Alone Together
Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
BBB Library: Communication, Technology and Globalization
ISBN: 9780465031467
Editorial Review
Alone together is a book written by Sherry Turkle who is a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She traces back technology and its invasion into our lives and its impact in our behaviors, expectations, and way of thinking. She elaborately through many examples shows how it has affected our life generally and our social life specifically. Online connections were first conceived as a substitute for face-to-face contact, when the latter was for some reason impractical: Don’t have time to make a phone call? Shoot off a text message. But very quickly, the text message became the connection of choice. We discovered the network—the world of connectivity—to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, does it serve our human purposes?
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Wisdom to Share
As we put in our many hours of typing—with all fingers or just thumbs—we may discover that we miss the human voice.
Humans need to be surrounded by human touch, faces, and voices. Humans need to be brought up by humans.
When we lose the “burden” of care, we begin to give up on our compact that human beings will care for other human beings.
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Texting, interrupted by bad reception, incoming calls, and other text messages can compromise the intimacy it promises.
If lonely, you can find online a continual connection. But this may leave you more isolated, without real people around you.
Nothing is wrong with computer games but looking to them for amusement is one thing; looking to them for a life is another.
Online, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish to them to be, constructing them for your purposes.
Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play.
And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encouraging feeling of already being together.
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As we communicate in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses, we don’t allow sufficient space to consider complicated problems.
Now, we have found ways of spending more time with friends and family in which we hardly give them any attention at all.
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