As we head into the second part of the week here, I’m happy to be sharing Melissa S.’s book review of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. I’m looking forward to watching this because I’m sort of reading this book right now myself. Let’s see some questions and thoughts from folks here on Melissa’s book review, and big props for her for being the first one up!
Sarah T.’s is coming soon, I am sure….
Be gentle! If I had the time, I would re-shot the whole thing with my camera because I hate the webcam angle with a passion.
I just want to point out that your observation is in and of itself an excellent example of what I am hoping everyone gets out of this experience– at least in part. I am assuming that Melissa hasn’t made a lot of these videos before, and I am assuming that with all of you. So reflections along the lines of “if I were to do it again, I would…”
Hi Melissa! I enjoyed your video review and may have to pick up a copy of this book for myself.
I guess I’ll get us started in the discussion with a few questions/comments…
Towards the beginning of the video, you say that Turkle’s tone in the book is neutral, but then you say that she is “obviously not happy with what she sees.” I’m a little thrown off by that. If her stance is so obvious, how is she neutral? Do you mean that she takes the time to present both sides of arguments before taking a stance?
In terms of her arguments, I agree that these days many people (myself included) seem to have a “virtual self” and that, as Melissa explains, we live out a “combination of the real life and virtual life.”
I did, however, have a bit of a problem understanding Turkle’s argument that “confession sites” are an outlet for people to avoid intimacy with others. Maybe there’s more to this than Melissa had time to touch on in her video, but I think that’s just bogus. Confession sites in themselves, I think, function as their own little community and can be an outlet not for those looking to avoid intimacy/sharing things with others, but to contribute to and be a part of a community. Also, I guess I’m not really sure exactly what she’s referring to when she calls it a “confession site.” Immediately, http://www.postsecret.com came to mind, but I am also thinking in terms of websites with pretty anonymous discussions going on (such as Reddit).
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Hi Danielle,
In retrospect I guess I should have included another sentence to modify the obviously-not-happy part. Turkle keeps a neutral tone, taking a very academic approach but that doesn’t mean she is without opinion. While she never comes out and says “I hate this” or “this is directly to blame” or anything overtly negative, she did have some comments such as “In my training as a psychoanalyst, I put a lot of importance on relationships” and would mention her devotion to relationships, implying this is something she sees as missing. Her conclusions are also things that cannot be taken as negatives – the book is more or less a call to action; something is wrong with today’s young generation and we need to fix it. Therefore I don’t think she hides her emotions, but her writing stays academic and she uses logic to draw her conclusions, not emotion.
I have to admit I’d never heard of confession sites (she does mention PostSecret). I didn’t have time to get into this, but she talks about how there is a difference between apology and confession. People are using confession site to get things off their chest and think of them as therapy, but they don’t actually work through anything because there is no confrontation. As she put it, they are ready to confess, but not to apologize. Apologizing would mean that you confront a person and you talk about what happened – it is an intimate moment. Posting on a board and reading replies is not, yet people use it in lieu of apologizing.
I would recommend this book – it was very interesting, especially since I’m pretty much right on the edge of the generation she’s talking about (I was primed by Tamagotchis).
http://msyapin.wordpress.com
***her conclusions are also things that cannot be taken as positive
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I really enjoyed your presentation Melissa. I especially liked the bit about “sociable robots”. It’s interesting that these things prompt us to feel as if we are not really alone by giving us signals that suggest we are with another living being. I see that in many respects these life-like dolls condition children for responsibilities they will have in the future, such as a little girl playing with her baby doll and mimicking the actions she believes a real mother would use to take care of her baby. I found that very interesting. Great job.
