Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

MIT's Dr. Sherry Turkle's ALONE TOGETHER (Basic Books, 2010) is must reading for anyone who has a cell phone; and a must MUST if you also have a child. This talented MIT professor again provides superbly stimulating food for thought about the social / psychological dimensions of where our chaotic technology consumption may be taking us. My own clinical research and preparing my book ( Kids, Parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Families , MyDigitalFamily.org) led me to discover Dr. Turkle, and I found her to be one of the most important and sensible scholars in the human / technology space. I found the book excellent, at times dense, and always a page turner. We all should now be concerned about being in a 'robot moment.' Cybercrime, sexting, gaming, cyberbullying, multitasking, endless power struggles with our teens, and other sensational happenings that are capturing our attention are but tips of an iceberg. Uncannily, even super-rational MIT scholars, despite their traditional impatience with how others anthropomorphize and project feelings onto their machines, now themselves develop feelings about robots, as if they were in a relationship with a living creature. This is BIG: Just because we have been anticipating them for centuries (at least since the 270 A.D. Golem), let us not be too casual now that they are actually here. Down closer to earth, in our everyday lives, we too have become insidiously tethered and 'addicted'. Dr. Turkle suggests that, like the youngsters and oldsters she has studied, we are all vulnerable to becoming attached to robots, in our present case to the many disembodied robots that run our interactive devices. Dr. Turkle also reminds us that ever-more fully embodied robots, are already on their way. We are now discovering that, given free rein, even as we intend them to improve our connections with one another, and to many extents they do, using these tools often actually fragments communication and can be harmful to us. It is also often easier to anonymously mistreat each other and ourselves. Our beloved devices filter too much out, and their use is dumbing down our kids and weakening our family lives. In addition, we now seem so attached to the devices themselves that we are scaring ourselves by just how out of control we can be. We are still attached to people, but are increasingly interacting via the mediation of disembodied robots. Sadly, we end up treating each other shabbily as these devices also lead us to willingly chop up and squeeze the richness of our nuanced and felt human connections with each other into small, thin, narrow-bandwidth data trickles. Then we feel desperately compelled to keep this thin channel open. No, wonder -- it's hard to feel a good hug through a straw. So what now? Dr. Turkle's are necessary brilliant first steps, but the progress of science is careful when it comes to creating certainty. Adopting major new technologies (bronze tools, printing press, cotton gin, automobile, TV, atomic fusion, etc.) does inevitably change each new user, families, society, and the very course of history. Maybe what is new today is that the rapidity of change is itself so stressful. Now we even have a front row seat in real time. So maybe we can now hope to influence the course of this IT revolution directly, when it is still young. People have always been social creatures who have needed each other. Humans have always been plugged in -- connected to one another through our senses and minds and bodies -- with what resemble broadband 'social synapses', hard-wired into us from birth. Making possible our survival as a species, these deep channels carry a wealth of highly choreographed uniquely human information among us. Children always have and always will need good family relationships, values, education, and parents' full love and presence to develop into human creatures with healthy brains and minds. Children are programmed to form broad-band social synapses, primarily with parents, that feed them the rich data that organizes and shapes their brains and fullest humanness. We do not know how their development is ultimately affected by increasing interactions with robots or through narrow-bandwidth devices. IMHO, it is HOW we use technology that counts. So let's start building on Dr. Turkle's and other scientists' findings and manage our technology consumption more thoughtfully, especially when it comes to children. The time has come for us to stop merely reacting with fear and mistrust of technology. We need comprehensive, sensible, practical approaches based on a sound vision of where to go from here. Such a framework needs to be credible, practical, pro-social, developmentally-oriented and family-centered. Let us take charge and make sure we, not the media or the devices, give ultimate form to our social synapses, especially when it comes to our kids. Parents: change your mindset. Sometimes parents need to paddle the family canoe against the stream of popular culture, which, after all, often seeks the lowest common denominator. After over a decade of Wild-West digital social experimentation and youth media consumption chaos, it is now time for parents to become empowered and educated and use new tools to manage the digital lives of children. I suggest beginning in early life to make the correct use of technology part of family life, not the other way around, if you want your babies to use it correctly when they become teens. Treat devices as appliances, like blenders. Harvest the best interactive digital resources and present them to kids as their personalized balanced Media Plan containing age-appropriate Growth Opportunities for Family Relationships, Values Education, Education Enrichment, Socialization, and Entertainment and your full presence. Plan media consumption as you do meals and hygiene. Decide that no interactive digital device, whether embodied or disembodied, belongs in the home where you are raising budding humans unless it enhances family life and child development. Carve out tech-free times and places: keep the robots out of reach and turned off regularly in your home, borrowing from the traditional practice of reserving the Sabbath for restorative spirituality and reflection and affirmation of our anchors in faith, values, family, and community. And please, please, do not rush yet to put embodied robots into kids' cribs or playpens. - Dr. Eitan Schwarz has been privileged to know families and kids intimately through long portions of their lifecycle journeys, including all the peak experiences and deep valleys, during his nearly 40 years of child and adult psychiatry practice. In Kids, Parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Families and [...], Dr. S empowers, educates, and gives the right tools to parents wanting to raise kids with healthy minds and brains in today's digital world.

