It's Complicated, By Sherry Turkle

In her book, It's Complicated, Danah Boyd expresses her views on modern-day social media and the modern-day teenager's reliability with it. The book is comprised of 8 enlightening categories: identity, privacy, addiction, danger, bullying, inequality, literacy, and searching for a public of their own. Throughout the book, Boyd provides data, true stories, and factual conversations to help support her main claim: social media has taken over our youth.

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.

The article Electronic Intimacy by Christine Rosen talks about the relationships people have with the online world and how it affects relationships because everything is just so fast. The purpose this article was written is to give her audience which is people who use social media to experience an actual in person relationship because the only relationship we know today lies in a direct message. Rosen poses a question to her audience that has us all thinking and also is her thesis. The question says “But does the way we communicate with each other alter that experience significantly?” (Paragraph 5). But it makes sense because in today’s world there is no such thing as personal relationships which is why Rosen states that “We are living in an

Social media has become one of the greatest developments of human technology history. In today’s society, human are surrounding by the social media and wireless devices. In Shannon Matesky’s spoken word poem “MySpace”, the poet explains “physical contact is more important than our number of contacts” (Matesky). According to the poet, Shannon Matesky successfully redefines the word “Myspace” from a formal definition of “the distance from other people or things that a person needs in order to remain comfortable” (Merriam-Webster), to an operational definition of the contact created on the social media. People now forget how to stay with face-to-face relationship, social media become the new way of communication. “We can’t deal with the face-to-face so we let technology replace the space that people are supposed to fill”(Matesky), said Matesky, we are losing the ability to connect each individual face to face, and socially connection has been taking over through social media by using technologic device. Shannon Matesky has successfully redefined the actual meaning of “Myspace” from the distance between two to the space one’s create on the social media. MySpace no longer refers to distance between two, but to

On the one hand, people should be allowed to use experimental technology in certain circumstances when the people who are actually using that feel benefitted. Mario, a patient suffers from severe OCD mentioned in Slater’s essay, says that “[he does not] are what [the psychosurgery] means, [he] cares that [he is] better. [He] is not all better, but [he] is better” (Slater 243). Mario is the proof which the new yet controversial technology honestly works and benefits people. Similarly, a women named Miriam Turkle described has a disappointing relationship with her family and thus looks for comfort from a robot named Paro. With Paro “Miriam is lost win her reverie, patting down the

Sherry Turkle, the Harvard educated MIT professor, founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, asserts that “people have never been more connected—or more alienated” from each other; that they may not aspire to their vision of best self as their devices become increasingly important. People unintentionally place more importance on “virtual relationships over real, instant messages over deep complex feelings, robots over live

He asserts that the connection problem is a result of having distant relationships, not the cause of it. Turkle does not agree. Instead, her position is that shared distant connections make it difficult to create authenticity in relationships. She further believes that technology is one of the biggest threats sustaining shared connections with others. She defines the shared connection as “a love relationship that involves coming to savor the surprise and the rough patches, of looking at the world from another’s point of view, shaped by history, biology, trauma, and joy. Computers and robots do not have these experiences to share” (268). No matter how smart or swift technology can be, it will never fulfill the need to maintain relationships with others. Hence, having relationships with technology, such as computers or robots, is incongruent with the physical and emotional experiences felt by human beings. On a basic level, technology can be a good choice because it can help people who are not good at having relationships with others. Technology can encourage and teach others to communicate, but this may not be as beneficial as one would hope. No matter how well people can communicate with technology, they may still have trouble with relating to others. The only way to

The article “I’m So Totally, Digitally, Close To You (Brave New World of Digital Intimacy)” (2002) is written by Clive Thompson, who is also a blogger and columnist. The author aims to explain the users’ attraction of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of “incessant online contact” through his text. Since social networking has become a nearly ubiquitous aspect of human contemporary life, Thomson has effectively illustrated the invasion of the social media into human daily lives, how people are commanded by it. He later goes on to explore the benefits of social networking sites and a few challenges of the usage assumptions.

The use of technology has increased rapidly as time has gone by.  In “Growing Up Tethered”, Turkle proves that the young generation need to be connected at all times by relying on their phones a lot. Reality is now based on technology, which people now live off of. Turkle’s argument in “Growing up Tethered” was used in the form of a book, with a well-organized smoothly transitioned article telling of the disconnection of the world we live in today, due to technologies such as cell phones, and social networks. We are slowly becoming a society of distance amongst each other with face to face conversations being limited to 20minutes phone conversations, and on social network sights we are making a portrayal of a person who we are

The modern trend is switching from conversation to connection as digital devices are being relied on more. People are avoiding face to face contact and are forming relationships with their technology. Their devices have no human experiences, but they still find them more trustworthy and comforting than other humans. Sherry Turkle successfully gets her point across that communication is failing with the use of ethos, logos, and

Everyday technology has become a strain on the real world. People would rather have a conversation online than face to face. In today’s society, everything is seemed to be done online, whether it is having a conversation or even trying to make new friends. In The Flight from Conversation, Sherry Turkle asserts that technology has had a negative impact on how we socialize with one another, lessening the conversation. Turkle, who has spent years researching the relationship with technology and humans, uses real world situations where technology has not only changed the way someone socializes but has changed their persona and character making the audience feel pitiful and reflective of their own actions. The author also uses logical reasoning

Furthermore, I agree with Turkle that technology is overtaking our lives in a way that we might not even notice. Most everyone has one has a cell phone. Whether we are texting, reading emails, or playing Angry Birds, we are so absorbed into a virtual world. Even though we may not realize it, many of

People begin to connect more and more every day with the power of social media. Whether someone is thousands of miles away or a few blocks from your house there is the possibility of finding them on social media. The question is, with all the connecting possible through social media does it make us more distant to one another? With today’s youth, social media begins to take over one’s life and become their main source of interacting. Social media is possibly one of the best and worst creations in the modern world but the cons definitely triumph over the pros.

Lately there have been more and more smart machines that have been taking over regular human tasks but as it grows the bigger picture is that robots will take over a lot of tasks now done by people. But, many people think that there are important ethical and moral issues that have to be dealt with this. Sooner or later there is going to be a robot that will interact in a humane manner but there are many questions to be asked like; how will they interact with us? Do we really want machines that are independent, self-directed, and has affect and emotion? I think we do, because they can provide many benefits. Obviously, as with all technologies, there are dangers as well. We need to ensure that people always

Technology is great for sending quick messages but shouldn’t be a place where we are always communicating. In order to have more authentic relationships we shouldn’t use technology for creating relationships because you truly can’t learn about one another if you’re not communicating in real life as well. What we put out on social media is often times fabricated or enhanced to depict a life that we aspire. We can edit text or pictures to our discretion and even delete images or texts, which we can’t do in real life, which is why we tend to prefer texting and social media because we have