Her short interview with Colbert can be seen here:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kd5rmr/the-colbert-report-sherry-turkle
"People are performing on Facebook. Facebook is a performance of you. ...I'm no Ludite. This is not a book of put it away, get rid of it, but just to put it in its place. ...You live for your communication with people. You don't live for your communication with technology."
I know it upsets people when I talk negatively about Facebook. For me, I simply cannot justify supporting a company with such gigantic ethical breaches. As well, I hate watching what it is doing to human connectivity, interactions, and communication skills.
It's very real, and the downslide continues to degrade and deteriorate, and I simply am not being heard. In my defense, neither is Dr. Turkle.
When FB is so easy and convenient, my warnings will simply fall on deaf ears. I am happy to find an MIT professor who was trying to warn society 8 years ago!
In 2014, she also gave a Ted Talk, here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together/transcript?language=en
She notes, ""Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things."
Why does this matter? She continues, "Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection."
She refers to her interview with Colbert: "I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question. He said, 'Don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?' My answer was no, they don't add up. Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information, they may work for saying, 'I'm thinking about you,' or even for saying, 'I love you,'... but they don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other."
Sherry continues, "That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -- so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us. We're developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions -- to the elderly, to our children, to us. Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood. And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. It comforted her. And many people found this amazing. But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life. That robot put on a great show. And we're vulnerable. People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing. So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, 'That robot can't empathize. It doesn't face death. It doesn't know life.' ... I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we're not so comfortable. We are not so much in control."
PRETEND EMPATHY. That is the underlying issue, covered and smothered with too high a dose of ethical impropriety. FB gives us the illusion of empathy and support at the cost of BOTH an ethical breach in the most basic of personal confidentiality, privacy, and respect, as well as believing the falsehood that those FB friends whom we have never met in person and who are little more than a button click and a couple of FB posts are real friends. And yet, people will not give up their Facebook and social media. (Social networking is different from social media. FB does have some social networking aspects, but that comes sandwiched in the gigantic social media buffet.)
In February, 2019, she gave this talk at the University of California:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13w10bLUkjE
The best part of this interview begins at minute mark 38:30...
"There are two things that are lost in our recent fascination with our heads in our phones. And one is that people are becoming less capable of being bored. We're losing the capacity for boredom, and the capacity to be bored is an incredibly important developmental moment, and it's so important ...when you're feeling bored your brain is not bored at all. Your brain is laying down what is called the default mode network, which is the pathway of a stable sense of an autobiographical self. So you need those moments when you feel bored for your brain to really develop your stable sense of self. right now when people feel bored, they have absolutely no tolerance and they go immediately to their phones/tablets/laptops. ...I try to remind people to walk toward the boredom. ...Let your child be bored! Let them develop that capacity.
So boredom is very important, and with boredom comes the capacity for solitude. Now, why is solitude important? ...Very often in solitude you need to have that moment of boredom. ...The capacity for solitude means you are alone with yourself and you can tolerate your own company, you know your own company, which means that when you go to somebody else, because you are okay with yourself, you can then recognize them for who they are. You're not trying to use who they are to buttress your fragile sense of yourself. ...We forget the importance of solitude for relational purposes. ...If you don't teach your children how to be alone, they will only be lonely. ...You need to be able to be alone in order to be not lonely. If you know how to be alone, you will be able to really connect with other people. Now that we have our phones, people do not know how to be lonely.
...It's not that I am anti-technology! I am worried about people! I'm pro-human, I am not against technology! I don't begin with an animosity towards technology! I'm just very concerned about human beings and their development, and being able to maintain relationships with other human beings.
...What was a tool has turned us into a tool. ...When people have a moment of boredom and pick up their phone, it's no longer a tool. It becomes, 'I'm using it to not have a moment of boredom.' ...It's no longer a tool; ...it's an underminer of human potential.
...It's our human vulnerability and avoidance of feeling vulnerable that can get us into trouble. ...That moment of feeling anxious, alone, vulnerable...."
She goes on to describe how, in today's world, the moment we feel anxious, vulnerable, or alone, we reach for our phones/tablets, because we have this sense that "all my friends live in my phone, all my family is in my phone; everybody is nice to me in my phone." That's what we do know when we are bored, lonely, anxious, alone, vulnerable... we reach for our phones/tablets/devices. That's fine, says Turkle, except if we do it all the time. More and more, instead of turning to the people, the individuals to whom we really are connected, we turn to our phones.
Turkle goes on to say that this has enormous societal and political impact. The data collection by social media is creating a definition of each of us as individuals. While most people just shrug and think this is inconsequential, Turkle reminds us that this data collection which defines us may be in conflict with who we really are and who we might want to become. THIS DATA ABOUT EACH OF US GETS SOLD and used for very specific political and marketing purposes.
Thirty years ago I was sounding the alarm at becoming a highly consumeristic society. Our value as individuals was being reduce to how much we could consume and buy buy buy. Social media has take this into a much darker slope..... that we have been further reduced, not just to how much we can consume and buy, but we have also become the consumable product, our data farmed, collected without our knowledge or permission, and sold to any who has the money to buy it so that we can be further manipulated into consuming. The consumer has also become that which is consumed.
Why is it so few other seem to see the problems this is creating?
At least there are a few, like Dr. Turkle.
Her interview gets most interesting when it comes to politics and direct marketing using the mined data from social media, particularly Facebook, at minute mark 49:43.
"We've signed onto a system where we are used to getting things for free... Why are e getting all these things for free? We are getting it for free because they are taking everything––they are reading your mail, they are reading your docs, what you post...––that's why it's free. It's NOT free! You've agreed that they can read all your mail, they can read all your docs, and they can know where you go... that's not free. Why was it so important to the founders of this country that the U.S. mail be protected? ...[Yet today] anybody can read your email, anybody can read your Facebook, anybody can read what you do online. It's all owned by the people who provide it."
A step in resistance is consciousness of the implications of all that is happening to us.
"This is the biggest step. It's like global warming. People want to forget. You can watch them forgetting,. The second you warn them, you can watch them glazing over and purposely forgetting. Because no one wants to be reminded."
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