Turkle: "Connected, but alone?"

In private correspondence, a good friend pointed me to the recent TED talk by Sherry Turkle, "Connected, but alone?", which also dovetails with my recent post "Free Your Mind."   The MIT professor's thesis:  "Our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do; they change who we are" (at 2:36 minutes).

Ubiquitous and incessant texting, for example, creates the "illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."  And "you can end up hiding from each other even as we are all constantly connected to each other" (at 5:02 ).  Why?  Because, as she explains more fully, "technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. ... we're lonely but we are afraid of intimacy.  And so from social networks to social robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship" (at 12:13 ).

Real relationships, including the art of personal conversation and self-reflection, are suffering:  "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding.  And we clean them up with technology. ... we sacrifice conversation for mere connection" (at 7:10).  (A similar, if differently articulated, observation is made by Jonathan Franzen in his essay/address "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.")  Constant use of technology is, to restate Turkle's thesis, altering humanity, our self-conception of it, and ourselves (and our duties) as relational beings within it.  It is, in this sense, reshaping not just what we do as humans but who we are as humans, both individually and in community.

Ms. Turkle's most recent book, Alone Together:  Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, explores related ideas in more detail than her TED talk.  The book is  reviewed in The New York Times, and she was interviewed, among many appearances, on "The Colbert Report."  Her 20-minute TED talk, which includes some practical suggestions for navigating the technological/relational minefield, is embedded below.  And yes; it is okay to watch this engaging digital media video about the relational dangers of digital technology -- just not in board meetings, during family breakfast, or at a funeral.