Brandon Croke

Alone Together – Book Excerpt and Review

by Brandon Croke on 12/03/11 at 12:50 pm

Image courtesy of FlySi

I’ve just started a new read that I can’t put down. I can’t think of a better way to prime myself for one of the worlds largest gathering of web, technology and emerging media conferences (SXSW Interactive) than to read a book on how these new technologies are changing us as people.

Sherry Turkle is the author of Alone Together – Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and the founder and director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self. As a clinical psychologist she’s been studying technologies effects on human relationships. I wanted to share some excerpts from the book, which in your busy life you may not have time to read.

From Second Life to Furbi’s Sherry takes a step back from all of the technological hype to ask questions such as:

• “In the age of smart machines, what is special about a person?”
• “Will people prefer to marry robots in the future?”
• “Does losing yourself in a digital world distract you from facing problems in the real world?”

You may want to pick up the book after your finished reading some more excerpts below.

“Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.”

“It turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the social robots offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.”

“Technology ties us up as it promises to free us up. Connectivity technologies once promised to give us more time. But as the cell phone and smartphone eroded the boundaries between work and leisure, all the time in the world was not enough. Even when we are not at work. We experience ourselves as on call.”

“We have no long turned to technology to make us more efficient in work; now Nora illustrates how we want it to make us more efficient in our private lives. But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes a redfined as intimacy. Cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes.”

Love and Sex with Robots

“David Levy an entrepreneur and computer scientist says by mid-century: “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans.” Levy argues that robots will teach us to be better friends and lovers because we will be able to practice on them. Beyond this, they will substitute where people fail. He proposes the virtues of marriage to robots. He argues that robots are, of course, “other” but , in many ways, better. No cheating. No heartbreak.”

“When people talk about relationships with robots, they talk about cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, and children who take drugs. They talk about how hard it is to understand family and friends. Historically robots provoked anxieties about technology out of control, these days they are more likely to represent the reassuring idea that in a world of problems, science will offer solutions. In a complicated world, robots seem a simple salvation.”

Do you think technology is reshaping our emotional lives as Sherry suggests? Is this new world better, worse, or just different?

Human civilization has always been changed by technology from the invention of the alphabet to the printing press, but some say this digital change is different. What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.Tweet