‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle - Review - NYTimes.com

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ALONE TOGETHER

Why We Expect More

From Technology and

Less From Each Other

By Sherry Turkle

360 pages. Basic Books.

$28.95.

February 21, 2011

Friends Without a Personal TouchBy MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Teenagers who send and receive six to eight thousandtexts a month and spend hours a day on Facebook.

Mourners who send text messages during a memorialservice because they cant go an hour without usingtheir BlackBerries. Children who see an authenticGalapagos tortoise at the American Museum of NaturaHistory and cant understand why the museum didntuse a robot tortoise instead. High school students who

wonder how much they should tilt their Facebook profiles toward what theirfriends will think is cool, or what college admissions boards might prize.

As Sherry Turkle notes in her perceptive new book, Alone Together, these arexamples of theways technology is changing how people relate to one anotherand construct their own inner lives. She is concerned here not with the politicauses of the Internet as manifested in the current democratic uprisings inEgypt and other countries in the Middle East but with its psychological sideeffects.

In two earlier books, Ms. Turkle a professor of the social studies of scienceand technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinicalpsychologist put considerable emphasis on the plethora of opportunities forexploring identity that computers and networking offer people. In these pagesshe takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playinggames, Internet bulletin boards and robots have made convenience and
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control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other humanbeings.

Ms. Turkles thesis here some of which will sound overly familiar, but someof which turns out to be savvy and insightful is that even as more and more

people are projecting human qualities onto robots (i.e., digital toys like theFurby and computerized companions like the Paro, designed to provideentertainment and comfort to the elderly), we have come to expect less and lesfrom human encounters as mediated by the Net.

Instead of real friends, we friend strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking othe phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writesmakes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will. Inwriting this book, Ms. Turkle interviewed hundreds of children and adultsabout technology, and her anthropological generalizations sometimes seembased on largely anecdotal evidence; we often never know just howrepresentative her examples really are. Still, the author has spent decadesexamining how people interact with computers and other devices her firstbook on computers and people, The Second Self, was published in 1984; thenext, Life on the Screen, in 1995 and by situating her findings in historicalperspective, she is able to lend contextual ballast to her case studies.

Many of the adolescents cited in her book express a decided distaste for usingthe phone. One high school sophomore says telephone calls mean you have tohave a conversation and conversations are almost always too prying, it takestoo long, and it is impossible to say good-bye. Another student says: Whenyou talk on the phone, you dont really think about what youre saying as muchas in a text. On the telephone, too much might show.

Texts, in other words, offer more control and the ability to keep ones

feelings at a distance. Many young people prefer to deal with strong feelingsfrom the safe haven of the Net, Ms. Turkle writes. It gives them an alternativto processing emotions in real time.

While teachers must contend with distracted students, who may be texting orsurfing the Web in class, says Ms. Turkle, young people must contend with
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distracted parents who with their BlackBerries and cellphones may bephysically present but mentally elsewhere. Noting that the psychoanalystErik Erikson regarded identity play as part of the work of adolescence, sheargues that the Net not only supplies teenagers with lots of opportunities toexplore who they are and what they aspire to but also generates added anxiety

heightening peer pressure and encouraging many to construct, edit andperform a self in an effort to win friends and influence.

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: Brad says, only halfjokingly, that he worries about getting confused between what he composesfor his online life and who he really is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, itmakes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesnt really know artrue. 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 onFacebook. Brad struggles to be more himself there, but this is hard. He saysthat even when he tries to be honest on Facebook, he cannot resist thetemptation to use the site to make the right impression.

As Ms. Turkle sees it, online life tends to promote more superficial, emotionallazy relationships, as people are drawn to connections that seem low risk andalways at hand. This tendency to treat other people as objects that can bequickly discarded, she says, is embodied at its most extreme by the social Website Chatroulette, which randomly connects you to other users all over theworld:

You see each other on live video. You can talk or write notes. People mostly hnext after about two seconds to bring another person up on their screens.

There are other consequences to constant networking as well. When we arealways tethered to our offices, our families, our friends even when hiking in

the woods or walking by the ocean then solitude becomes increasinglyelusive, and creative, contemplative, carefully considered thought increasinglygives way to immediate, sometimes ill-considered reactions.

At times, Ms. Turkle can sound primly sanctimonious, complaining forinstance that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and


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smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: These people are not myfriends, she writes, yet somehow I miss their presence. Such sentimentalwhining undermines the larger and important points she wants to make in thivolume the notion that technology offers the illusion of companionshipwithout the demands of intimacy and communication without emotional risk,

while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.

Once we remove ourselves form the flow of physical, messy, untidy life andboth robotics and networked life do that we become less willing to get outthere and take a chance, she writes. A song that became popular on YouTubein 2010, Do You Want to Date My Avatar? ends with the lyrics And if youthink Im not the one, log off, log off, and well be done.

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‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle - Review - NYTimes.com