connected, but disconnected

February 24, 2011 at 10:54 am Leave a comment

As technology makes deep inroads into our lives, we are spending more time, with ourselves – in virtual worlds of our making – that essentially is the prognosis of author Sherry Turkle’s insightful new work, “Alone Together,” reports the NYT.

While immersing ourselves in worlds where avatars and emoticons rule, there seems to be no room for intimate forms of expression.

Can we break out of this adult dollhouse? It’s going to be tough, but not impossible.

She takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies — including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots — have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings.

Instead of real friends, we “friend” strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writes, “makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.”

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real.