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”...

N.R. & S-M.R