(20) Tue Dec 6

Alone Together

BEFORE CLASS:

1. Write

2. Link

3. Read

1

One girl says, “Facebook has taken over my life.” She is unable to log off. “So,” she says, “I find myself looking at random people’s photos, or going to random things. Then I realize after that it was a waste of time.” A second says she is afraid she will “miss something” and cannot put down her phone. Also, “it has a camera. It has the time. I can always be with my friends. Not having your phone is a high level of stress.” A third sums up all she has heard: “Technology is bad because people are not as strong as its pull.” Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

2

The most glaring discovery of the Stanford University study was not that people burned up two hours a day on the Internet but that those two hours came out of time they would normally spend with family and friends. Once that withdrawal has begun and technology has been identified as a way to connect, it’s a hard cycle to break. Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

3

A Facebook friendship “really isn’t too demanding of a relationship.” Our Facebook connections typically require little thought or action on our part. We don’t have to work hard at them, or offer much of ourselves in return. We don’t have to “take responsibility” for anyone. We get to enjoy glimpses into our friends’ lives — both old and new — without all that messy “getting to know you” business. And perhaps most importantly to us, we get to reveal and withhold whatever we feel like. We are in control. We do not answer to anything other than our own temporal wishes. Source: Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected are Redefining Reality (2009)

4

In a 2012 study, twenty-four percent of users of U.S. adult social networking sites reported that they missed out on a key event or moment in their lives because they were so absorbed in updating their social networking site about that event or moment. Source: Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2015)

5

You wake. The first thing you do is check your smartphone (62 percent of us), and in all probability you’ll be checking your phone within the first fifteen minutes of consciousness (79 percent of us). In 2013, 25 percent of U.S. smartphone users ages eighteen to forty-four could not recall a single occasion during which their smartphone was not within reach of them or in the same room. Source: Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2015)

6

Online friendships are based on many of the same things as traditional friendships — shared interests, frequent interaction — but they nonetheless have a very different tenor: They are often fleeting; they are easy to enter into and easy to leave, without so much as a goodbye; and they are also perhaps enduring in ways we have yet to understand. Source: John Palfrey, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008)

7

The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is “managing.” The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that “teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.” There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: “Change My Top Friends,” “View All of My Friends” and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, “Edit Friends.” With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship. Source: Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis (2007)

8

Perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson observed that “friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.” Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. “It’s a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,” as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker. Source: Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis (2007)

9

A popular urban high school senior has over five hundred followers on Twitter (most of them real people) reading her every post to find out where the action is tonight. I’m trailing her, along with a youth culture trendspotter, to see what she does on a typical Friday night: how she makes her decisions, and how she communicates them to her ever-growing posse of followers. Gina is a trendsetter, a social leader, and a creature of the moment — in more ways than one. She’s at a club on the Upper East Side, but seems oblivious to the boys and the music. Instead of engaging with those around her, she’s scrolling through text messages on her phone, from friends at other parties, bars, and clubs throughout New York. She needs to know if the event she’s at is “the event to be at,” or whether something better is happening at that very moment, somewhere else. Sure enough, a blip on display catches her interest, and in what seems like seconds we’re in a cab headed for the East Village. We arrive at a seemingly identical party, but it’s the one that Gina has decided is “the place to be” tonight. Instead of turning the phone off and enjoying herself, however, she turns her phone around, activates the camera, and proceeds to take pictures of herself and her friends — instantly uploading them to her Facebook page for the world to see. She does this for about an hour, until a message comes through one of her networks and she’s off to the next location for the cycle to begin all over again. Gina is the girl who is everywhere at once, yet — ultimately — nowhere at all. The most social girl in her class doesn’t really socialize in the real world at all. Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

10

Nathan Jurgenson describes social-media users as developing “a ‘Facebook Eye’: our brains always looking for moments where the ephemeral blur of lived experience might best be translated into a Facebook post; one that will draw the most comments and ‘likes.’” Source: Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (2015)

11

Teenagers know that when they communicate by instant message, they compete with many other windows on a computer screen. They know how little attention they are getting because they know how little they give to the instant messages they receive. One sophomore girl at Branscomb High School compares instant messaging to being on “cruise control” or “automatic pilot.” Your attention is elsewhere. A Branscomb senior says, “Even if I give my full attention to the person I am Iming…they are not giving full attention to me.” Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

