Week 5 Blog Post

Professor Sherry Turkle, in her article, "Can You Hear Me Now?", which is a pun of sorts on the identical Verizon catchphrase, asserts in the tagline that "thanks to technology, people have never been more connected–or more alientated". I feel that this is a perfect summation of an assessment of the state of people, given all the myriad technological advances of the day.

Notice that she is first positive: people have never been more connected. I can email, text, or videoconference my best high school friend Quang, who currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, almost any time and any place I want to (given that I call during his waking hours). If he's not available for a "linear" type of contact--phone call or video call--I can opt for a nonlinear type of contact: email, text (linear meaning realtime; nonlinear referring to communications disjointed by gaps in time).

When I was in high school, this was much much more difficult. I would have to either call Quang through a landline to his own landline, or write him a letter! The former would mean calling from my home (since payphones would be much more expensive) to his home or office. Back then, communications were so, relatively speaking, incredibly circumscribed. Actually, I remember organizing many basketball games with my friends: I would park myself by my telephone and dial one friend after another, informing them briefly what time we were going to congregate to play pickup games. It could take up to 20-30 minutes to do so!

Because I really liked basketball, I was the primary organizer. And though today one can simply create a group in Facebook Messenger, Wechat, texts, Whatsapp, Groupme, Slack, Kakao, Skype, etc., I actually didn't mind calling people individually. For example, I enjoyed hearing my friends' voices, chatting briefly with them, and providing them service; they were always appreciative and always showed up when they said they'd come. It also allowed me a lot of time to think about who I wanted to invite; after all, some people are not the most pleasant to play basketball with. There was also a certain pleasure to memorizing people's phone numbers and tangibly realizing that I was reaching a certain level of friendship--of intimacy--with them.

On the flip side, as Turkle mentions, there are negatives to every situation--including the old times! It took time to call everyone one by one. I wasn't able to reach out to as many people as I could have--acquaintances I could have added easily with today's technologies would have been much harder to do or simply impossible back in the days of landline telephones and paper contact/address books.

I would argue that this is nothing new under the sun. When the wheel was invented, and everyone began riding horse-drawn carts, perhaps there were people who lamented the loss of the intimate horse-rider connection that riding a horse as a single rider brought--the physical connection between the horse and rider, the unity of thought and body with the horse, perhaps the greater maneuverability of a horse and rider versus horse-drawn cart.

When the electric shaver was invented, perhaps manual shaving stakeholders lamented the decline of a beautiful tradition and the slightly inferior shave that electric razors provided. Yet, on the flip side, people could save lots of time and enjoy much greater convenience.

So, to sum my thoughts up about Prof. Turkle's article as well as her TED talk, I agree with her that there are pitfalls, some of them quite insidious, to new technology. But I would also counter that this has been the story with humans from the invention of the oldest technology, and that we must take a neutral attitude towards technology. It indisputably has pros and cons for our lives. I feel that the the most important thing for us to do is to recognize what these pros and cons are, because, I would agree with Turkle, if we don't recognize the pitfalls for what they are and understand what they entail, we can do serious harm to our lives.

As for the misgivings she communicates at both the end of her TED talk and her Forbes article about the presence of robots and their advanced AI, on the one hand I feel like it's just going to be the same old story. But on the other hand, I would tend to agree with her: AI is a different animal. It contains more of a human being's ability to think, reason, and have agency. So actually, I agree with her that we must be more cautious than ever before--even more so than with the atomic or hydrogen bomb, or biological warfare technology.

Lastly, I would just like to state that yes, technology is changing us. Our attention spans are shorter (I notice my own having decreased radically!), there are more opportunities than ever for distraction (e.g. in class, with our laptops, tablets, and phones immediately available) and sometimes I do feel like I need emotional stimulation from social media (why isn't anyone, or more people, liking my posts? Why do I keep liking people's posts if they don't like mine back? Why am I feeling resentful towards my social media "friends" because I'm not getting more likes--why do I care about the stuff other people are doing if they don't care about my life?). But at the same time, when I contemplate social media with some perspective, I learn to view technology for what it is. Technology does not validate who I am or give my life meaning. That's something totally separate from technology--that's real life.