Immediacy versus immensity. What does it mean to be only a couple of key strokes away from speaking to anyone on the planet? We still struggle to find an adequate metaphor for the impact of technology on daily life today. I am reminded of when I arrived in Germany as a foreign exchange student in 1978, Before I left, I could not find my destination, Göttingen, on any map that I owned or could find in the local library. Furthermore, my correspondence with the university was entirely in German, a language that I had studied but not yet mastered. When my flight arrived in Frankfurt, I was entirely at the mercy of the stationmaster to get on the right train to reach my destination. Today, answers to all such travel questions can be found on any smart phone; one need not be fluent in German to understand them fully; and, anywhere along the way, you can call your parents (or kids) to help sort everything out. Talk about a reduction in uncertainty! The effect of changes in technology on us as individuals and on today’s culture is the subject of Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together. Turkle explores the immediacy of technology in part one—The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies—and the immensity of technology in part two—Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes (vii). While these parts could easily have been themes in separate books, Turkle’s interest in the changing perceptions of intimacy and solitude clearly binds them together. Alone Together is part of a trilogy (The Second Self, Alone Together, and Life on the Screen; 4) focused on the cultural effect of technology. Turkle’s 14 chapters are equally divided between analysis of the individual response to robots— 1. Nearest Neighbors 2. Alive Enough 3. True Companions 4. Enchantment 5. Complexities 6. Love’s Labor Lost 7. Communion —and the response to life tethered to cell and computer networks— 8. Always On 9. Growing Up Tethered 10. No Need to Call 11. Reduction and Betrayal 12. True Confessions 13. Anxiety 14. The Nostalgia of the Young (vii-viii). Repeatedly, I found Turkle anticipating my anxieties about technology and offering a balanced assessment. She writes: “we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place” (295) In other words, technology is a tool that can be used for either good or evil. Turkle’s focus on the individual response to technology is no accident. Turkle describes herself as: “the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, the founder and director of the MIT initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist.”[1] Her background as a psychologist shows through clearly in her choice of topics to discuss and in her extensive use of case studies to authenticate her points. An economist or sociologist might easily have focused more on questions of productivity and institutional change, but Turkle never goes there. Here the focus is on responses by individuals to technology—no military drones, no self-driving cars, no targeted advertising, no robotic assembly lines, no wiz bang. Turkle’s perspective is reflective, fresh. Her special concern is for children. Let me focus a minute on Turkle’s two parts: robotics and networking. Robotics. As a member of the MIT faculty, Turkle has special access to the MIT robotics lab where her work focuses on social robots, especially robotic toys like Tamagotchi, Furbi, Merlin, My Real Baby, Cog, Kismit, and so on. Turkle writes: “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” (1) Unlike Barbie, who invites you to project your issues and emotions on the doll in a kind of Rorshach test, these toys interact, talk, and appear to learn with you—what Turkle describes as a “new psychology of engagement” (38). In other words, the relationship possible with these robots is much more complex than with traditional toys. For example, citing Baird, she asks: “How long can you hold the object [a toy, an animal, or a robot] upside down before your emotions make you turn it back?” (45) With a toy, no one cares if you abuse it; with a gerbil, abuse is seen as cruel and is discouraged by most adults; but with a robot, like Furby, that complains, how do you respond—do you feel an ethical dilemma? Why? Turkle observes: “We are at the point of seeing digital objects as both creatures and machines.” (46) As part of her research, Turkle would lend these robotic toys to children and adults and then return after two weeks to interview them about their experiences and retrieve the toys. Frequently, the interviews would be postponed as the recipients—even the adults—did not want to give up the toys. Occasionally, this issue posed embarrassment, such as when a grandmother obviously preferred a robot, such as My Real Baby, to spending time with their own grandchildren (118). This happened so often that Turkle stopped trying to retrieve the robots after the interviews. Networking. The immensity of telephone and computer networks. Not only do we have the ability to contact anyone, anywhere on earth; we never really leave home. Turkle writes: “When I grew up the idea of ‘global village’ was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete. Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home.” (156) This level of connectedness poses a challenge for adolescents who have a developmental need to separate themselves from their parents (174). Especially in American culture, individual autonomy is a cultural icon. In my own experience as a foreign student, the current level of connection made possible through cell phones and the internet was unthinkable. During my year in Germany, for example, telephone calls were so expensive that my gift for Christmas from my host family was a call home. My remoteness during the year disrupted a number of relationships, particularly with my parents [2], but I was well-prepared for this separation having worked summers as a camp counselor in high school and attended college out of state. By contrast, my own kids have had cell phones since high school and are seldom out of touch with their mother for more than a few days. Turkle talks about kids using texting to validate emotions even before they are fully aware of them. In effect, they poll their friends on how they should feel about things or test out emotions before fully investing in them (175-177). She writes: “in the psychoanalytical tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use.” (177) So here we have a niche for technology—to insulate people from the push and pull of normal, complex human interaction. What is perhaps surprising is that kids that text constantly are often texting their own parents (178)—which suggests the need for a mature and informed parenting style. Wow. I never felt like a fully trained parent—how about you? Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together is hugely interesting, informative, and accessible read. College professors looking for insight in discussing the role of technology should consider this book. I would certainly consider reading the other books in this trilogy. [1] [...] [2] At one point the year after I returned home I visited relatives and attended a dinner party. No one felt comfortable talking with me. Finally, I learned why—my farm relatives could not imagine that a world traveler, such as myself, would find talking to them interesting to speak with. Once we got over that point, things picked up and returned to a more normal interaction.

