The Empathy Diaries Summary

Many people are not mindful of how technology is disconnecting us from one another. When people pull out smartphones during a conversation or social gathering they will cause others to feel disconnected. These phones allow people to withdraw from what is happing now and move another situation reducing the quality of the conversation that is within our reach. In the essay "Stop Googling. Let's Talk" by Sherry Turkle; she believes that we are becoming a culture of short chats versus growing our culture of thinkers that are open to sharing in constructive and meaningful conversations with one another.

As cell phones have become more and more common in today's society, some people have a significant issue with not being able to disengage from their cell phone. So-called “smart phones,” which combine functionality of an organizer, browsing the Internet, playing tunes, and taking pictures, only worsen the reliance on one’s cell phone. Cell phones are no longer just a privilege but now have become a necessity. While using such devices for everyday tasks, work, and socializing with friends and family is perfectly normal, not being able to put them down while engaged in a conversation with your significant other or a friend who’s sitting in front of you may denote an increasing problem. In today's society, cell phones have become an addiction and affect our lives in more negative ways than positive ones, causing face to face communication to become less prevalent and loneliness to become the most common ailment of the modern world.

In his June 12, 2015 article “Flick, Flick” published in the commonweal, Rand, Richard Copper wrote that people are addicted to their phones and they don't have time to make new conversation with others. People are using their phone to talk to their friends instead of talking to them in person. According to the article, people are “farming out” conversation, a significant part of their lives and their selves. In the article author gives an example, where his three friends and himself went to see the red sox game, instead of watching the game all of his friends were playing games on their phones. In the article he also says “ our here is disappearing” meaning that people do not want to talk to anyone in person; they just want to use their phones

Surely, we can’t deny how technology helps us contact each other, but there is one idea that they overlooks, which is the addiction that people have on the cell phone. Whenever people congregate, the action they do is stare on the phones. Audrey, sixteen, a Roosevelt junior, describes how her relationship with her mother breaks up as her mother spent all her time on the phone every time they were together. “It could have been four days since I last spoke to her, then I sit in the car and wait silently until she’s done,” said Audrey (377). In other words, Audrey is trying to express her feeling that how the cell phone has estranged her and her mother. From these, we can tell that how technology has been a “drug” that keeps us from interacting with each

In Turkle's article she focuses on how more and more individuals are becoming less emotionally involved in conversations because of how much technology is being used in every aspect of our lives. People are using their phones as a shield from silence; when they get involved in a conversation that has a long pause they can pull out their phones and avoid any awkwardness. Most conversations don’t ever get past light-hearted topics which doesn’t allow individuals to develop conversations that are

Social interaction is an important aspect of day to day life and digital communication has made that personal connection come to a halt. Turkle says, “It’s not so good for the sort of nuanced understanding and relationship-building you get when you are present with your friends — for sharing intimacies, for sharing difficult news, for saying you are sorry, for really getting to know someone” (How Smartphones are Killing the Fine Art of Conversation). From infancy we are exposed to emotions, learning our limits and gaining approval through the look in our mother's eye. Today smartphones have become an extension of the physical body removing the ability to see how our choices affect others. Humans compete for the attention of their significant other, of their peers, of their parent, continuously losing the capability to understand social emotions. Lack of eye contact and face to face conversation inhibits full understanding of relationships and is reducing the development of closeness and trust with our partners. A continuous barrage of information limits our growth and relationships and can also affect us in our daily

The point is not to say that being on your phone is bad, or social media is less important. The point is to be respectful of what having a conversation can do and make sure that we have adequate amounts of it in our lives and in the lives of the kids that we hope to raise so that they accumulate the empathic skills and the fluidity of conversation that permit them to have the relationships that they need to have with other individual.

Sherry Turkle's main argument is that cellphones and other forms of modern technology are dividing the modern generation socially, both by taking focus away from in-person conversations and providing a method of communication from distance that also serves to entertain people and enhance productivity (Turkle 21). For example, she gives the example of the junior in college who wants to tell her friends to put away their phones at meals because she enjoys the conversations they have when they aren't using technology, but that doing so would be out of line socially (Turkle 30). However, she notes that instead of pushing away from cellphones as a whole, we should instead work towards becoming self-aware of our relationships with technology and

Counselling theorists, psychologists and researchers have emphasised that counsellor empathy is crucial to the therapeutic process as it enhances a counsellor’s ability to assist clients in attainting deeper self-understanding (Kaelber & Schwartz, 2014). Further, emotional intelligence is also critical as it is the ability to “recognise the meanings of emotions and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them” (Mayer et al., 1999). This tends to include self-awareness, self-regulation, and social skills, as well as being able to identify to one’s own feelings, motivations, beliefs and intentions (Goleman, 1995; Kaelber & Schwartz, 2014). Accordingly, emotional intelligence involves both interpersonal and intrapersonal

In our everyday technology world, the cell phone has changed the person inner soul mentally. Through time cellphones have advance from a positive shift being an interactive media tool to one friend. Smartphone allow us to communicate long distance, form friendship, and unite with our lost self. One may believe it has resulted in an advantage in how people verbally communicate and interact with one another, but that is not the situation. Cell phone have shifted the state of character in which a person goes from the state of solitude to a state of feeling loneliness. An intimacy that is lost. Meaning technology has an effect on our social isolation, many times making us feel lonelier than before. The Illusion of phones

Currently, a common belief is that technology makes people closer and linked, but people are paying more attention to their devices instead of noticing the world around them, which makes people more alone. At family gatherings, more people are beginning to use their cell phones instead of communicating face to face with their families. The truth is that people who are overusing technology do not see how they are perceived. While these people think, they are socializing through their cell phones, they are in fact losing their real-life relationships, causing a sense of loneliness. According to Julie Peterson “Characterized by the rapid expanse of liberalization, urbanization and globalization, loneliness is no longer a positive delicacy nevertheless, the boundless openness towards the world is making people more alone than ever.” Instead of people talking to cashiers or waitresses at stores, people are on their phones. As a rule, in many restaurants and businesses, a

Sherry Turkle argues in her new book Reclaiming Conversation, much of the “communication” that takes place on our smartphones is actually a poor substitute for genuine, face-to-face conversation.

“And more than anything, we are discovering just how far and wide mind and body can be separated, because now we can be where we aren 't, no matter where we are,” said Martin Miller, a reporter from Los Angeles Times (Martin Miller 1). Despite the fact that cell phones clearly make our long relationships easier they completely destroy our closer ones.

As a society, we go through constant change, the most popular change to date is the use of the internet and cellular devices. In today's world, most people have become so attached to their phones that they can’t have a simple conversation with another person. According to the article by Valdesolo, the average person checks their phone 85 times a day and spends an average of about five hours a day on their phones. It’s become such an increasing nuisance that some restaurants and concerts have banned the usage of cell phones, due to the fact that they take away the experience of being there in the moment, even in some places where phones are prohibited such as churches, people ignore that and use their phone anyways. We have lost contact with the reality of the world because of the fact that we are constantly on our phones. Cell phone are distracting us from what the world has to offer today.

In the narrative “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, she says in this age of mobile devices and Facebook people have sacrificed conversation with connection. People are always on their phones and struggle to maintain eye contact, and when they’re texting in classrooms and even in dates when you are supposed to connect to someone physically and emotionally, and instead people act like robots and text even on dates and probably other social occasions. All this meant to show how people have become less social due to their phones always sending texts or emails and shopping online when they should be focused on where they are who they’re speaking to and what time it is. And this is a reasonable conclusion in our modern society