Logging on to loneliness
Caitriona Palmer reports from Washington on a controversial new book that has all America talking (and not just online!)
Log in, drop out: Is our love affair with social-networking sites affecting our capacity for human interaction?
How many times in the last hour have you sent a text message? Or logged on to check email? Or fiddled with your BlackBerry? Or deftly swept your fingers across your iPad or iPhone?
If the answer is more than once, then, according to renowned American professor Sherry Turkle, you -- like millions of people across the world -- have a problem.
Turkle is the author of a groundbreaking new book, Alone Together, which chronicles how modern society has become enslaved to computers and hand-held devices, and how humans are substituting real emotional connections for technological relationships.
It is yet another book in a recent backlash against modern technology that is causing shockwaves across America. It follows an equally explosive tome, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, which suggests the internet is radically altering the way our brains work.
In a world where the loss of a mobile phone can "feel like a death", human beings are tethered to technology like a ball and chain, says Turkle, who is a leading academic at the world-renowned Massachussets Institute of Technology.
Instead of picking up the phone to call a friend, we tap out abbreviated messages on our cell phones. We check our BlackBerrys last thing at night and first thing in the morning. We ignore our children's pleas for attention to pause and answer an email or text message that can always wait.
Although technology means we now communicate with each other more than ever, our "wired lives" are isolating us further and further from genuine human interaction, says Turkle. "We expect more from technology and less from each other," she writes.
Through nearly 15 years of research and hundreds of interviews, she portrays a world in which human beings are increasingly isolated from one another. The devices that keep us connected -- our mobile phones, BlackBerrys and computers -- offer the illusion of companionship, she says, without the demands of friendship. We may speak to each other at an unprecedented level online, but we're lonelier than ever.
'Because our technology is always-on and always-on-us, we now have the possibility of 'bailing out' of any interaction at any time. So, we can be having dinner with friends and texting others. We can be on the playground with our children and communicating with others," she told the Weekend Review.
"We can interact with those at a distance in preference to those who are physically close. This can be a magnificent thing, an ability to keep in touch with people from all over the world. But it can also distract us. . . we don't give 'full attention' to the people around us.
"To put it simply, we'd rather text than talk," she says.
In 2008, in the American magazine, The Atlantic, Carr complained he simply wasn't thinking the way he used to and suspected the internet was straining his cognitive abilities. He noticed that his brain became "fidgety" when he was reading books or longer texts and that his mind would drift only after two or three pages of text.
Carr believed his constant use of the internet -- distractedly clicking from web page to page, to his email account, to web video, and back again -- was changing the way his brain worked and chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation. Was the internet making him stupid, Carr wondered?
"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," Carr said, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check email, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."
Last year, edge.org, a leading technology website asked scores of philosophers, scientists and scholars whether the internet was changing the way they thought.
The answers were varied, but uniform in their response: the web had both profoundly affected the way we gather our thoughts, and how we disseminate the information, they said.
In a country where the average teen sends 3,500 text messages a month and spends approximately seven-and- a-half-hours a day on Facebook, Twitter and Instant Messenger, technology-driven chronic distraction is a well- documented problem. Numerous studies have shown that internet- obsessed teenagers are less empathetic than generations past.
During her research, Turkle spoke to teenagers who admitted they were too afraid of the unpredictability of a telephone to pick up and make a call. Instead of sitting down to write a note, they preferred to text.
"I start to have some happy feelings as soon as I start to text," one high-school student told Turkle.
Last year, the Capio Nightingale Hospital in central London launched a new residential rehab unit for children who are hooked on the internet, mobile phones and video games. The rehab unit offers to wean kids off their computers and phones and to teach them how to interact face-to-face.
Today's kids and teenagers have grown up in a "culture of distraction", says Turkle. They were raised by parents who chatted on their phones while pushing them on swings and had to compete with their parents' BlackBerrys at the end-of-school-day pickup. "From the moment this generation met technology, it was the competition," she says.
"It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are even nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the phone by their side or watch football games or movies without having the BlackBerry handy."
She says there are moments when parents and families should "put the technology away" and recommends that parents refrain from texting and emailing during meal times, school-runs or when they're interacting with their kids.
A respected sociologist at the world's foremost technological university, Turkle says she is "no Luddite" and remains in awe of all that modern technology has to offer.
Despite the pessimistic message in Alone Together, she remains "cautiously optimistic" having witnessed some "young people try to reclaim personal privacy and each other's attention".
She insists she is not advocating getting rid of of your Smartphone, iPad or laptop computer.
She simply wants you to put them in their place.
Originally published in