12

So, stalking is a transgression that does not transgress. A seventeen-year-old junior at the Fillmore School describes it as “the worst. Normal, but still creepy.” Normal because “it’s not against the rules to look at people’s wall-to-wall conversations [on Facebook].” Creepy because “it’s like listening to a conversation that you are not in, and after stalking I feel like I need to take a shower.” Just starting college, Dawn, eighteen, says she is “obsessed” with the “interesting people” who are her new classmates: “I spend all night reading people’s walls. I track their parties. I check out their girlfriends.” She, too, says, “My time on Facebook makes me feel dirty.” So stalking may not be breaking any rules, but it has given young people a way to invade each other’s privacy that can make them feel like spies and pornographers. Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

13

As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to-avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind? Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

14

In corporations, among friends, and within academic departments, people readily admit that they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face-to-face. Some who say “I live my life on my smartphone” are forthright about avoiding the “real-time” commitment of a phone call. The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. I recently overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two women. “No one answers the phone in our house anymore,” the first woman proclaimed with some consternation. “It used to be that the kids would race to pick up the phone. Now they are up in their rooms, knowing no one is going to call them, and texting and going on Facebook or whatever instead.” Parents with teenage children will be nodding at this very familiar story in recognition and perhaps a sense of wonderment that this has happened, and so quickly. And teenagers will simply be saying, “Well, what’s your point?” A thirteen-year-old tells me she “hates the phone and never listens to voicemail.” Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay. A twenty-one-year-old college student reflects on the new balance: “I don’t use my phone for calls any more. I don’t have the time to just go on and on. I like texting, Twitter, looking at someone’s Facebook wall. I learn what I need to know.” Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

15

The telephone was once a way to touch base or ask a simple question. But once you have access to e-mail, instant messaging, and texting, things change. Although we still use the phone to keep up with those closest to us, we use it less outside this circle. Not only do people say that a phone call asks too much, they worry it will be received as demanding too much. Randolph, a forty-six-year-old architect with two jobs, two young children, and a twelve-year- old son from a former marriage avoids the telephone because he feels “tapped out…. It promises more than I’m willing to deliver.” Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

16

Ambient contact is beginning to kill off that earlier technology of contact — the phone call. According to Nielsen data released in 2010, the number of mobile calls per person peaked in 2007 and then dropped steadily. And those calls are getting shorter: in 2005 they were three minutes on average, and by 2010 they were half that length. Source: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2014)

17

Educator and writer Lowell Monke shared with his students a troubling study that showed that many young people prefer to interact with machines rather than directly with human beings. The next day, one of the students sent him an e-mail explaining why this might be: “I do feel deeply disturbed when I can run errand after errand, and complete one task after another with the help of bank clerks, cashiers, postal employees, and hairstylists without ANY eye contact at all! After a wicked morning of that, I am ready to conduct all business online. “In a society in which adults so commonly treat each other mechanically,” Monke writes, “perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our youth are more attracted to machines.” We believe in our screens so much, we’ve placed them at the center of our lives, so why shouldn’t they? Source: William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (2010)

18

Today’s adolescents have no less need than those of previous generations to learn empathic skills, to think about their values and identity, and to manage and express feelings. They need time to discover themselves, time to think. But technology, put in the service of always-on communication and telegraphic speed and brevity, has changed the rules of engagement with all of this. When is downtime, when is stillness? The text-driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible but does little to cultivate it. When interchanges are reformatted for the small screen and reduced to the emotional shorthand of emoticons, there are necessary simplifications. And what of adolescents’ need for secrets, for marking out what is theirs alone? I wonder about this as I watch cell phones passed around high school cafeterias. Photos and messages are being shared and compared. I cannot help but identify with the people who sent the messages to these wandering phones. Do they all assume that their words and photographs are on public display? Perhaps. Traditionally, the development of intimacy required privacy. Intimacy without privacy reinvents what intimacy means. Source: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)

