The Reverberations of Connectivity and its Disconnect

The idea of Replacement has long intrigued the human kind. Funny how we sometimes compensate it by calling it Upgrades. Its the light in which you see.

In her article, Sherry Turkle challenges the idea of Change and its echoes on human connect with one another. Our mode of communication has come a long way through the years. And for the sake of keeping this read a short one, lets cap it at the Digital Age.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. What if we replace Absence with Virtual Presence? Today, missing someone does not have the same meaning it had a couple of years ago. The compensation or expression for that void is fueled by different paradigms of social media and online connections. We can instantly show how much we “Miss” somebody by sending them a snap or a short video. Initially it started at a peer to peer level, but slowly the hunger to be heard lead us to share our lives with others at a mass level, through the internet of course.

It is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart

This statement by Turkle can be countered by saying that we are simply keeping up with time, leading me back to calling it as Upgrading oneself and the people around you. A new mobile application for new ways of saying Hi launches and we instantly on-board ourselves to it along with 10 of our closest people. It this wild fire? Is this a snowball flying down a mountain side, devouring everyone in its wake? OR is it Revolution? We would never really know. Maybe with time, we would upgrade ourselves to an otherworldly plane of Knowing, Maybe.

What is beautiful about this article is how well Turkle has stitched the fabric of our lives with technology. She states apt examples to trigger certain thoughts within the reader. One such example that clearly stood out for me was that of Ellen, a young woman who maintains a connection with her grandmother via Skype. Although Ellen admits to being guilty of multitasking during her hour long conversations with her grandmother, she has given her a reason to be happy just by watching her. This mutual benefit has lead to both of them being alone yet connected.

To me this is the brutal, beautiful truth of today’s digital age.

Its the light in which you see.