39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Turkle has noted that many young people ensnared in the web of modern communication technology long for a deeper, face-to-face connection. Texting, she claims, “makes a promise that generates its own demand” (265). The promise is that you can send a text and have a friend receive it in seconds, and the demand is that the friend is obligated to respond.
Turkle argues that part of the reason today’s children long for connection is that they grew up competing with phones for their parents’ attention. She paints the picture of parents texting with one hand and pushing swings with the other. She interviews many children frustrated with parents spending time on their BlackBerries at the dinner table or in the car while picking them up from school. Turkle draws a line between the children competing for their parents’ attention and competing for their peers’.
Robin, a 26-year-old copywriter, feels pressured to keep her BlackBerry out at all times, and now she feels anxious without it, “almost dizzy” (269). She uses it to browse Facebook now, too, which she has become increasingly annoyed with. She tells Turkle about her college friend Joanne, who wrote her long emails during a stay in Thailand. Now, Joanne is back there, but instead of writing personal letters, she publishes a journal on her blog.
Students at the Fillmore School describe their longing for phone calls, or even a letter, because it shows that a person took the time to focus only on them. Of the era of letter writing, Luis says, “‘I miss those days even though I wasn’t alive’” (271).
Turkle turns to the topic of spontaneity, which she claims the “diner of the Internet bazaar” (272) stifles. Brad, a student, tries to maintain this sense of spontaneity when posting on Facebook but struggles to resist the temptation to overthink how he wants to come across, how he wants to “play to the crowd” (273). He decides ultimately to take a sabbatical from technology, preferring to focus on the quality over the quantity of his relationships.
Turkle points out that ironically, at a conference, they were trying to figure out what tasks they could give to computers. However, that hasn’t been a problem. The computers use us. We are overwhelmed by all the buzzing and pinging; we imagine new technologies that can help get us out and, in so doing, dig the hole even deeper.
While she is working on the book, Turkle discusses the themes with a disabled colleague of hers, Richard, who values the humanness of his caregivers despite the fact that they make mistakes that a robot might not. Being with another person gives him dignity and a sense of authenticity, “of being connected to the human narrative” (282).
Turkle wonders if we care that a robot cannot feel, if “the performance of feeling” suffices. One theme that ties our preference for robots and our addiction to social connection is a desire to “control our connections, to titrate our level of availability” (282).
Turkle does not agree with Kevin Kelly, a technology writer who views connectivity as a remedy for loneliness and loss. She brings up Oedipus, “a story about the difference between getting what you want and getting what you think you want” (284) to show that rapture comes at a cost. She claims that we might find we want some solitude if we pay attention to the consequences of limitless connectivity, which is what we think we want.
She wonders about whether technology is making us less comfortable with being alone, with finding replenishing solitude.
She argues that roboticists often offer quandaries that include forced choices in their arguments for sociable robots. She supports breaking out of quandary thinking. This changes the conversation, taking it beyond the robots or no-one choice.
Turkle makes a final argument for not rejecting technology but rather contextualizing it. She sees signs in the coming generation that signal that they have the desire to curtail the use of technology. She wishes to prevent us continuing down a path where convenience and control become increasingly prioritized to the point that robotic companions tempt us. She optimistically points out that robots prey on our vulnerabilities, not our needs, and as such, we have a choice in the matter. We must be willing to accept that the situation is a complex one, and be cautious that we don’t change what being loved can be by normalizing emotionally one-sided robotic love.
Turkle texts her daughter, who is taking a gap year in Dublin before college. Remembering the letters she sent and received from her mother while in college, Turkle is overcome by nostalgia. She recalls them being long and emotionally honest. She doesn’t feel this way about Skype calls and texts with her daughter. She asks other mothers, and they share similar feelings, although they do value the ability to communicate frequently.
Turkle discusses various methods of “life capture”—ways of recording and logging huge parts of life. In some cases, the goal is to preserve one’s life story for posterity. Turkle wonders if in such cases one’s life “becomes a strategy for establishing an archive” (300) in the same way people shape their lives to produce an impressive Facebook profile. One man doing this meticulous life collection is Bell, who finds that in relying on a computer to remember his past, he loses the ability to do it himself.
She asks her daughter Rebecca about it, and Rebecca comments that it seems “pack-ratty” and the two discuss the possibility of striking up a letter correspondence.
In these sections, Turkle discusses the real concern of privacy and how it can hamper the positives of “play”—(“it is not so easy to experiment when all rehearsals are archived” (273)).She sums up her paranoia about a networked life:
We go online because we are busy but end up spending more time with technology and less with one another. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from one another. At the limit, we will settle for the inanimate, if that’s what it takes (281).
She counsels against falling for the seduction of a perfect computer that doesn’t make mistakes like humans, which could lead us to a place where robot caring is sufficient: “The idea of a robot companion serves as both symptom and dream. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by ‘solving’ it without addressing it” (283).
She claims that “no matter how difficult, it is time to look again toward the virtues of solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment” (296).
By Sherry Turkle