"Can You Hear Me Now" Analysis of Sherry Trukle's Essay
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ur Today it is very easy to get tethered to electronics and communications that give you instant results. A quick check on networking site is becoming the norm verses actually picking up the phone and calling the person you are catching up with. Sherry Turkle, in her essay “Can You Hear Me Now?,” discusses points and personal experiences that persuade the reader that today’s society is becoming “more connected- or more alienated”, than ever before. Turkle utilizes the pathos appeal by using the rhetorical appeals of anecdotes, assertion, and reasoning. She relies heavily on the use of pathos throughout the entire article. This is important because it gets the reader involved in the story and sets the stage for the entire article.…show more content… In this society many people completely immerse themselves in a new life that often times leads to distractions within their real life. Turkle states, “For those who are lonely yet fearful of intimacy, online life provides environments where one can be a loner yet not alone, have the illusion of companionship without the demands of sustained, intimate friendship”. This statement supports her overall claim that the addiction to technology leads to a person alienating themselves. A person could have the greatest life in an online environment and not even leave their house. This continues to lead the reader to the second trouble of her soul by setting them up emotionally. In this instance Turkle is trying to elicit a reaction of feeling sorry for the people reading her essay.
She continues to use pathos to describe how people spend more time finding about their life and what is happening in it by the use of BlackBerry’s and constant checking of e-mails. “Think of the BlackBerry user watching the BlackBerry movie of his life as someone watching a movie that takes on a life of its own”. (Turkle) Here she uses another anecdote to describe a person watching their life go by tying them into another electronic device that shuts off the rest of the world physically and emotionally. This is another good example of being