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The Flight From Conversation By Sherry Turkle

Decent Essays

Sherry Turkle was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948. She is a professor of Social Studies and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has written many works, such as Alone Together, and this article, The Flight from Conversation, was published in the New York Times in April of 2012. The claim she makes in the article is that communication technology is causing society to lose its ability to have a meaningful conversation. She presents several strong rhetorical strategies, and some weak ones, through logos, ethos, and pathos.
Turkle’s use of logos is possibly the strongest part of her argument. One could argue that her argument is lacking because it does not possess any statistics or solid facts and relies solely on examples from her personal experience. However, Turkle does not base her conclusion on some singular instances but on a diverse and wide range of similar situations, which I think makes up for her lack of data. She proposes three main grounds to support her claim. Beginning in the eleventh paragraph, Turkle states, “Texting and e-mailing let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit… Human relationships are messy… We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology… In conversation we tend to one another… we are called on to see things from another’s point of view.” Her main point in these quotes is that technological communication does not accurately simulate a real and meaningful conversation. The underlying

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