The article by Sherry Turkle, Can You Hear Me Now, is a blast from the past. Written in 2007, the article has nothing to do with my friend Paul Marcarelli’s now infamous Verizon sales pitch. In fact, the article recalls a time when Blackberrys were the cutting edge of mobile technology. The article’s tone has an undercurrent of tech phobia which I found completely amusing, especially coming from an MIT, award-winning, scholar in Social Science and Technology.
Professor Turkle issued dire warnings in this article which at times verged on hysteria. “We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds” (Turkle, 2007). Reading this article, I, too, became slightly hysterical wondering how Professor Turkle has coped with text messaging.
Her article then increased in scope to virtual realities and a critique of artificial intelligence in the form of robot caregivers in Japan. Somehow, she bridged the gap from discussing the “always-on culture” to the complete devaluation of human life with an antidote about her daughter protesting a turtle’s confinement at the Natural History Museum. The daughter, seemingly more connected to reality than her mother, stated empathy for the turtle having to live its life in cage and suggested a robot could have sufficed in its place. Professor Turkle conducted an impromptu poll of how many kids agreed that the “real life” turtle was unnecessary. She was shocked that most children didn’t value the fact that the turtle, which didn’t move much, was alive. Her take away was that this was proof that we are losing our humanity in light of technology.
Wow. 😱 How about this take? The child felt like the turtle’s life was being unfairly taken for granted when the purpose of the display was to educate children on turtles. The daughter rightly, in my opinion, accessed that all necessary education could more humanely be given with a life-like robot. That seems like a win for valuing life to me.
Completing this article, I seriously started to worry about how Dr. Turkle has been dealing with the advent of iPhone, Android, Skype, Periscope, Twitter and Snapchat? Her latest offering is Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, published in 2015 by Penguin. It hardly seems to be a vanguard in the field.
I wish Professor Turkle could have been at the dinner party I attended last night. It was an intimate gathering with some of the most tech savvy and tech-addicted people in the world. My circle of friends include a highly collected photographer, who is also addicted to video games, an award-winning editor of high-tech films and a partner in a law firm, (the last holdouts on the Blackberry technology were lawyers). We all spent our formative years glued to “the idiot box.” We all have our phones (two Notes and two Iphone 6’s) with us at all times. All of our jobs force us to interface with technology all day long. And yet, somehow, we have sustained meaningful friendships that have lasted 30 years. This tech-addled group somehow managed to stay around the dinner table, with no screens or devices in sight. We talked until after midnight about life, love, politics and where we should move if Trump was elected. I’m sure it would have comforted Dr. Turkle.
In my opinion, technology will not turn us into “cyborgs.” It has not changed us into lesser people or made us not value human life. Nor will it. It has not forced us to become our best or our worst selves. Who we are, I posit, remains unchanged. Technology has simply made it easier for more people to share and witness our best and worst selves. Like violence against Black Americans, it has always been there, but now because of technology we see it more often.
Resource Turkle, S. (2007, April 21). Can you hear me now? Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/176.html
I told you I'm open to opinions with evidence. You and your friends definitely show an opposite case to Turkle's worries. However, she did have a good point about certain people who lost humanity to technology. I remember seeing a cyborg conference somewhere. A group of people are actually proud of being cyborgs. They go as far as implanting chips in their bodies. Going back to your post, I found that you seem to believe the neutrality of technology, that it's up to humans to use technology for good or evil purposes. Humans have control of technology. Turkle and other writers challenge the neutrality view of technology. They argue that modern technology gets into our psych and existence and that we're becoming a different species.
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