The other day, located at the museum of civilization in Quebec City (English translation) was an exhibit showcasing the dangers of technology and a room where would put under facial recognition technologies. The exhibit itself was an attempt to have a social discourse around aspects of technologies showcasing a strange scenario of a world that we are living in now, a technological revolution. Located on the corner of one of the exhibits was Sherry Turkle's Alone Together works, which maybe one day will be looked at as a relic in a museum. The exhibit itself, sort of like this book, is more or less the most tame version possible. Technology itself seems to have a spectacle that Debord which sole goal is to prevent a social discourse or the Foucauldian conception of an inverse one referred to as a Panopticon. Strangely, the being that is Sauron, the all seeing eye where nothing escapes its gaze in the land of Mordor is I think a good metaphor for data collection and at times does remind me of a more fully realized version. We are certainly way past both along with Deleuzian's postscripts of society of control and are in the third stage where many issues like this are ignored for some reason and never discussed. There are numerous discussions about other things and almost all of them have done little to nothing to alleviate the subject or create any type of discourse, I think this is largely built around the utilitarian utopia or perhaps it is more the telos (end of history) we are following where the end justifies the means and we must take our destiny into our own hands. Maybe, its the dialectic toward synthesis of technology being an apocalyptic end to the world or being viewed as its binary opposite where it is viewed as super positive and innovative. Either way, it doesn't matter, it will still keep happening and won't matter, all it takes is preconditioning and ensuring that through the study of knowledge that certain areas can be manipulated and create addictions to technology, something that has already happened and of course there was no discussion around that and at the very least will maybe in a few decades if regulated, just become another addiction like cigarette warning labels with varying degrees of illegality. Lately, there has been a push for people to be immortal beings or robots. Where people wish to become AI or something, without any possible agenda, losing all sense of privacy, presumably working toward a conquering of the right to disappear or to be immortal, there is a radical stance, that Jaron Lanier has actively discussed in his other works. There is again genetics where potentiality can be repressed to ensure that individuals are designed a certain way but at the end of the day, it follows an individuals that have already been "normalized" or subjectified and more or less bring things further under control. There is now the strange avatar that is written on the internet or social media websites, one where people make presumptions and assume that person is real based upon what they say or their appearance of how they present their wall on Facebook or anything else really. As the reader knows, this is usually not the case and many find out the person they thought they knew wasn't real at all or there was an entire missing area that existed in the real world occurring simultaneously, that if known, would provide clarity would make sense and put an end to all discussion. The internet itself has become like other addictions or obsessions it is usually for me as a reader the last place I would ever expect to have any type of discussion and 9 times out of 10, I have been misinterpreted severely (reddit) and have watched with some horror as it has been taken out of context as I'm sure many have experienced themselves. It becomes more of a personal nightmare when others use the medium to write double meanings and then imagination, based on what the readers think takes over and one usually sees flame wars on various debates and forums, where no sense of anything is reached and its difficult to know who or what is even real or believes it at that point. There's the expectation that those on the internet can be mature and tell the truth, and in time, it becomes obvious that's non-existent not to say completely impossible. There is also the aspect that everything has become distorted with fake news and reliability is put into the question, along with a certain unwellness as Turkle showcases here where people become more isolated. If we forcibly evolve the human being, (we have already done this with the destruction of the environment), we will create more of an imperfect world of artifice where humans will become more experimental I guess following a continuous deferment of knowledge toward reason and is very similar to a globe that is in the hand of another that designed it or well designed the future generations. I think if these were discussed I might begin to pay attention to the field but the waves have been non-existent at best. I found all one can do is perhaps bear witness to our destruction if we aren't consumed in the next several centuries or so. Like most things none of the things that have happened up till now needed to play out the way they did and it still happened. I highly doubt anything will change, which has continuously declined over the years. Instead, it is simply the world people want, which is too bad of course, if there is another life after this one, like some sort option, I would have to do a massive evaluation at this point. So in time as a reader, I may say more around the subject if I noticed some type of social discourse, but for now pretty non-existent and tame overall. You would need at the very least a second progressive era to counter it and that's non-existent we are outdoing the 20th century gilded age and with that maybe some day it may change. Until then, no social discourse and tame books like this one. I did attempt to name drop areas for more interested readers to broaden their perspectives and get a full picture from another side. That doesn't mean an endorsement from me, its more attempting to help the reader go down other routes if interested, because the field itself is tame and we are at a very bad turning point.

