Book Remainder Summary

Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other is divided into two parts; Part 1 is “The Robotic Movement: In Solitude, New Intimacies,” and Part 2 is “Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes.”  Part 1 focuses on how sociable robots affect humans, and is organized mostly by focus on a specific robot for a specific chapter, but it also more thematically based, as she can pull in examples from other robots, which she mentions in later or earlier chapters.  Part 2 also had chapters devoted to specific networking technologies, but more often was thematically based.

Part 2 of Alone Together focuses around themes of human interaction with each other due to changes in technology.  Some chapters have a particular focus around familial relationships, such as Chapter 9 “Growing up Tethered” and Chapter 14 “The Nostalgia of the Young.”  These chapters emphasize that not only are children using technology to a point of being anti-social with members of their own families, but that adults also do this, and this is negatively effecting children.  Other chapters, such as Chapter 10 “No Need to Call” and Chapter 13 “Anxiety” discuss the use of the phone and how changes in technology have made people uncomfortable with actually calling someone else; calling has become a weird in-between for text communication and face to face communication.  It’s too personal for just socializing and small talk, but too impersonal for heavy news which you would want to discuss face to face.  The rest of the chapters in this section (Chapters 8, 11, and 12, “Always On,” “Reduction and Betrayal.” and “True Confessions,” respectively) center more heavily around the interconnectivity associated with new networking technologies and their effects on relationships between people.  Both positives and negatives are discussed.

One of the important points Turkle tries to make throughout her book is that technology in itself is not bad, it is how we choose to use it that makes it good or bad.  She sites a few examples of how technology can help people “work through” their problems by “us[ing] the materials of online life to confront the conflicts of the real and search for new resolutions” (214).  This is obviously a beneficial thing, available through the use of technology.  It is only when people use technology not to work through their problems but to “act out” the problems by just recreating and repeating them virtually causing “little growth” (214).  In any conversation about technology, I think it’s important to keep this idea in mind, as does Turkle.  It’s not necessarily what it is, but how it’s used that is the important thing.  We don’t need to necessarily go about changing the technology itself, but changing how humans view it and react to it.