介绍:
One Hundred Tweets of Solitude
How many times a day do you check your email?
When you wake up? Before bed? A dozen times in between?
The technology that was supposed to simplify our lives
has become the ultimate time-suck:
the average teen spends more than seven hours a day
using technological devices,
plus an additional hour just text-messaging friends.
The advantage to all that gadgets, of course, is connectedness:
email lets us respond on the go,
and we are in touch with more people
during more hours of the day than at any other time in history.
But is it possible we're more lonely than ever, too?
That's what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book,
Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship
with technology, the result of nearly 15 years of study.
Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our perceptions
of intimacy and solitude-
and warns of the risks of embracing such virtual relationships
in place of lasting emotional connections.
For Turkle, a psychologist by training, the biggest worry is
what all this superficial engagement means for us developmentally.
Is technology offering us the lives we want to live?
"We're texting people at a distance," says the author,
the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
"We're using inanimate objects to convince ourselves
that even when we're alone, we feel together.
And then when we're with each other,
we put ourselves in situations where we are alone-
constantly on our mobile devices.
It's what I call a perfect storm of confusion about what's important
in our human connections."
What can't be denied is that technology, no matter its faults,
makes life a whole lot easier.
It allows us to communicate with more people in less time;
it can make conversation simple-no small talk required.
But it can also be tempting,
providing more stimulation than our natural lives make possible.
"The adrenaline rush is continual," Turkle says of our wired lives.
"We get a little shot of dopamine every time we make a connection."
One high-school student she spoke with put it simply:
"I start to have some happy feelings as soon as I start to text."
But are any of those feelings on par with the kind we feel
when engaged in real, face-to-face intimacy?
Online, you can ignore others' feelings. In a text message,
you can avoid eye contact. A number of studies have found that
this generation of teens is less sympathetic than ever.
That doesn't spell disaster, says Turkle-but it does mean
we might want to start thinking about the way we want to live.
