January 12th, 2011, 05:46 PM
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Frequent Poster
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Europe
Posts: 941
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Technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude
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As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting 'rid' of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they 'reveal too much.' They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in 'real time' take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world 'unplugged' does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?
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Sherry Turkle (2011): Alone Together
http://alonetogetherbook.com/?p=4
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
- David Foster Wallace
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