That was one of my thoughts as I read Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: no matter what robots learn to do, they will never learn to write a book as thoughtful, informative, and intense as Alone Together. They would not know how to pose the questions, let alone use such discernment in addressing them. It is interesting that Turkle chose to discuss robots in the first part of the book and the Internet in the second part. By presenting the "strange" part first, she gives us a sense of how strange our everyday lives actually are, how far we have moved away from enjoying each other's presence. Turkle quotes children and adults who hesitate to use the phone because it seems awkward and intrusive; it is much easier, they say, to dash off a text or email. At the same time, Turkle points out, because of this very convenience, people expect quick responses. She describes the anxiety of teenagers when they do not get an immediate reply to their text messages. One girl talks about needing her cell phone for "emergencies"; it turns out that what she means by "emergency" is having a feeling without being able to share it. Turkle shows how our Internet communications mix the deliberate with the unconsidered. On the one hand, people put great effort even into short email messages. On the other, they "test" ideas and expressions in formation to see how others react. Some create fake online profiles just to try out different sides of their personality. The problem with such experimentation is that it is conditioned almost entirely by online reactions, often reactions of strangers. There is little room to form thoughts independently. Throughout the book, Turkle brings up the question of solitude. What happens to our solitude when we are able to get responses to anything and are expected to provide responses in turn? What happens to our sense of dissent when everything we say and do online bears a trace? She points out how important privacy is to dissent, for if we have no place where we can think and act unseen, we end up policing ourselves and censoring our own thoughts. We tame and restrain ourselves, knowing that anything we do and say may end up "out there" forever. "But sometimes a citizenry should not simply 'be good,'" Turkle writes. "You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent." Also, Turkle points out, when we have no privacy we lose the ability to privilege some thoughts and actions over others. She quotes Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who says that "if you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Like many others, he ignores the possibility that there might be privacy without shame or crime. We might want to keep things to ourselves for any number of reasons; when we "put everything out there," that "everything" is somehow trivialized. Turkle quotes a girl who claims there's nothing much to know about her; "I'm kind of boring." Will the loss of privacy lead more people to dismiss themselves as boring? One of Turkle's most powerful points is that we have come "to take the performance of emotion as emotion enough." Who cares, some might say, if the robot cannot feel? It behaves as though it feels, and that's enough. But is it? I see similar assumptions in education, where test scores are equated with learning, and students' visible activity in class is equated with "engagement." How do you go about defending something that is not tangible, visible, or measurable? It is difficult, but Turkle does it. Because this book is so informative, because Turkle understands the complexities of technologies, she can make bold statements. She insists that we have the capacity and obligation to question the principles behind new inventions. She suggests that the touch of a human hand is indeed different from a robot's, that a handwritten letter is different from a text, that thinking and remembering have value even when it seems there's no more time for them. I won't give away the ending, but it left me with a surprising sadness, as though in a movie theater, when it's over and the place is dark, and you sit there for a few minutes, stunned, before getting up and walking out into the blink-provoking street.

