Blog Post 2

Psychologist, Sherry Turkle's Ted Talk "Connected, But Alone?" confronts the subject of too much time spent on devices such as smartphones and laptops. Turkle introduces her discussion quoting a text she received from her daughter, Rebecca moments before her talk telling her "she will rock"(Turkle). Though Turkle found Rebecca's gesture sweet, she describes herself as embodying the "central paradox" because even though technology is very prominent in her life, her talk mainly focuses on the negative aspects of technology on our text savvy world. From there Turkle divulges further into her history with technology. She takes listener back to 1996 when experimentation with chat rooms and virtual communities was just beginning. From her interaction with these early revolutions in technology Turkle became excited, "[mostly about] the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world [to learn more] about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world" (Turkle). Today however, Turkle states she is "still excited by technology, but believe[s]... we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go"(Turkle). Turkle informs listener that it is because of this belief she has been doing further research about the effects of advancing technology in our world. Since 1996 Turkle has done numerous studies on technologies of mobile communication and have interviewed hundreds of people about "their plugged in lives" (Turkle). From her studies Turkle found "that our devices, are so psychologically powerful [and] they don't only change what we do,[but] they change who we are" (Turkle). From there Turkle further explains how technology cause people to be withdrawn from the now and completely submerged into their different devices. She explains how this outcome is negative to our wellbeing, because it is causing us to lose our ability to have natural human connection. Turkle believes technology is  causing us to isolate ourselves from face-to-face conversation because we " don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather [ourselves]" when speaking face-to-face like we do when texting. When closing her talk Turkle does not encourage the end of technology, but instead encourages the audience to "use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love" (Turkle).