Saturday, January 22, 2011
Big Thinkers - Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is one of the key academics writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives and relationships. This video gives a snapshot of the questions she's asking about technology and identity. She's just published a book called Alone Together. Click here to read a review of it in The New York Times.
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Turkle brings up a good point: our increasing connection to objects is responsible for creating our identity. Times demand that there is a “joined citizenship” between computer and the psychoanalytic culture. What has happened to us? Technology has provided us with faux identities and internet relationships. It is almost as if as new media grows, the individual’s personality dwindles to what is written in the ‘about me’ boxes on their Facebook pages. And in “Alone Together,” Turkle comments that there are no signs that these trends will let up. So what is our future? New Media is here to stay. But what of us? Are we doomed to become a society of new media-addicts, glued to our computer chairs, our lives completely devoid of all human interaction? The system feeds on the input we provide. Ultimately, I think this will be a critical decision that we must make. What will you choose?
ReplyDeleteSheena,
ReplyDeleteI thought your comment about our personality "dwindling to what is written in the 'about me' box" on our Facebook pages was especially interesting. I actually think that new media does something really odd to identity--a kind of split. We have our in person, 3-D lives and then there's our existence on screen, which is just a representation of our in person lives---to an extent--but because we spend so much time on computers now, that screen self is merging with our "real" self as we develop important relationships over the Internet. Of course this isn't true for everyone, but I certainly think it's true for some people--especially people who play "real life" games like World of Warcraft.