- Why do people no longer suffice?
- In the case of children, I am concerned about their getting comfortable with the idea that a robot’s companionship is even close to a replacement for a person. Later, we will hear teenagers talk about their dread of conversation as they explain why “texting is always better than talking.” Some comment that “sometime, but now now,” it would be good to learn how to have a conversation. The fantasy of robotic companionship suggests that sometime might not have to come. But what of an adult who says he prefers a robot for a reason?
- When part of your life is lived in virtual places–it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site–a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is “true here,” true in simulation.
- In the course of a life, we never “graduate” from working on identity; we simply rework it with the materials on hand.
- People are skilled at creating rituals for demarcating the boundaries between the world of work and the world of family, play, and relaxation. There are special times (the Sabbath), special meals (the family dinner), special clothes (the “armor” for a day’s labor comes off at home, whether it is the business man’s suit or the laborer’s overalls), and special places (the dining room, the parlor, the kitchen, and the bedroom). Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.
- Technology, on its own, does not cause this new way of relating to our emotions and other people. But it does make it easy. Over time, a new style of being with each other becomes socially sanctioned. In ever era, certain ways of relating come to feel natural. In our time, if we can be continually in touch, needing to be continually in touch does not seem a problem or a pathology but an accommodation to what technology affords. It becomes the norm.
- I suggest that the culture in which they (today’s children) develop tempts them into narcissistic ways of relating to the world.
- We have seen young people walk the halls of their schools composing messages to online acquaintances they will never meet. We have seen them feeling more alive when connected, then disoriented and alone when they leave their screens. Some live more than half their waking hours in virtual places. But they also talk wistfully about letters, face-to-face meetings, and the privacy of pay phones. Tethered selves, they try to conjure a future different from the one they see coming by building on a past they never knew. In it, they have time alone, with nature, with each other, and with their families.
- Listening to what young people miss may teach us what they need. They need attention.
- The Perils of Performance-Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting “confused” between what he “composes” for his online life and who he “really” is.
- We deserve better. When we remind ourselves that it is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we should have better.