Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT and social and personality psychologist, focuses her studies on human interaction with technology, and more recently, on people’s control over technology and its effect on their interpersonal relations. Her main argument centers around the notion that in order for people to grow, connect and understand the world, solitude to think, discover and gather oneself is necessary. However, as she laments, although technology has allowed for greater access and sharing of information to promote connections, these fleeting bonds formed over the web only serve to create further isolation between people. This is what she calls, as titled in her 2011 book, being “alone together”, a phenomena that is trampling on the current and future generations’ capacity for growth and development.
BBC’s documentary series from 2009, The Virtual Revolution, explores the path society has taken with its current usage and reliance on evolving technology. Turkle’s interview in the series explores the final fruits of her studies, which she had spent 15 years on. Turkle brings up is the relationship between intimacy, privacy and technology. With the ability to share just about anything, people are able to put their whole lives on the web, detailing every intimate, personal and individual event for all to look through. People are starting to have this belief, says Turkle, that information is free, including that of the self. She contrasts this with an anecdote from her childhood, when her grandmother took her to the post office to teach a lesson about privacy. Turkle’s grandmother said, very self-assuredly, that the contents within the mailbox were hers and hers alone, that it would be a federal offense for anyone who dared anything of hers. Now, technology has made it such that people gather and share personal information at this constant, fast paced rate, leading to this information and connectivity overload, which people are withdrawing from. Indeed, points out Turkle, more and more people are involved with technology to communicate, but that does not mean any intimate connections are actually made between people. Rather, because talking is so high speed on a screen, there is less and less time for proper reflection to thoroughly think and give replies. Actual interpersonal relations, emphasizes Turkle, are diminishing as people hide behind the technology they rely on so much.
This hiding behind of technology development is something Turkle harshly criticizes, as she finds people turning towards their devices more often. During her TED Talk in 2012, “Connected, But Alone?”, Turkle comments on the idea that people, who “want control over where they put their attention”, take comfort in technology, which allows them to keep others at a distance they want, customize their own lives and fill the void of loneliness. Turkle argues that people desire companionship, but fear the “demands of friendship”, which ultimately pays a toll on their interpersonal relationships. As people expect more from technology and less from other individuals, they start to feel alone, thinking that there exists no empathy in society, making them turn to technology even more, as the superficial, online connections let people think they are being heard. Thus, the sense of connection via online only further exacerbates the feeling of isolation in people, because the capacity for self reflection has been lost, resulting in no appreciation for the self and others. This solitude is the gateway to proper communication and connection, stresses Turkle multiple times. She finds it especially important for younger generations, who grew up with technology, and have lost the ability to establish face to face relations, to carry out raw conversation that hasn’t been edited and retouched. Turkle wishes for children, and adults, to regain this value, because, as she believes, interpersonal, live connections and communications with others is the best means to discover and develop the self. And only after the self is appreciated, can others be listened to and understood. Turkle ends her speech optimistically, her belief in society to make room for solitude, to think and talk about important matters and to listen to others, as people have all the resources they need to start.
Sherry Turkle’s arguments seem to be driven emotionally, as she establishes ethos in her speech by putting herself in the shoes of the average technology junkie. She lets her audience know, in both instances, that she has been enticed and dominated by modern technology, with two personal stories; in the interview, she talks of how easily her information is tracked and withheld while driving through an E-ZPass, which has allows her to explore that the blurred boundaries between privacy and technology. At the start of her TED Talk, Turkle admits to the audience that she was elated to receive a text message from her daughter containing a simple “good luck”. She calls herself a paradox, the embodiment of loving technology but fearing the reliance on it to be too troublesome for relations in the real world. Her initial work had praised technology’s abilities to move the world, and all its connections, online, earning her a spot on Wired magazine over 15 years ago. However, after realizing what has become of herself and her generation, Turkle’s attention moved to the implications the dependence on technology has on people’s ability to communicate and connect, with not just others, but the self as well. She appeals to the audience’s emotions as she pleads with them to realize that being alone is not a weakness that requires fixing, at least not with technology. Technology, she reasons, which is supposed to be cold and emotionless, is actually very psychologically powerful, appealing to the mass when they want to remove themselves from the grief or troubles of the real world. Turkle continuously brings up the loss of self-reflection in the current generation, which is harming future users of technology, the young, who use devices to stay in constant connection, but at a distant that satisfies them.
Turkle’s argument against the path humanity has taken with technology covers a lot of ground, and is very appealing to those concerned that technology harms more than benefits. It tackles the issue of people relying more on technology and less on each other because of the ease in not having to deal with the real life, messy relations in person. She wants people to consider what it means to be intimate and private while still using technological devices to connect and communicate. However, she ends her speech poorly, as she does not define any means for humans to achieve this level of balance, only superficially stating that she believes in humanity to make a change for the better. Of course, it’s understandable that there is no single solution for solving a problem of this magnitude, but it felt as if Turkle’s speech, which had so much momentum from start to middle, ended like a bucket of water dousing out a flame.