{"id":980,"date":"2012-06-13T14:48:36","date_gmt":"2012-06-13T14:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/?p=980"},"modified":"2012-06-13T14:48:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-13T14:48:36","slug":"friends-without-a-personal-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/friends-without-a-personal-touch\/","title":{"rendered":"'Friends' Without a Personal Touch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interesting review of Sherry Turkle’s research on kids and technology. \u00a0How much should we try to restrict our student’s modern means of communication? \u00a0Is the solution to encouraging student interaction restricting technology or teaching the value of real relationships? \u00a0What policies does your school use in regards to technology? \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

“Friends’\u00a0Without a Personal Touch\u00a0<\/strong>By Michiko Kakutani<\/p>\n

Teenagers who send and receive six to eight thousand texts a month and spend hours a day on Facebook. Mourners who send text messages during a memorial service because they can\u2019t go an hour without using their BlackBerries. Children who see an authentic Galapagos tortoise at the American Museum of Natural History and can\u2019t understand why the museum didn\u2019t use a robot tortoise instead. High school students who wonder how much they should tilt their Facebook profiles toward what their friends will think is cool, or what college admissions boards might prize.<\/p>\n

As Sherry Turkle notes in her perceptive new book, \u201cAlone Together,\u201d these are examples of the ways technology is changing how people relate to one another and construct their own inner lives. She is concerned here not with the political uses of the Internet \u2014 as manifested in the current democratic uprisings in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East \u2014 but with its psychological side effects.<\/p>\n

In two earlier books, Ms. Turkle \u2014 a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist \u2014 put considerable emphasis on the plethora of opportunities for exploring identity that computers and networking offer people. In these pages, she takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies \u2014 including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots \u2014 have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings.<\/p>\n

Ms. Turkle\u2019s thesis here \u2014 some of which will sound overly familiar, but some of which turns out to be savvy and insightful \u2014 is that even as more and more people are projecting human qualities onto robots (i.e., digital toys like the Furby and computerized companions like the Paro,<\/a> designed to provide entertainment and comfort to the elderly), we have come to expect less and less from human encounters as mediated by the Net.<\/p>\n

Instead of real friends, we \u201cfriend\u201d strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writes, \u201cmakes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.\u201d In writing this book, Ms. Turkle interviewed hundreds of children and adults about technology, and her anthropological generalizations sometimes seem based on largely anecdotal evidence; we often never know just how representative her examples really are. Still, the author has spent decades examining how people interact with computers and other devices \u2014 her first book on computers and people, \u201cThe Second Self,\u201d was published in 1984; the next, \u201cLife on the Screen,\u201d<\/a> in 1995 \u2014 and by situating her findings in historical perspective, she is able to lend contextual ballast to her case studies.<\/p>\n

Many of the adolescents cited in her book express a decided distaste for using the phone. One high school sophomore says telephone calls mean you have to have a conversation and conversations are \u201calmost always too prying, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say \u2018good-bye.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Another student says: \u201cWhen you talk on the phone, you don\u2019t really think about what you\u2019re saying as much as in a text. On the telephone, too much might show.\u201d<\/p>\n

Texts, in other words, offer more control \u2014 and the ability to keep one\u2019s feelings at a distance. Many young people \u201cprefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net,\u201d Ms. Turkle writes. \u201cIt gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

While teachers must contend with distracted students, who may be texting or surfing the Web in class, says Ms. Turkle, young people must contend with distracted parents \u2014 who with their BlackBerries and cellphones may be physically present but \u201cmentally elsewhere.\u201d Noting that the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson regarded identity play as part of the work of adolescence, she argues that the Net not only supplies teenagers with lots of opportunities to explore who they are and what they aspire to but also generates added anxiety, heightening peer pressure and encouraging many to construct, edit and perform a \u201cself\u201d in an effort to win friends and influence.<\/p>\n

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: \u201cBrad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting \u2018confused\u2019 between what he \u2018composes\u2019 for his online life and who he \u2018really\u2019 is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn\u2019t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more \u2018himself\u2019 there, but this is hard. He says that even when he tries to be \u2018honest\u2019 on Facebook, he cannot resist the temptation to use the site \u2018to make the right impression.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

As Ms. Turkle sees it, online life tends to promote more superficial, emotionally lazy relationships, as people are \u201cdrawn to connections that seem low risk and always at hand.\u201d This tendency to treat other people as objects that can be quickly discarded, she says, is embodied at its most extreme by the social Web site Chatroulette, \u201cwhich randomly connects you to other users all over the world\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see each other on live video. You can talk or write notes. People mostly hit \u2018next\u2019 after about two seconds to bring another person up on their screens.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are other consequences to constant networking as well. When we are always tethered to our offices, our families, our friends \u2014 even when hiking in the woods or walking by the ocean \u2014 then solitude becomes increasingly elusive, and creative, contemplative, carefully considered thought increasingly gives way to immediate, sometimes ill-considered reactions.<\/p>\n

At times, Ms. Turkle can sound primly sanctimonious, complaining for instance that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: \u201cThese people are not my friends,\u201d she writes, \u201cyet somehow I miss their presence.\u201d Such sentimental whining undermines the larger and important points she wants to make in this volume \u2014 the notion that technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we remove ourselves form the flow of physical, messy, untidy life \u2014 and both robotics and networked life do that \u2014 we become less willing to get out there and take a chance,\u201d she writes. \u201cA song that became popular on YouTube in 2010, \u2018Do You Want to Date My Avatar?\u2019<\/a> ends with the lyrics \u2018And if you think I\u2019m not the one, log off, log off, and we\u2019ll be done.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

This article published February 21, 2011 in the New York Times. \u00a0Click here<\/a> for the original post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interesting review of Sherry Turkle’s research on kids and technology. \u00a0How much should we try to restrict our student’s modern means of communication? \u00a0Is the solution to encouraging student interaction restricting technology or teaching the value of real relationships? \u00a0What policies does your school use in regards to technology? \u00a0 “Friends’\u00a0Without a Personal Touch\u00a0By Michiko […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,239],"class_list":["post-980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership-news","tag-sherry-turkle","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5BJbv-fO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}