Tamagotchis were the best…I must have had at least 3 or 4 of them when I was little.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification, Melissa. And as for the part about confession sites, I still have a problem with it…why does every confession require an apology? I’ve read plenty of confessions on Post Secret that I don’t think would require feeling sorry or regretful about. Maybe this is getting to be a bit off track, but I just don’t know about her argument there. I’m gonna let it go now, though
http://www.daniellebreann.wordpress.com
Thanks for the book review/video, Melissa. I am slowly but surly reading this book myself right now, and I think you largely get the book right in this video. Turkle is a good writer and this is a good read in and of itself. But I do find myself resisting some of her conclusions, frankly, maybe because of what her conclusions potentially say about me and my relationships with technology/social media/etc.
Not having read the book, if the author wasn’t overly negative or positive about the effects technology is having (she stayed neutral)—what led you to the conclusion that she was not happy with what she was seeing?
Some of the themes in this book bring to mind feelings I have had about video games like “Sims,” which to me was like, “Why pretend to live a digital life, instead of living the organic one you have?”
You made effective use of cutaway visual and text shots to emphasize transitions and central ideas/concepts.
In the quote, “With sociable robots we are alone but receive the signals that tell is we are together. Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone,” can you expand on or contextualize exactly is meant by expectations? Such as the level of intimacy or undivided attention? What exactly is Turkle referring to?
How are these virtual identity supplements anything more than a shallow fantasy stroke of the ego? Turkle did make a good point in that looking to games for amusement is fine, but looking to them for a life is not.
I like how Turkle touched upon the shift from what was the dominant mode of communication, calling someone on the phone, to texting because of the control it affords the party or parties. And while it does offer more control over the “conversation” there are costs or downsides, such as loss of intonation (for the most part, there are things like emoticons but they can only account for so much of the English language), the difficulty in expressing things like sarcasm in the written word, and the feeling of immediacy in replying to every text.
I especially like the phrase that Internet connections are not the ties that bind, they are the activities that preoccupy (or something like that, not exact quote); I believe Turkel hit the nail on the head with that one.
Overall great job. Trust me, when you see the hot mess that my lack of video editing experience will culminate in you will feel like, “Hey, mine was pretty good.” I think you did an excellent job summarizing the book. It sounds like you got a lot out of it, but you did seem utterly depressed there at the end. Hahaha…way to end on a downer note. But seriously, good job.
Danielle–I asked the same question, exactly how does her unhappiness come through if she’s neutral. However, I’m a bit confused as I’m not familiar with confession sites or their communities. My take on it would be to agree with Melissa, as I wouldn’t deem a confession to complete strangers (in the sense they are not a priest, or people you have an emotional, physical, investment in/with/for), who aren’t necessarily stakeholders or affected by the confession/transgression/or whatever. Again, I’m not really familiar with them so this is just me spouting my uninformed opinion at this point.
Again, no personal experience but I’m betting as a psychoanalyst Turkle would argue without confrontation and an apology if appropriate the confession is little more than the same “fake” digital online persona people imagine for themselves. Sorry Danielle, just playing Devil’s advocate.
I think this kind of comes through in Melissa’s review, but I think it’s pretty clear after reading the introduction and the first chapter (or so) that Turkle’s research (which is the “neutral” part, IMO) leads her to the conclusion that there is a negative effect to these technologies.
But it’s more complicated than that in that she’s not suggesting a simple binary of bad/good with the tools and technologies she’s talking about. I guess I have some advantage from having read some of this book, but like Melissa said, Turkle seems to get more “negative” as she goes along, which also maps with her own writing. Her previous books on these topics were much more optimistic than this.
Awww! I did notice that you blurred yourself out with Turkle’s utterly alone quote, but you are not alone! lol! Trying to be reassuring
Great job! Glad to see some visuals to reinforce your review! Seeing and hearing yourself in a video is hard! Having worked on a promotional videos for the past 6 months, there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.
I have read most of this book and other Turkle essays and find much of her research and perspective extremely interesting. So, I too am probably biased and understand the issues brought up in the review.
I think this connects very closely with the Coursera class we participated in. I think the exploration of technological effects on human behavior are just in their infancy and we are starting to observe and see that it is indeed effecting us negatively.
