About http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-72747
Alone Together, Sherry Turkle, Google image
The meaning of "Alone Together" is that we are alone but all connected due to social network like Facebook & Twitter. "People want to be with each others but also elsewhere. Connected to all the different places they want to be". Like explain by the pictures of her daughter with friends "be together and not together"
The second point is if we have noticed symptoms of this in our daily life or surroundings. For me yes for certain points I felt particularly concerned as "receiving a sms is like receiving a cuddle", "send mail, message, or go on Facebook during meeting, courses".
For the same question, Sanna-Maria say "not that much actually, at least not in the same sense as in the video. When I'm meeting up
with my friends, we might check our phones, but we do that just a few times and
therefore we're not "alone together", we're together. However, I have
seen students using their phones while listening to a lecture or a presentation"
Utopia or Dystopia, Google image
This vision is definitely
dystopian. She talks mainly negatively about how technology might affect us in
the future: she, for example, mentions robot companions. In my opinion, she's
too negative towards technology. I think that technology will never replace face-to-face
interaction with other humans simply because we have an inner need for
relationships with other people. You can talk to and see other people through
technology, but it's impossible to use technology to touch, hug, kiss etc them.
Furthermore, I think that technology is a very good thing. For example, I met
my best friend of over seven years through internet and have also met other
amazing people the same way - it is definitely possible to learn about other
people through technology. One does not need face-to-face conversation for it.
Technology helps families, friends and couples to stay in touch. My two years
as an au pair abroad would have been a lot harder if it wasn't for Skype.
When she
described the woman who had lost a child talking to the social robot, I don't
agree what she said about it not being amazing. Maybe the woman felt very
lonely because she probably had no family and just needed somebody to listen to
her? Talking to a robot doesn't mean that she was trying to make sense of her life.
Writing and telling about your feelings has been proven to have many positive
effects, such as feeling less stress. In addition, there have always been
people who do not like to be alone - nowadays they just have a different way of
coping.
I do think though that it is wrong that parents
focus on their cellphones or laptops rather than on their children. I also
don't deny the fact that technology can be harmful in the ways that she
describes, such as kids not knowing how to have a conversation.
We can summarize the video so: Technology
affects us in many ways – mainly negative ways according to Turkle. She says
that “we are letting technology take us places we don’t wanna go”. According to
her, being “alone together” is harmful because it’s affecting how we relate to
each other and ourselves. People do that because they want to control where
they put their attention, but she thinks it’s not a good thing as people can
end up hiding from each other – they would rather do things on their phone.
Technology
can cause other problems too such as the Goldilocks effect which means not
getting enough of people but “only if they can have each other at distance and
in amounts they can control” and adolescents not knowing how to have a
conversation. In addition, texts and tweets etc. don’t replace having a
conversation as they don’t work for learning, getting to know and understanding
each other, according to Turkle.
She
believes that the “No one is listening to me” feeling is a very important reason
why we are using technology: it’s appealing to write statuses and tweets
because there are many automatic listeners there. The same feeling also “makes
us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us”. Turkle then
mentions social robots that are designed to be companions to us. In addition,
she claims that technology appeals to us most when we are most vulnerable and
that we’re lonely but also afraid of intimacy. In other words, we turn to
technology in order to not feel lonely and in ways we can control. Turkle sums
up three gratifying fantasies that phones offer us: we can put our attention
wherever we want it to be, we will always be heard, and we will never have to
be alone. She says then that we now see being alone as a problem that needs to
be solved and that having connections through technology can lead to isolation
which can have a negative effect especially on children because they don’t know
how to be lonely. In addition, she says that we should talk more about our
relationship with technology: we should see that we are vulnerable and have
time to think and talk about things that really matter and listen to each
other. She finishes off her speech by saying that technology has gone to the
wrong direction and we therefore need to “can use digital technology, the
technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love”...
