After completing Sherry Turkles book Alone Collectively, I was extremely amused to find out about the brand new struggles showing with technology and the worries of how our company is becoming more and more dependent upon them. I would agree it appears that at the core of all humans is a desire to be together and a striving for some type of close relationship with others. At the same time, however , we could in the continuous struggle to become invested inside an intimate relationship due to the insufficient control we have over it. Having seen the position Prof. Turkle takes on technology and what we should are strenuous of it as far as for enjoyment intimacy moves, I would admit I agree with certain aspects of course, but not all. As I begin my personal critique on the book I would really like to say which i knowledge a lot of Prof. Turkles points, yet I watch many of them as a bit severe in comparison to my life and growing up with these very same technologies that she speaks of.
Probably the most interesting areas of the book that I found was underneath the curing a life section, where sociable robots were introduced into nursing homes to aid the elderly with loneliness the moment caretakers couldnt always be by their side. The AIBO, my own real baby, which was offered to a few aged people within the medical home, actually caught my personal attention. This being mainly because I failed to believe seniors would in fact open up to these forms of robots for friendship considering they had not grown up with them. In reality the moment worse arrived at worst there have been multiple situations when the elderly would start and share deep intimate secrets with this kind of technology. As in Jonathan and Andys case we are able to see that extreme solitude can lead to inch putting up with a new technology, which usually ultimately can cause adopting the technology and finding comfort in it. I do believe Prof. Turkle on problems that could come up from this newfound comfort in the technology rather than actual man interaction, although I do not really agree the moment she says that this new-technology will make this easier for youngsters to stop visiting their father and mother or truly feel less guilty about missing meetings together with the parents in nursing homes. I feel that that is merely an overstated stretch. However I would claim that the elderly putting up with these technology is simply a method of removing cognitive dissonance.
As you may know with intellectual dissonance people are motivated to remove dissonance and go about this kind of in various ways. Most begin by ignoring other viewpoints, changing beliefs to fit their activities, and look for reassurance via others during difficult decisions. Ultimately this was seen within just Jonathan and Andy’s case when offered the “my real baby”. Both initially had the viewpoints of numerous adults and would not be caught playing with the toy, but as period moved on they will rationalize with themselves that they can indeed weren’t crazy and therefore changed all their initial morals to make playing or discussing with the toy okay. Consequently by changing their morals they brought consonance and removed the psychological inconsistency of how they’d been evaluated for reaching the “My real baby”.
Therefore as I mentioned before I really do believe that Prof. Turkles statements are a bit drastic, however I will admit that in both Jonathan and Andys case intellectual dissonance was not the only problem at hand. His or her cases continuing it is easy to notice that my genuine baby was only a brief solution to their problem of loneliness. Is where I really do agree with Prof. Turkle or in other words that man interaction is definitely mandatory sooner or later because it provides a more organic sense of understanding that a robot cannot mimic. Going for a step back there is one last point in that we strongly don’t agree with Prof. Turkle and this is the moment she stated, “the blurring of intimacy and solitude may reach its starkest expression if a robot can be proposed being a romantic partner. But for most of the people it commences when 1 creates a profile on a cultural network¦” (12). Again I believe this is a drastic comment that assumes the absolute worst of social networking.
In my opinion that Prof. Turkle’s declaration referring to the blurring of intimacy and solitude inside social networking is definitely preposterous for a few reasons. first off this kind of statement assumes that everybody will be using social media for the same reason, interacting with other folks with more control. However I will personally say that anything that My spouse and i posted on Facebook or additional social networks is usually an open subject for me to discuss with friends in person. In some cases I would argue people postings on social networks to succeed in the people, when simply telling all their immediate good friend group personally isnt enough. My disagreement being that the moment Prof. Turkle claims that theres a blurring between intimacy and solitude in the use of social networking this is simply a blanket declaration that does not examine everybodys motivation for their real use of networking communities.
In essence, I actually do believe that Prof. Turkles publication raises understanding to the growing concern of humans’ reliability upon technology instead for actual human conversation. However I think that many of her issues are worst-case scenario predictions that suppose therell be no small amounts when it comes to technology and its uses. I do concur that it is frightening to see caretakers within a nursing jobs home stating things such as “robots substitute great for each of our actual man care” although we must understand that just because a couple of caretakers get this statement will not mean that automated programs will come capturing in and take over. Since both aged people Jonathan and he turned out technology and robots can simply substitute for a lot, at the core most humans desire an actual human-to-human interaction. All over again emphasizing that most things can be handy in moderation, but we must figure out technology is not innately negative while portrayed in Alone Together.