I can’t even imagine in the far future what the human species will look and act like? Will “The Terminator” movies come true where we’ll have half human/robot hybrid species? There’s a TED talk that discusses how we are already fusing technological instruments into the human body through the medical field with the invention of implanted heart monitors, metal plates reinforcing the joints in our bodies, and so on.
When I was at MSU, I knew people who failed out of college because they were playing the Sims and Dungeons and Dragons 12 hours a day! I’ve had some awkward conversations with people that talk about their online/gaming life as if it were their waking, real time life. I wouldn’t even realize until later in the conversation the distinction between these two realities.
I think these issues even go back to the beginning of the class when we were talking about personas and how we change and/or project ourselves differently in online situations than how we are in our actual physical daily lives. I think that it is disturbing to see how easy we can be “retrained” and altered by various technologies without even realizing it.
Hey, Melissa, sorry for the delayed response. I enjoyed watching your video, and it seems like Turkle had some really interesting points to make about robotic friends and pets–I had a Tamagotchi, too.
One thing I was wondering the Tamagotchi regard–did Turkle talk at all about the disposability of these robotic playmates? I understand what Turkle means about mourning the digital, because I was pretty sad the first time my Tamagotchi died. I was also (I remember this pretty clearly) nearly heartbroken when my first zebra in Zoo Tycoon (which is a zoo sim in which you build exhibits, buy animals, etc.) died of old age. I even made a list to commemorate my “departed Zoo Tycoon animals.” But with both the Tamagotchi and Zoo Tycoon, the “death” became commonplace, to the point where it lost all meaning. Tamagotchi was dead again? Argh, what a pain, best reset it and start again. Another zebra died? Ah, well, time to buy another one, stick it in the exhibit, and move on.
What I’m getting at is, after a while, the “reality” of the digital “creature” broke down. The emotional connection to it, the element that made it appear to be more than a machine, faded away, to the point where a dead Tamagotchi just led to a roll of the eyes rather than any mourning. Did Turkle discuss at all this breakdown of the relationship that the human projects between him/herself and the digital?
Also, back to the idea of disposability, did Turkle talk at all about, how in a relationship with the digital, you can just set aside or discard that thing, that relationship? Or did she just transition more into what you talk about in the second part of the video, and get into talking about relationships between real people, conducted through various technological avenues?
All in all, this was really interesting to listen to, and I liked (as others have said, too) how you interspersed visuals to enhance the spoken word. Well done.
Hi Jackie,
Yes Turkle did talk about the disposability of Tamagotchi’s and other toys to that effect. She actually brings up an ethical question in regard to it because many of the children she observed would hold funerals for their Tamagotchis or would never let their parents turn the robot off. In her observations, death didn’t become mundane because they considered the “new” pet to be an imposter and “knew” they weren’t the original ones. The children didn’t really think of it in terms of “oops, just killed another one” because they felt such an attachment with it. The parents most certainly did, though, which is how it got into ethical considerations of “can I turn off my child’s toy, meaning can I kill my kid’s pet robot?”
What was actually pretty interesting is that for adults and adolescents this idea of phones, digital artifacts as being disposable doesn’t really come out. Instead, we feel bound to our technologies – to the point that we are almost suffocated by being so connected. It was a way to be more efficient, but then it becomes overwhelming because you are expected to constantly be in touch with the network. This leads into her discussion of society as being anxious over our technologies – something I think we can all identify with, unless you are one of those weirdos that is ok leaving your phone at home
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I think I am naturally more cynical of technology and have never really thought it was a great thing for society, so in those ways I guess my beliefs already align with hers. I would find myself nodding along or thinking about my experiences as I read, but I also found myself thinking “yeah” about younger generations – placing myself outside the scope of her observations I guess. I actually tried really hard to find something to pick at because I don’t think a good book review can avoid critique. I agreed with her book, however, so it was a bit harder for me to find one this time..
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