After seeing Sherry Turkle's incredible TED talk on this topic, I was compelled to read the book associated with the talk. I'm heavily interested in the ways that the Internet and constant connectedness has affected us both as individuals, and also as a society, so I felt this book would be a slam dunk when it comes to exploring those topics. Unfortunately, I felt the book painted a picture of Sherry's thoughts on the topic via a series of well-selected anecdotes, but I felt she was non-committal on her conclusions. The first half of the book analyzes how robotics are beginning to affect our lives, especially the lives of those who are currently seen as burdens to society, such as the elderly, children, and mentally handicapped. This section did not interest me as much, and I felt the topic could have been better addressed in it's own volume. Addressing robotic encounters in the same volume as connected encounters seems to me obtrusive and unnecessary. My recommendation to purchasers is to skip the first half of the book unless you're specifically interested in that topic. The second of the book addresses constant connectedness, and paints several pictures of how it has affected our lives. Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that once you've seen 10-15 such stories, you've seen them all. Nevertheless, she persists through several more anecdotes. In fact, this book's. overall structure is an anecdote or two, followed by a somewhat noncommittal discussion of what the anecdote might mean. The overall volume could have been better addressed had it been organized better. She does, however, paint a general picture through the anecdotes that discusses how various people relate to the Internet and social networking. Overall, however, I appreciated the discussion of the topic, even if it was a little long and left more questions than answers. I suppose I expected that a member of the MIT faculty would have some stronger opinions or perhaps have organized research of this kind into quantifiable observations, however, this is not the case with this book. If you're looking for a volume that, in an impressionistic way, paints an overall picture of how technology might be making us lonely, unknown and disconnected, than this is the book for you. If you're looking for quantifiable research, this is not going to satisfy. This book is far more anthropology than statistics. 3.5/5

