Turkle: Plot Summary

“In 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended” (Turkle). As technology keeps growing and growing we find that it has an effect on many things. Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle’s articles both relate to how Google is effect many people today. However, Carr’s article focuses more on how it is affected our ability to concentrate and contemplate, while Turkle’s article shows how we have lost the ability to connect with others.

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.

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.

“No Need to Call” by Sherry Turkle is an article written about the relationship people have with technology, and specifically with communicating via technology. How it has affected the way we want to interact with people, or how we end up interacting with people. This being due to social norms having changed when it comes to our way of interacting, such as the meaning behind making phone calls rather than texting. The article itself brings up many viewpoints as well as different opinions on the subject, plus a few pros and cons to show that certain things are not always to be seen as black and white. Technology has its advantages, but even the most tech savvy, devoted people have to admit that it has its disadvantages, brought up in this article. Examples are brought up with each point to

In “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.” by Sherry Turkle a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five years, she has been focusing on topics: What has happened to face‐ to‐face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk, families, friendships and romance. She has also studied schools, universities and workplaces. Among this topics she has talked and provided studies on how we have become distant from “who we are.” She reports that we as a society have lost a lot of virtues as a society such as a lack of empathy for one another, solitude, and communication with one another. As the “digital world” continues to grow we as a society continue to grow with it and apart from one another. Sherry also emphasizes that we

The relationship between people has been changed because of the widely using of new technology. People can easily communicate with other people by using different kinds of methods. Because of the use of those methods, people have more space with others and frequently hide part of themselves on the Internet in order to show the best of them. In the essay “Small Change: Why he Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Malcolm Gladwell states that the relationship between people can be categorized by strong ties and weak ties. For example, in the past, people communicated by the method of interpersonal hierarchies, which are considered as strong ties. However, with the development of technology, social network, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Skype, which have become very popular in the world, are regarded as weak ties. Moreover, in the essay “Alone Together”, Sherry Turkle claims that people are distant with others and get lost in the virtual world through the new technology. She points out that now people communicate with others through technology instead of directing talking to real people. Furthermore, some people suppose that sociable robots as substitutes for people. Both Gladwell and Turkle agree with the idea that technology plays an important role on people’s connection. Technology only creates inauthentic relationship because it hides identity of many disorganized people.

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

In the second chapter of her book, “The Empathy Diaries” Sherry Turkle argues that people are fleeing or running from normal conversation. She also states that even though we want to be with each other, we also want to be able to disconnect with reality and connect somewhere else. She claims “What we value most is control over where we put our attention” (19). We want to be close but not that far away, but just right. The writer acknowledges that our phones give us a sense of “companionship” without having to deal with the demands of an actual relationship. With that being said, even our conversations are being impacted by our phones. The writer even states that, “even the mere presence of a phone on a table (even a phone turned off) changes

There are few places on this Earth, if any, where the possibilities are truly endless. However, if you detach yourself from the physical world and emerge into the “online” world, you find that this just might actually be accurate in this realm. The World Wide Web has had so much to offer to us since the early 1990s, but with this comes controversy. Unleashed onto a plane of seemingly immeasurable freedom of anonymity, was the world ready for such responsibility? Since those early days when new emerging technology changed our lives immensely, have we at all become a better place, or have we bitten off more than we can chew, and doomed our human relations forever? Exploring these concepts are three in-depth articles, including: “Growing Up Tethered” by Sherry Turkle, “The Loneliness of the Interconnected” by Charles Seife, and “Cybersexism” by Laurie Penny. Although it is thought that the Internet brings the world together, it actually does not help us politically, culturally, and economically like one would believe, as it makes us unable to be independent, isolates us from different points of view, and encourages real-world violence against women and other minority groups.

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

It is widely accepted that technology can be used for people to connect with one another. One primary example that may spring to mind is the smartphone. No matter the distance between two people, the other party is only a text, call, or instant message (IM) away. In consideration of that, certain methods are favored over others. In her work titled “No Need to Call,” Turkle examines why there is a decline of phone calls. She surveys different generational demographics that bring her to the consensus that, regardless of age, texting holds wider appeal because there is less commitment involved. As a result, calls are more significant, only to be used if one is a family member or if the message cannot be properly expressed over text. Cases of the latter may even come with restrictions. One person that Turkle interviewed claims that it was easier to deal with traumatic news without immediately speaking about

In the article, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.”, Sherry Turkle claims that technology is leaving us vulnerable to the world. Cell phones along with other technology can be detrimental in certain situations. She bases her claim off of several experiments done with all ages of kids and technology. The article, written in 2015 and published in the Sunday Review, targets how the conversations today are becoming shallow because the world attached to their phones. Even though Turkle’s argument that conversations are dying and are shallow, her article shows evidence that conversations are different when phones are in sight. She offers vital information and evidence about scenarios where conversations are changed because of the use technology. She provides statements and facts that are true to our everyday lives especially our lives with technology.

In her essay “No Need to Call,” Sherry Turkle makes the claim that smart phones, texting in particular, are having a negative effect on the way humans interact and communicate with each other. The issue of how smart phones are changing our social behaviors is important because it can potentially impact the future of the human race. With smart phones, computers and tablets, our society is entering into uncharted territory and we cannot be certain of how the outcome will change our social interactions. Figuring out whether or not these changes are negative or positive is a pertinent topic for all people because everyone is affected by these new technologies in their everyday lives, whether they have them or not. Turkle believes that the way we are communicating through these devices is starting to develop us into humans who are too reliant on impersonal forms of communication to the point that it is changing how we interact with others.

In the reading, “Connectivity And Its Discontents,” by Turkle, the author contends that social media defends people against loneliness. She also states, that it controls the intensity of connections of how people connect with other people, and create ease to communicate and disengage if people wanted to. For example, he states, “We discover the network—the world of connectivity—to be uniquely suited to the overworked and over scheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and disengage at will” (190-191). Therefore, people using social media to communicate is good because people might have a busy life style that doesn’t allow them to spend time meeting with their friends. It also provides an outlet against loneliness because some people might not have many friends, and social media allows them to connect easier with people they can’t see through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other forms of social media. It’s better for people to be open with other people online. People are able to socially interact with other people all over the world using computers, cell phones, and even tablets. The technology today doesn’t limit people from communicating, and web browsing to their hearts content. Social media and the technology

As Turkle (2012) suggests, there is a contradiction between connection and disconnection that technology imposes on users. To be tethered is to be connected, but the connection is beyond time and space, meaning being physically absent, but emotionally present. Likewise, Turkle (2012) argues that it is odd that individuals participate in the collective activity while being somewhere else. Similarly, the self is invisible, and the ways in which the self can develop and form are physically absent. Technology allows for a greater sense of control over one’s conversation and interactions, yet, the control is illusive. The relationship is contradictive, meaning as technology allows for a greater sense of control, but also becomes a source of obligation. Therefore, Turkle (2012) suggests that web technology creates an overload of information, which is troublesome because we are constantly surrounded my information, and we do not know how to piece information together or make sense of it. The instantaneous clicking of a button does not allow an individual to analyze an issue. Thus, an instant response undermines our ability to think critically.