Connected, But Alone [Ted Talk]

Connected, But Alone [Ted Talk]

  “I’m still excited by technology,“ says Sherry Turkle in her TED talk, “but I believe, and I’m here to make the case, that we’re letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.” Turkle is a psychologist and author most recently of the book, Alone Together. Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile communication and I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting… Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents’ full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention.” The Allure Of Connecting When You Want, How You Want, With Whom You Want Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in...