We are so familiar with Blackberrys, iPhones, and other devices showing up at dinner or, in my case, in the middle of psychiatric sessions, we hardly blink an eye or click a mouse. It's routine. It's the 21st century. But if I call an old friend on my iPhone while driving to work and talk with her (illegally), the conversation is not the same as if I had deliberately called her from my favorite chair at home. Out split attention always comes at a price. What I loved about the book as a child psychiatrist myself is her capturing how today's youth hold technology so close it may as well be under the skin. One youth is "waiting to be interrupted right now" by his phone, and all youth are reinventing separation (perhaps being out of range or temporarily in a tunnel under the Big Dig?). Going to college simply means checking for good reception and endless texts, photos, and instant messages go back and forth rather than a single phone call on Sunday evening. Her subtle and rich discussion of adolescents and technology is a must read. Adolescents can wander far from home in a suburb and still know parents are looking for them because the phone rings, even though the teen may not answer. And they may choose to text, and not to talk, to avoid the intimacy of spontaneity. Similarly, she describes how teens can easily ring one friend after another to find someone who picks up. Remind me again, what is being alone? The book is a major contribution to teasing out just how much technology is changing who we, and our children, are. I found the second major section of the book ("Networked") far more relevant to my life than the first, which primarily concerns robots. Some readers--- perhaps those routinely interrupted by their Blackberrys -- may want to begin with the second section. Alone Together is the mother of all wake-up calls about how technology and who we are evolve together. It's not just 'the world' that has changed. No one has observed this with a finer eye than Sherry Turkle.

ATTENTION ALL PARENTS, SENIORS, TEACHERS, CIVIC-RELIGIOUS-HEALTH LEADERS, STUDENTS, and all other guardians of learning! THIS IS A MUST READ. Another excellent book from Professor Sherry Turkle! One with vision. I remain an ardent fan of her work. She has consistently informed, enlightened, and inspired through her clear writing style and depth. Sherry Turkle's new book is timely, provocative, research-solid, and elegantly written from mind and heart. It should be required reading for all interested in the never-ending confluence of technologies and human nature. Its humanistic undercurrent sensibly counters the far-reaching consequences of our technological imperative, and in so doing raises profound questions of identity, epistemology, and ethics. What makes her book particularly rich is its documentation of many voices - from young children to young adults, adults to elderly - who find solace in the company of "sociable robots" to compensate for missing human interaction. Her message is resounding: Let's return to Real Life - natural, animal, and human - that is all around us. For our present and future, the stakes are indeed high. Now, more than ever, we need to challenge the disturbing authority of the hyperreal (that dimension we tend to uncritically embrace when simulation assumes more "reality" than the real). This memorable book is a prominent and worthy voice in raising the crucial questions. Without hesitation, I recommend this book to ALL, ESPECIALLY PARENTS.

I tend to read anything by Sherry Turkle - her thoughts often leave me with more questions than answers, an aspect of reading and learning that I adore! True confessions, I tend to see technological advances as 'progress.' Does it seem to you that we readily (eagerly?) adopt technology into our lives with little consideration for the personal, emotional, relational, and ethical impact? Turkle calls us to slow down, reflect, and consider the impacts of technology particularly our emotional, relational, communicative, and connective lives. What is gained? What is lost? What might be the impacts be? Are the naysayers chicken little, the sky is falling or are there truly some negative aspects of technology adoption that warrant further consideration? Topics explored include: intimacy, solitude, communion, companionship, anxiety, betrayal, connectedness, disconnectedness, multitasking, separation, identity, and personal development. My favorite chapters: Ch9, Growing Up Tethered discussed young people, their personal development, and the impact of living "in a state of waiting for connection" (p. 171). I laughed out loud at Ch10's No Need to Call describing how annoying(laugh) a telephone call can be given its immediacy and immediate demand for our attention. Read this book also: Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.

