Disturbing portrait of the future is one of the blurb descriptions on the back cover of Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Turkle is an M.I.T. professor and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book is, in effect, the third of a trilogy and she has researched this subject for twenty years. She writes that we are living parallel lives in a virtual world and that her research shows that too many people find their online life more satisfying than their actual lives and this might be leading to fully networked lives.
She explores two avenues in the book. The first being personal robotics and the second social networking. Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, recently reviewed here, alluded to technology as being a living organism in itself. Turkle adds the descriptive seductive. We are fearful of intimacy, she writes, in a way that keeps us just far enough away from others to keep us comfortable.
My interest in this book is in the social networking aspect of it. My concern is that a nation, America, about to collapse from ignorance within and enemies without, increases the former and motivates the latter through its inane fascination with Facebook and its equally narcissism inducing cousins. Turkle feels that it is necessary to begin with personal robotics. As did Kelly, Turkle reveres Charles Darwin but its probably better that such a book as this comes from a member of Higher Education and Psychology, for Christian books have been giving this caveat on the computer age for decades but their message seldom reaches any further than the customers of a Christian book store or the listeners to Christian radio.
As I read Turkle's comments on her trip to the Galapagos, I smiled and glanced over at my CD player where the soundtrack from Master And Commander, a movie where the Galapagos played no small part, was playing. Half of this book was read in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel as my wife was busy with her own volunteer work for our society while I tag along every January to read. Why is it that urban areas are so...liberal? After four hours of turnpike driving without seeing an Obama bumper sticker, I only had to walk past three cars in the parking garage to see one, and there were two more before I got to the elevators. I sat and watched with fascination, both the lobby dwellers and the street race walkers with phones constantly positioned by the ear. The further one gets from the hustle...and the hustle-bustle of the city, and the closer one gets to the land of Bonanza Steakhouses and Harley Davidson dealerships, the more neurons cease to oscillate in abnormal patterns. People walk faster in the city, smile less, do not make eye contact as often, pat their back pocket for a wallet or look to see that their purse is closed every few minutes and generally try to stay as far away from others as possible. Their magazines tend to be on health, fitness, sport cars, money and astrology whereas the closer one lives to the cornfields, the magazines tend to be on woodworking, sports, quilting, the auto-trader and fraternal veterans organizations. Women's glasses in the city tend to be large and round, magnifying the iris while on state route whatever they.... well just look at a picture of Sarah Palin and you'll see them. City dwellers tend to look out of their work windows and down upon the race walkers on the streets below while in suburbia they look out of their windows up to birds flying in the sky. But enough of my own observations. Have our smart phones become a phantom limb, as the book states, when we don't have them in our possession? I know that mine was and that is part of the reason for the self-imposed six-week moratorium I subjected myself to a few months ago.
Sherry Turkle's research on robots begins with those toys that Americans bought their children beginning in the 90s. Names such as Tamagotchi and Furbie were still in the recesses of my memory. She moves on to robotic dogs for companionship, robotic babies for teaching, and even robotic adults that can serve mankind in everything from babysitting, to care for the elderly, to therapeutics for everyone. "People disappoint, robots do not," she writes. Her research involved children, adolescents and adults while her personal interviews brought her into contact with 250 individuals who opened up to her on their computer usage. One man wants to know why he cannot marry his "female" robot and Turkle supplies a little bit more information than we need on just how these robots can serve.
Turkle is right in that the future is unfolding before us. We have lost the ability to look ahead and to see consequences. She fears for the children who are being weaned on technologies that confuse the virtual with the real. She uses the phrase fully tethered life, and writes that we are too often shattered when unplugged. She sees social networking as our future and I sincerely hope that she is wrong on this. Much of her focus was on Facebook where her first concern is whether our profiles are really who we are or who we want to project ourselves to be. "We can always be elsewhere" through social networking, and "we tend to the net and the net teaches us to need it" she writes. Do we really collect friends or do we simply access others, and only the parts of them we find fulfilling, comforting or amusing.
The author paints a panorama of today's networking and begins with the Internet game Second Life, if you can call it a game. In Second Life one creates one's own avatar and lives a virtual life through it. You don't like the house you live in now? Create your dream home and live there in cyberspace! Work in the profession that you have always wanted to and the best news of all is that there is most likely a female avatar out their looking for a little romance! One problem here is that one is never really sure the gender of the one who they are romancing. Turkle provides case study after case study in many areas of virtual life in cyberspace.
One story that I found very interesting was that of two young women, Robin and Joanne, who had a wonderful friendship in college. Joanne finished her schooling in anthropology and went off to Thailand. She wrote long, detailed emails to Robin every two weeks on her experiences. Robin treasured them and would read and reread them for they were "elegant, detailed, poetic." Joanne returns home only to leave for Thailand again a few years later only this time she puts her experiences online for everyone to see for it is more "efficient." This devastated Robin for this close friendship was now to be shared with anyone who had access to Robin's Facebook page. I have felt this before upon receiving Christmas newsletters. You are happy to hear from a friend but at the same time, removed from being part of a close friendship.Turkle laments that the young view the telephone call as something that does not have to be answered, but the text does; and to one young person, at least, teaching her parents how to text was a big mistake. Turkle writes that people can be "processed" easily on the net. Texting is fast but a voice can only slow you down, and it is harder to live up to your profile in a telephone conversation.
Her warnings though are too mild for she gives far too much credit to the good things social networking can provide. This same distorted tolerance is on display in the media's reporting on the Facebook revolution in Egypt. There may be wars ahead with hundreds of thousands if not millions dead but...democracy must be embraced, and right now! Democracy is a worthy pursuit, a pursuit I have lauded many times. Freedom and liberty are essentials for a healthy society and I have filled these pages with this thought but it is hard to take it serious from those pressuring Egypt to lay bare their defenses against the radical fundamentalist in the name of democracy when they found it hard to rejoice in the Iraqi elections or in the Tea Parties for that matter. Coincidentally, The Drudge Report has, as I write, a report titled Generation Net: The youngsters who prefer their virtual lives to the real world. Sherry Turkle's book is not even mentioned here but the results were the same. "Children are happier online" and "they can be exactly who they want to be." The phrase "divorced from reality" is used.
This nation is running, not to the sound of the trumpet that calls us, but to the roar of the mouse. Whereas it was once said that the pen is mightier than the sword, it may soon be replaced with the logarithm is mightier than the pen.
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Political Thought and the Christian
