This book is a string of anecdotes and interviews that tie together the occasional psychological insight about what connectivity and technology is doing to us interpersonally. I expected more empirical analysis and if there was data supporting the author's observations, you wouldn't know it as basically no research is presented other than her one on one interactions with various individuals. At some point, it just felt like the same point being made again and again, which is the book's thesis: we are more connected while at the same time maintaining distance from people with our technology. This point becomes pretty tired when there isn't much to discover from the reading on what the implications are for society. The anecdotes all seem to be making the same point as well: we like our technology, but it makes us anxious, and our avatars and profiles may be impacting the construction of a concrete self. This hardly required 300 pages to say. As a book with the fundamental premise that the way we associate with and place our expectations on technology is hurting us...I think Turkle has written a brilliant book. I have three serious objections, in order of severity from least to most.1) She does not always successfully walk the line between "This is a problem that technology cannot fix and we need to stop relying on technology to try" and "Technology causes this problem". The post-fordist 80 hour workweek was not caused by Blackberry. The culture of "do what you love and do it ALWAYS with no vacation" was not created by email and the Internet. Email is, in a sense, our attempt at mediating between a culture of constant work and our desires for a home life. But while she touches briefly on the point that these issues need to be fixed beyond technology, she neither deconstructs the evolution of this attitude towards technology nor engages with the technological triumphalism on the level of a societal paradigm shift. 2) As, perhaps, a corollary to my first point, this book has a tendency to assume that technology as a stopgap against/symptom of contemporary pathology is created alongside contemporary pathologies that did not exist earlier. Children wonder about the suitability of robots as caretakers who can replace present but absent parents (parents who are there but digitally connected and don't really see them). Without mitigating the awfulness of being such a child, the idea that technology caused this loneliness and exacerbates it is absurd. There were lonely children ignored by their parents in the 80s as well. And in the 70s. And in the 800s. There were children who felt uncomfortable in high school environments and the difference was that they also lacked the outlet for online expression. Some of them got lost in books. Some of them were just lost.Her original point, that technology is not a panacea but at best a bandaid, is taken, but technology does not necessarily create loneliness. It's possible that technology just makes us aware of the already felt gaps. Her argument seems specious to me when it shifts from pointing out that technology cannot do everything to when it becomes the scapegoat for people's refusal to enter into and engage with the real world. The story of the man who is barely getting by and spends all his time playing Quake is not the story of someone whose life was ruined by technology. Take away the game and everything is better? Of course not. So much of what Turkle's book does is point out how technology almost works as a diagnostic tool to point out the problems in everyday life.3) Which brings me to point 3. The triumphalist psychological narrative within this book is troubling. And I mean that in two senses. The first is--as the previous point suggests--technology becomes a pathologic influence that takes people and breaks their "authentic" relationship with the world. Turkle assumes the existence of an authentic self, accessible through unmediated contact, from which technology cuts us off. So this promotion of an authentic self accessible to others is deeply troubling, given that I see no reason to believe that I offer an unmediated, authentic experience of my self to anyone other than me. A face to face conversation is differently mediated, the rules for what can be said and when and how are different, but it is just as much a performance of self as my Facebook page. Again, we're back to the idea that cultural shifts in what constitutes authenticity have some kind of correspondence to reality. But this has a far more troubling implication if you assume that free, comfortable, face-to-face connections are the gold standards and everything else is a shoddy imitation that cannot satisfy. Because you pathologize psychological difference. If face-to-face interactions according to the complex and unstated rules of society are not only the norm (as they currently are) but the only healthy form of connection, you reduce anyone who is neuro-atypical to a broken human being. Mediated connections that force a new kind of conversation style or a new definition of connection can sometimes favor people on the spectrum for whom reading the affective cues in body language is extraordinarily difficult. Speaking to all but one's closest friends via Facebook as a way to avoid triggering anxiety attacks is not an excuse to avoid therapy, it's a way of using technology to make the world more manageable. (Sidenote - where is this universe that Turkle lives in? Because there's this subtle sense I get from the book that she believes that therapy can help far better than technology and if everyone just underwent therapy and dealt with their problems, we would not need to rely on technological bandaids. So where is this world where therapy is constantly successful and accessible and affordable to all?)Anyway. Long story short, we would not judge Stephen Hawking as a conversation partner without the technology he uses to achieve face-to-face dialogue. There is no one "normal" person that we all should strive to be. So the role that technology plays in making our lives better or worse or simply altering our relationships with others is complex. And Turkle's assessment of the ways in which technology cannot be a grand savior of humanity is both an excellent case study in our relationship with one of our symptoms (in the Lacanian sense of symptom) and a useful corrective to Utopian rhetoric. But this book often veers too far into condemnation and, in doing so, it blames technology for problems that have less to do with robots and far more to do with contemporary culture and, most worryingly, it conflates psychological disease with "does not function according to a particular ideal".
What do You think about Insieme Ma Soli (2011)?
Makes me glad I am not as addicted to technology as some of the people I read about in this book.
—tigerman
Amazing, terrifying, super relevant to our lives today
—KLL182
