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Sherry Turkle on life online
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Will Hall
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Sep 22, 2006 21:12 PDT
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http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125691.600;jsessionid=NCLAKKEKFDJH?DCMP=ILC-OpenHouse&nsref=mg19125691.600INTLiving
online: I'll have to ask my friends
* 20 September 2006
* Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4
free issues
* Liz Else
* Sherry Turkle
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Is social networking changing the way people relate to each other?
For some people, things move from "I have a feeling, I want to call a
friend" to "I want to feel something, I need to make a call". In either
case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to
manage and contain one's emotions. When technology brings us to the
point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings
instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the
extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.
Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense
to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says "I am on my
cell", "online", "on instant messaging" or "on the web", these phrases
suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social
existence through technology, a tethered self. I think of tethering as
the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people
and things we reach through them.
How is it affecting families?
Let me take a simple example. Tethered adolescents are given a cellphone
by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents'
calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new
freedoms. On the other, the adolescent does not have the experience of
being alone, of having only him or herself to count on: there is always
a parent on speed dial. This provides comfort in a dangerous world, yet
there is a price to pay in the development of autonomy. There used to be
a moment in the life of an urban child, usually between the ages of 12
and 14, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a
rite of passage that communicated, "You are on your own and
responsible." Tethering via a cellphone buffers this moment; tethered
children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone.
Does it worry you?
Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more
connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all
information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality
should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages,
"check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to
quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about
complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the
cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that
contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an
emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and
understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it.
Is this a bad thing?
The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures
success by calls made, emails answered, messages responded to. In this
buzz of activity, there may be losses that we are not ready to sustain.
We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a
communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to
sit and think, uninterrupted. Teens growing up with always-on
communication are primed to receive a quick message to which they are
expected to give a rapid response. They may never know another way.
Their experience raises a question for us all: are we leaving enough
time to take one's time?
Are you talking about a permanent change?
It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to
know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else
thinks. But we learn about what everyone else thinks by reading highly
polarised opinions that encourage choosing sides rather than thinking
things through. You can give media culture a positive spin and say that
people are more socially enmeshed, but it has a darker side: as a
feeling emerges, people share the feeling to see if they have the
feeling. And sometimes they don't have the feeling until they check if
other people have it too. This kind of behaviour used to be associated
with early adolescents, with their need for validation. Now always-on
technology is turning it into a norm.
Surely being socially enmeshed can also have a positive side?
The challenge for this generation is to think of sociality as more than
the cyber-intimacy of sharing gossip and photographs and profiles. This
is a paradoxical time. We have more information but take less time to
think it through in its complexity. We're connecting globally but
talking parochially.
Are you saying that people are missing the broader picture?
People are connecting one-on-one - they have their online social network
or their cellphone with 250 people on speed dial - but do they feel part
of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political
commitments? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that
would require that they act in concert rather than just connect?
Recently, connectivity and statements of identity on places such as
Facebook or MySpace have themselves become values. It is a concern when
self-expression becomes more important than social action.
What kind of responsibility are they ducking?
Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal
campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to
environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all
to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is
less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in
refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may
talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is
out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective
action.
Explore the other features in New Scientist's guide to the social
networking revolution:
This is your space – Discover how social networking evolved, how it
works and how it is already revolutionising the way we live, socialise
and work
The end of privacy? – You wouldn't tell a stranger on the bus about your
sexual habits, so why do people reveal this stuff on websites available
to everyone? Will their openness return to haunt them?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google – A short
story by Bruce Sterling
The internet could be so much better – Social networking websites like
MySpace or YouTube owe everything to the genius of Ted Nelson, who
invented hypertext in the 1960s
Give it a try – Feeling left out of the social networking revolution?
There are many ways you can get involved, so take a look
Profile
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies
of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her books include The Second Self: Computers and the human spirit (MIT
Press, 2005) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the internet
(Touchstone, 1997). Her next, Evocative Objects: Things we think with,
will be published in April 2007. She is also completing a book on robots
and the human spirit.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 20 September 2006, page 48-49
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