19

Social media has made us, in a sense, narcissists. In his essay “On Narcissism,” Sigmund Freud proposed two ideas of the narcissist: one revolved around the concept of self-love, the other stemmed from a state of mind that has no awareness that the self and other exist. McLuhan used the Greek myth of Narcissus to explain why people become entranced by tech gadgets. Narcissus is the youth who sees his own reflection in the water and mistakes it for somebody else. “The point of this myth,” McLuhan wrote, “is that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Similarly, he said, we’re fascinated by new technologies because they project us beyond ourselves. But just like Narcissus, we don’t recognize that that’s what the gadget is doing, projecting us, by extending our bodies into the world. The confusion induces a kind of trance. We can’t take our eyes off it, but we don’t understand why. Source: John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail (2009)

20

In his book The Culture of Narcissism , Christopher Lasch commented that “advertising institutionalizes envy and its attendant anxieties.” One could say that social media, with its own focus on advertising (advertising is the principal revenue stream for practically every social-media company, including Google), institutionalizes a peer envy. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing , “The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life.” We publicize our lives through social media to create an aspirational ideal for others and an idealized, possibly unfulfillable, version of ourselves. No one’s life is as good and eventful as seen through Facebook, no one’s life as shimmering and beautiful as viewed through the filters of Instagram. Source: Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (2015)

21

In another recent study, based on surveys measuring empathy among almost fourteen thousand college students over the last thirty years, University of Michigan researchers found that today’s college students are significantly less empathetic than college students of the 1980s and 1990s. The researchers suggested that perhaps connecting with friends online makes shutting out real-world issues easier. “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” said Edward O’Brien, a University of Michigan graduate student who helped with the study. Source: Brian Chen, Always On (2011)

22

In the future, whenever you write a message or update, the camera in your smartphone or tablet will ‘read’ your eyes and your facial expression, precisely calculate your mood, and append the appropriate emoji. Source: Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (2015)

23

The obvious next step in this reviewing culture is to start reviewing people. Many review sites offer spaces to review professionals — doctors, lawyers, mechanics, plumbers — while employers, teachers, and vacations are now increasingly reviewed on sites such as Glassdoor, RateMyProfessors, and TripAdvisor. But reviewing people who sell us goods or services, or treat our illnesses, is to be expected. How would you feel to be rated as a person, perhaps as a friend or lover, and to have that information be publicly available, linked to your real name and social-media identities? Source: Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (2015)

24

Robert Moran, head of the Brunswick Group, a communications consultancy, sees what he calls the “rateocracy” as an opportunity for transparency, when good corporations and citizens will be rewarded for acting ethically and in others’ best interests. It will be integrated with augmented reality apps, so that you can activate your Google Glass or pull out your smartphone and see ratings for people, businesses, and places all around you. Facial recognition will likely play a role: imagine being able to access information — social-media profiles, Google searches, biographical information, ratings from friends, colleagues, lovers — on anyone you see, without even talking to them. A universal ratings service might appear, or ratings services will become more deeply intertwined, with shared log-ins and metrics in the manner of some social networks. The term “rateocracy” is supposed to be a combination of “rate” and “democracy,” but the word sounds eerily like “autocracy.” A world in which everything and everyone you see is judged and those ratings distributed in real-time could lead to some horrific outcomes. As one critic put it, “think about the power to manipulate and control that algorithms and organizations which provide ratings will have, how ratings will lead to stigmatization and cumulative disadvantage, and how fear of automated social judgment will have a chilling effect on behavior.” Unfortunately, in many important respects, that world is already here. Source: Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection (2015)

25

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form. Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her “a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. “It drags you out of your own head,” she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself. Source: Clive Thompson, The New York Times (2008)

4. Watch

DURING CLASS:

1. Current events

• Discussion leader: Robert

2. Lesson work

• Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
• Online discussion leader: B
• Links library discussion leader: C

3. Digerati: Sherry Turtle (@sturkle)

• Activity leader: D

Sherry Turkle is a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She writes on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers.

In-class reading (click here for a link) excerpted from: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011) and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age (2015)

4. Preview

Preview homework for class 21: Thu Dec 8

• Homework
• Classroom leadership assignments