Essay on Understanding Ourselves in the Age of the Internet

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.

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.

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.

Constant communication takes the importance out of what we say. We often worry that our emails and texts are a burden. They have always seemed destined to be thrown away. Because of this, we treat people we meet online as objects. Constantly keeping up with connections changes who we are in the morning. Our cultural forms are shifting. Networking makes it easier to change your identity, but also harder to leave the past in the past. Turkle closes the chapter by recalling a conversation with a student who is exhausted by keeping up with online

Postmodernism is a term which is highly contested in the sociological world, where it is used to indicate a significant detachment from modernism. It is easier to give the uses of the term; ‘to give a name to the present historical period, to name a specific style in arts and architecture and to name a point of rupture or disjuncture in epistemology’ (Buchanan, 2010). For this,

To begin with, to determine the meaning of postmodernism is possible only through the relationship with modernism. Modernism in modern science is understood as a kind of cultural consciousness, which is implemented in the artistic practice of symbolism, expressionism and acmeism. In the socio-historical context, it means the period of modernism in the development of culture from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, that is, from Impressionism to a new novel and the theatre of the absurd. Modernism as a world based on the principles of urbanism (the cult of the city), technologism (the cult of the industry), primitivism (the cult of the underdeveloped role model), and others. Postmodernism simultaneously grows and is repelled by the picture of the world, established in modernism. Overcoming modernist tendencies, postmodern cult of the city replaces cosmism, values of industrial society - environmentalism, denying mindless nature and asserting the need for harmonious relations between society and nature. Thus, the ideological concept of postmodernism includes the principles of cosmism, environmentalism and post humanism in a culture of active includes sexual minorities, and the ideas of feminism. Art of modernism and postmodernism is the realization of a universal picture of the world, reflecting the human consciousness of the twentieth century, the main feature of which is the new principle of the relation of being and consciousness.

Summary: In this chapter, Turkle talks about how everyone is so always on the Internet. At first Turkle talks about how everyone gets to create their own identity online and how there are things accessible online that aren’t accessible in the real world. Everyone thinks they are presenting themselves in a different manner when really there are just portraying themselves in a way they wanted to be viewed. She brings up how many ordinary people have invited insomnia into their lives by checking their e-mail, and doing other things online right before they go to bed. She then goes one to talk about how when people are on vacations, they’re physically in their vacation spot but mentally they are still at home. When teenagers go on vacation they bring their whole life with them instead of enjoying the vacation. They receive countless texts and check social media and none of their friends usually know that they were gone. She then talks about “Second Life” which is a website where people create an avatar and live their lives online and can get an education, get married, etc. online. Turkle then worries about how technology is robbing us from real experiences and real people.

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such

Postmodernism is a reaction to the logic, simplification and objectiveness of modernism. It is an abandonment of convention and reevaluation of traditional institutions. Ideally, it focuses on specific local contexts as well as on

Postmodernism can be called “a condition of contemporary culture”, it is a modern movement which is strong, ambiguous, very popular and controversial. However, it is very difficult to explain the term because there is no full clarity what the term really means. As one can read in The Condition of Postmodernity it is “a mine-field of conflicting notions” and “a battleground of conflicting opinions and political forces”. There are so many interpretations, definitions and evaluations of the term that it is hardly possible to build a coherent definition, or to be brave enough to attempt to describe it. Almost everyone has a different opinion about it, advocate “for” or “against” or are

The main features of a postmodernist are that he or she is overly subjective, sensitive towards the role of ideology in assertion and maintenance of political and economic power. On the other hand, a modernist for example, there exists objective natural

Postructuralism claims that the person is not an independent entity, introducing the notion of the dissolved or constructed subject; that is, that an individual doesn’t make him/herself: their Identity is shaped by social and linguistic intertwined forces. Derrida argues that by deconstructing our intellectual universe we obtain a universe with no absolutes, a decentered or relativistic Universe. From this moment, since the new Relativistic Society cannot define us, Identity becomes an inner process of negotiation where each individual develops their own image of themselves. Decaux supports this idea with his conception of Identity as one’s definition of the self. On the other hand, Harré (Yardley&Honess, 1987) defends the idea of the self as a mode of personal organization constructed through the grammatical properties of language, mode that is however not subjective or belonging to an individual order but to a social or moral order. To him, ‘person’ is a social concept and ‘self’ is the inner unity to which all personal experience belongs as attributes of a subject”. Self-structure is, therefore, a social

It is a cliché by now to say that we live in a postmodern world, and it is true that the word ’postmodern’ has become one of the most used, and abused, words in the language. Still, it is striking that not many people can say with assurance what this term actually means and involves. Some theorists suggest that ‘postmodernism’ refers to a mood or an attitude of mind, others define it as a literary, cultural, or philosophic phenomenon. Either way, critics haven’t agreed on a common definition for the concept. “Brian McHale points out that every critic “constructs” postmodernism in his or her own way from different perspectives, none more right or wrong

When historians look back at the latter half of the twentieth century, they might well remember it less as the time man walked on the moon and more as the time when the Internet was born. The Advancement Research Projects Agency Network, known as the ARPANET, was developed in the 1960's by the U.S. Department of Defense. This was the world's first operational informational sharing network, and the predecessor of what we now call the Internet. Although the creation of the Internet was primarily to allow the sharing of resources, its true popularity came in the ability to send and receive mail. This communication process, known as electronic mail or more commonly referred to as e-mail, has now evolved into the most used application on