When I finished Sherry Turkle’s disturbing new book, Alone Together, I had a strange sensation that was hard to pinpoint in terms of an emotion. We all know the Information Age has changed us. And we all agree that it doesn’t feel quite right to see people glued to their smart phones during meals, while walking down the street, or just about anywhere. Turkle says, “Mobile technology has made each of us pausible (page 186).” Our conversations are interrupted by text messages and we shrug it off without taking offense. Through many examples, she illustrates that “we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things (page 14).”
With our networked lives, we are always ON. We are led to believe that technology gives us more. But, Turkle claims, “moments of more may leave us with lives of less (page 178).” A generation of teenagers admits to be uncomfortable without their cell phones. Being connected has become the state of normalcy; yet, even though adolescents have always struggled with their sense of identity, the struggle with “online identity” has added an additional burden. One teenager points out the problem of creating a Facebook persona by saying that “it [self-revelation] loses meaning when it is broadcast as a profile (page 306).” He believes that when he reads what others post on Facebook, he is an “audience to their performance of cool.”
In Turkle’s words, the “experience of living full-time on the net” which has evolved in only a decade means that “we are all cyborgs now” (page 175).
When I closed the book (not literally- I actually turned off the e-reader), I felt this brave sensation of not giving in to fear. I pictured myself forging ahead into this new era carrying respect for the traditions of knowledge from past generations. The human spirit has been challenged by obstacles of every kind, yet there are those who continue on toward higher ideals. Will the novelty of gadgets and constant connection wear off? Will we be able to find a balance between the physical and virtual? The torch I carry through the forest of cyborgs is the idea that meaning and truth are more important that egocentric trivial matters. Those ideals have not changed and perhaps have always been overlooked by the masses.