Non-Residential Kin
Sherry Turkle: Alone Together#
notes:
- starts with talking about how her perspective towards tech changed as tech changed
- we are eternally attached to technology/online/connected
- pet scans that reflect how people’s brains react to technology
- talking about affordances and vulnerability / and not addiction affordances = the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used.
- “waiting to put each other on pause”
- we are lonely but afraid of intimacy
- the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship ~~ we can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other but at a distance and in amounts that we can control
- “we’d rather text than talk”
what are the costs of technology?
- allows us distraction from what we care about:
- too busy communicating to think
- too busy communicating to create
- too busy communicating with the people who matter
- we can communicate when we wish and we can disengage at will ref chapter: please do not call
we live a life of performance / online manufactured selves
being anxious about how to disengage from a person during a phone call ** overwhelmed across generations
professional/personal the details change but the dynamics remain the same
we measure our success through contacts reached
we have created a communication system:
that has reduced our time to sit and think uninterrupted
that asks for almost instantaneous responses
the value of back and forth in conversations is that it expresses respect for the complexity of people, of human emotions, of what we need to say to each other
lol Winston Churchill reference / fuck that guy
“I share therefore I am”
“I want to have a feeling” –> “I need to send a text”
contact lists have become spare parts to support the self
reduction of people into tools of validation
inner directed selves to other directed selves
in this constant online way of living, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to gather oneself
the metaphor of addiction:
- the little notification says you are wanted
- we can ill afford this metaphor
- it subverts our best thinking because it demands ONE solution = to get rid of it / the solution that we are not going to take
- this makes us feel hopeless and passive
- we are not passive victims of a bad substance
- in our use of technology we have incurred some costs that we don’t want to pay
- we are in trouble not because of invention, but because we sometimes allow ourselves to think invention will solve everything
- we will not find 1 solution or a simple answer
- moving forward, repair
our moment of opportunity
- does it serve our human purposes? what are these purposes?
- just because we grew up with the internet, we assume that the internet is all grown up
q/a: 1/ empirical evidence on the increase of multitasking as impacted by technology
- dopamine rush from each task added / as the performance declines
2/ does the premise undermine a kind of look back to an imagined past that was better?
- what grounds her is a notion of presence and attention to each other
3/ global view on this topic
- her study is a study of the US
- other cultures have different ways of thinking about the norm
- sociable robots scare her
4/ “what about the arab spring” question (what are some positives of technology)
- thumbs up to bringing down dictatorships x thumbs down to texting at funerals
- organising politically socially personally 10/10
- we should be able to take the good and still say that there’s some of it we don’t want (ie privacy)
5/ reaction to steve job’s death
- shows the impact of how technology has truly touched people
- he was saying lets design something gorgeous and make it something people want to have on their bodies
- “we are living his imagination”