Living Online and Other Technological Challenges

Living Online, and other Technological Challenges 1. The Online Looking Glass by Ross Douthat In the sad case of Representative Anthony Weiner’s virtual adultery, the Internet era’s defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism.

2. Going Offline for Goodness’ Sake by Kristyn Komarnicki This summer I flew to Toronto to see some old friends. In an act of the will that required great strength and determination, I decided to leave my laptop at home.

3. Book Review: Alone Together

by Sherry Turkle Basic Books, 2011 Reviewed by Dale S. Kuehne Sherry Turkle wants to talk about technological attachments. Not files we attach to emails, not attachments that allow us to charge our iPod on our car’s cigarette lighter, not special lenses to attach to our iPhones. No, in her recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, she wants to talk about the deep and potentially troubling attachments we form with our email accounts, music devices, and smart phones.

As an MIT professor, Turkle has spent much of her career studying the psychological and social impact of technology on human life. Her particular interest is in studying how robotics and personal technological devices impact how we relate to others and ourselves. She approaches the subject with an appreciation and fascination with technology, and yet from that vantage point has discovered some chilling data concerning how technology is making it more and more difficult for us to be human.

She speaks of how robotics have advanced to the point that children often prefer virtual pets to real pets and how the elderly can find such comfort in virtual pets or robots that they don’t feel as much need for human companionship, including their children. She lets us know that the technology is advancing so rapidly that we will soon be able to create human robots that are so “human” and personally engaging that Scientific American is exploring legal marriage between humans and robots.

Turkle gives us a glimpse into how personal technology and social networking is changing our lives, and especially the lives of our children. For an increasing number of people the most important relationship in their life is with the device that gives them

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access to email, IMs, and Facebook. So significant is the attachment we have to our technology that we are often unaware if we have developed an attachment stronger than we have with any person.

Alone Together is a well-written, widely accessible book that is a must read for anyone who wants to try to understand culturally where we are and where we are going, as well as understand how to work with the most at-risk group in our society—our children.

Turkle explains why I can’t go to a gathering of adults without finding a significant number of people, including me, texting and writing email while someone else is talking. Many of us are so attached to our technology that our brains have developed a biochemical addiction to the electronic stimulation of our devices. When that occurs— and youth are especially vulnerable to this due to their stage of development—what drives us is not the desire to be closer to the people to whom we are texting but our brain demanding the stimulation the screen is providing. Millions of us are unaware we should be in a new kind of 12-step program.

Turkle is not a Luddite. She appreciates the uses that can be made of the everadvancing technology. She is trying to alert us to the danger that the technology presents, especially its addictive and antisocial dimensions. This is the greatest contribution of the book.

If an essential part of what it means to be human is to love and be loved, to love God, neighbor, and self, Alone Together introduces us to the profound threat that smart phones, personal computers, and social networking pose for us. As the title implies, this technology can hypnotize us into believing we are relating to others when we are in fact connecting to a technological device. Moreover, social networking provides us with the ability to remake ourselves into who we wish we were and to relate to the fictions of others, thereby further complicating the difficult task of knowing self and others.

Turkle raises more questions than she answers, but they are the questions that help us put into perspective the challenge our culture faces.

Dale S. Kuehne is the Richard L. Bready Chair in Ethics, Economics, and the Common Good at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., where he is also a professor of politics. He is the author of Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker Academic, 2009).

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