39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “True Confessions”
On a site called PostSecret, people send in handwritten postcards confessing something, and these post card confessions are then put online. Turkle questions how many are fictional and if it matters—and if the consolation and acceptance one might feel posting on there is genuine or not. Online confessions are similar to robot companions in that “each takes as its premise the notion that you can deal with feelings without dealing directly with a person” (231).
Sherryl makes online confessions, but it doesn’t cause her to make amends: “She goes online to feel better, not to make things right” (233).
Confessing online also increases the number of people from whom one expects a nurturing response afterward, but it can open one up to cruelty and overall a “coarsening” of responses from readers. Turkle talks to Jonas, who projects his frustration for distancing himself from his son onto another poster. Turkle claims that while this happens in real life, it is “endemic” on the internet.
She speaks with Molly and points out that while Molly feels she’s found a community online, it lacks what a real-life community has, good and bad. A real-life community also would not give Molly the ability to log off when she gets negative feedback.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Anxiety”
Anxiety abounds in the new connective universe. There is a fear of missing out on something and the simultaneous trapped feeling of always being reachable.
Julia is 16, an only child who uses texting to find her real feelings. Her parents are divorced, and she feels caught between them. She stops calling her father. He doesn’t call her, either, though she wants him to. Four years later, they begin chatting through email.
She explains that she needs to look at her phone throughout the day and lists minor emergencies that might need her attention when asked why she doesn’t just turn it off. She talks about 9/11, too—a traumatic day when Julia was in the fourth grade and cut off from her parents due to school safety protocols. Turkle pinpoints this as the moment when cell phones “became a symbol of physical and emotional safety” (247).
Hannah meets a boy named Ian on an Internet Relay Chat(IRC), and the two get to know each other well enough that she feels he knows her better than anyone. But she notes that something is missing from their relationship and that friendship on the internet is demanding because it can bring out the worst in people. There are social pressures that come with Facebook, too, like a constant anxiety that one isn’t posting enough.
Turkle delves into the concept of Facebook stalking, which students describe overall as “normal, but still creepy” (252). Young people worry about privacy but don’t know the rules because everything is so complex and vague: who’s watching, what’s being logged.
Brad, 18, is unsettled when a friend mentions the “chat logs” she has of their IMs from years ago. The fear of being recorded makes online communication more anxiety inducing. It makes escaping a past self harder. How is one able to feel free to experiment when one knows that every misstep will be recorded?
Turkle finishes with a discussion on the idea of a surveillance state and one unnamed person who defends it at a conference by using Michel Foucault’s idea of the panopticon, a circular prison that enables all prisoners to be seen from a central location. She thinks that this is misinformed and lacks a sense of history, that true privacy is crucial to democracy.
Chapters 12-13 Analysis
Turkle is skeptical of anonymous confession sites for many of the same reasons she is skeptical of sociable robots or virtual connections: “In each, something that is less than conversation begins to seem like conversation. Venting feelings comes to feel like sharing them. There is a danger that we will come to see this reduction in our expectations as a new norm” (231).
She expresses the same kind of worry when she takes issue with the title of the symposium that implies that robots can “care”—a devaluing of words and concepts that can soon become the new norm. She feels we will expect less of people once it is.
She doesn’t want “venting” to mean the same thing as “sharing” (231) or the line between a “confession” and an “apology” (234) to blur.
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