Sherry Turkel, Alone Together

Citation: Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together : Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.

Summary: 

Turkle’s book explores pretty much that which is stated in the title, which is how our lives and interactions with one another have greatly changed with the technology we currently have available to us, namely the internet and the virtual world of various social media, and smartphones, our little handheld portals to these virtual worlds. She presents information and personal examples that aren’t incredibly surprising or prophetic in a time when these interactions have become the norm (I kept thinking how interesting it would be if she were able to tell someone from 40 or 50 years ago that this would be the course our lives were to take). However, she does present a few key elements that are worth further consideration, including the simple fact that because this trend of interacting in the real world as well as in a virtual world has become the norm and something we don’t question, further investigation is required of why it has become this way and what that means for us from here on out, for we live in a time in which there exists an “erosion of the boundaries between the real and the virtual” (xi).

Response: 

As stated in the summary, I didn’t feel that much of what Turkle presents in the text is anything incredibly insightful, but the fact that I was numb to her observations is something of consideration.  For example, her statistics of how many texts people send per year or how many hours are spent on the internet per week seem plausible…we are living in a digital age and much of our time spent living is spent in front of some sort of screen, whether it is the screen of a smartphone, computer, or television. The fact that this doesn’t surprise me doesn’t mean that I don’t care about it however. I do agree that we spend way too much time in front of these screens, and that these virtual worlds are impacting our lives to an incredible extent. She brings up the fact that when we interact on social networking sites like Facebook and Second Life, we experience and partake in a detachment of who we are in “real-life” versus who we are in our virtual existences: “people reflect on who they [are] in the mirror of the machine…through the prism of technology [exists] a shift in how we create and experience our own identities” (xi). In these virtual worlds people can live out their fantasies…who they want to be rather than who they are. Again, this is nothing surprising, but I think that dangers exist when people are no longer able nor willing to make the distinctions between the two. She also brought up a point that we’ve read about in our previous texts in this module on media. That is, the idea of this detached involvement, how we are increasingly becoming more alone and isolated yet believing that we are more together, more connected…all interacting at the time and in the same “place” on sites like Facebook, yet doing it alone as separate units, believing these reflections we interact with to be truth, the real deal… “Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our experiences of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing” (154). 

She brings up another valid concept, something I have been thinking a lot about recently, and that is “what [is] special about being a person” (x) and the “essence of personhood” (xvii)…it’s interesting to think that we should even have to defend this idea, but I believe we need to increasingly do so when computers, the internet, smartphones, the mass media, television, and machines have completely changed, and will continue to change, our ways of being.  It’s going to come to the point where being a person means to have these interactions with machines...it already has. Like John Berger states, in Ways of Seeing: “the car is an extension of the foot.” Now, the computer is the extension of what we consider to be reality. The day will come when we won’t be able to be defined without considering and defining these machines. 

Yet, what I want to know is what defines a person when these machines are disregarded, if they can be disregarded? What is it that we are all searching for at the end of the day? There exists more fulfillment than that which we find in these machines, but I fear that one day we won’t venture to find this fulfillment in any place beside the machines...this is something that drives my art making practices, the fulfillment we all need.