Literature Review #5

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print. 

            In this novel, Turkle describes how people of this day and age are losing touch with one another, and are no longer having the same connections with one another compared to generations prior. People are beginning to lose sight of basic “reality” and are completely submersed in their online lives and are more focused on making the shallow online connections, rather than making and sustaining real life connections with the people who surround us. She is depicting how technology is slowly but surely taking over the lives of much of society, and if this continues there will no longer be the simple sense of basic communication.

            Sherry Turkle is a professor at MIT and studied at Harvard University. Her novel, Alone Together, has gotten rave reviews and she was even featured on a segment of TED Talks. Turkle was also featured on an episode of the Colbert Report, and her extensive knowledge regarding society and technology is clear throughout her writing.

            Turkle seems to key in on the idea of connectedness, and is constantly comparing the idea of real authentic personable relationships, compared to the altering idea of apparent “relationships” online. Although both have the element of connectivity, personable and authentic real-life relationships are far more valuable that the idea of being interconnected via the Internet.

            She also brings up the idea of the basic conversation. Conversations are no longer held over the phone or over coffee, people attempt to receive and output their information as fast and as easily as possible, and it is unfamiliar and senseless, when it is necessary to get updates on friends and families lives through reading a status, email or even a text message. People are no longer valuing the aspect of communication, and many people are falling victim to the feelings of loneliness due to their complete and utter cut off from society through technology.

            “For a start, is presumes certain entitlements: it can absent itself from the physical surround-including the people in it. It can experience the physical and virtual in near simultaneity. And it is able to make more time by multitasking, our twenty-first century alchemy” (Turkle 155).

“This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now”  (Turkle)

“I believe that in our culture of stimulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians- threat and obsession, taboo and fascination” (Turkle 266).

            This article helped me explore my research question because it posed a threat to how too much technology could be dangerous to society. With technology all around us, it is important to only take key elements into the classroom, so students are not completely bombarded and shut down from the overload of technology that we have in our world today.