'Alone Together' is the third volume in a trilogy produced over three decades by Sherry Turkle, a psychoanalyst based at MIT, the preceding volumes being 'The Second Self' (1984) and 'Life on the Screen' (1995). I read each one soon after publication and found them engrossing, thought-provoking and well-illustrated with illuminating case-studies and insightful observations. The current volume is in two parts: the first develops themes from 'The Second Self' (here related to `sociable robots'), the second from 'Life on the Screen' (which focused on the construction of identities online). Because of the limitations of space, my comments here focus on Part Two. Whereas the earlier volumes were relatively upbeat about the implications of new technologies, the tone of the current volume feels markedly more jaundiced, alerting us to some potential social costs of `social media'. Provocatively, the main refrain is that in an online culture we are always connected (Turkle says `tethered'), but are rarely (meaningfully) connecting. Although (somewhat ironically) one may hear the same sentiment in a current commercial for a well-known matchmaking website, Turkle's nuanced stance `is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least'; indeed, she remains `cautiously optimistic'. This is a seriously reflective work well-informed by extensive ethnographic studies. The focus on authenticity and intimacy recalls the concerns voiced by Socrates in Plato's 'Phaedrus' about an earlier technological development--publishing one's ideas in written form--in particular the fear that communication at a distance would undermine genuine (face-to-face) human discourse. This has been a recurrent anxiety throughout the history of communication technologies. As the title suggests, this book reveals and explores unresolved tensions and contradictions in our attitudes and behaviour in relation to the latest manifestations of these technologies. Distance communication in all of its forms (print media, broadcasting, telecommunications, online) tends to facilitate what the sociologists call `weak (or loose) ties'. One sociological argument is that society at large depends on the maintenance of loose ties between distant acquaintances and those we know only indirectly, functioning as a sort of social glue, in addition to the strong ties and commitments that bind us rather more closely to our `immediate' family and `close' friends. As a psychoanalyst, however, the author argues that the personal cost may be that we are coming to rely too much on online communication with relative strangers at the expense of intimacy with, and commitment to the people we know from face-to-face interaction. For instance, her earlier enthusiasm for online worlds as `identity workshops' is tempered by a concern that the mediation of a screen encourages more premeditated behaviour, which has in turn led many teenagers to prefer texting to speaking on the phone because speech `reveals too much'. Ethnographic approaches are particularly useful in highlighting illuminating instances that may raise broader issues. Although such studies do not enable global generalizations, they can help to frame hypotheses for further research and reflection. This is indeed a book to be read and re-read. Sherry Turkle's timely critique reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's caveat that `we are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.' The always accessible style of her writing encourages engagement rather than closure, so that anyone who has paused to reflect on the implications of Facebook for friendship or of mobile phones for solitude is likely to find themselves entering into an imaginary debate with the author, countering the Platonic anxiety that reading is antisocial, and thus reminding us that whatever the apparent affordances of a particular technology, maintaining a well-informed critical perspective can reduce our vulnerabilities.

Ainda atual para buscar a compreensão sobre a nossa relação com as tecnologias. Recomendável e a abordagem em primeira pessoa é honesta e um convite a analisar sobre si.

Der Autor analysiert in dem Buch die Auswirkungen von Technologien (zB Spielzeugroboter, Handy) auf das soziale Verhalten der Menschen (von Kindern bis zu Senioren). Das Thema beschäftigt den Autor schon sein ganzes berufliches Leben und dies ist mittlerweile sein dritter Band zum Thema. Er reflektiert auch darüber, wie sich die Einstellung der Menschen (auch seine eigene) im Laufe der letzten 30 Jahre im Hinblick auf das Zusammenleben mit technologischen Begleitern verändert hat. Am Ende hat man als Leser ein mulmiges Gefühl, wenn man sich dabei ertappt, lange Zeit alleine mit dem Handy zu verbringen, im Internet (vielleicht sogar im Second Life) zu verweilen und stets dabei im Irrglauben ist, soeben soziale Interaktion zu betreiben. Das Buch war ein echter eye-opener, da diese Haltung gegenüber technologischen Produkten schleichend in den letzten Jahrzehnten in unser Leben Einzug gehalten hat und kaum mehr wegzudenken ist. Eine Empfehlung für jedermann, vielleicht sogar eine Pflichtlektüre (in Ausschnitte und zumindest im Fazit!) für Kinder, die sich mittlerweile mehr im cyberspace als im "echten" Kontakt mit Freunden aufhalten.

libro conforme alla descrizione, arrivato nei tempi e in perfette condizioni.

この本は、僕たちみんながこれからかんがえていかなくてはならない、非常に大切な問題を数多くのインタビューや、Researchをもとに書いてある。心理学的な観点に、焦点を置き構成されている。人は、ロボットに恋をする時がくるのか。。とにかく、ぜひてにとって、かんがえてみて欲しい。