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 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Always On”
Turkle recalls a group of people they called “the cyborgs” at MIT in the 90s. These people were “a new kind of nomad, wandering in and out of the physical real” (151). At the time, their wearable technology and attachment to virtual space seems alien to the faculty, but Turkle points out that many of us live like this now, whether it be through social networking sites or alternate reality games like Second Life. Our real selves are blurring with our virtual selves.
Turkle considers the differences between her daughter’s experience studying abroad in Paris and her own: her daughter is a phone call away from her friends and life back in Boston. She laments the end of a time when one could experience someplace new completely untethered.
Pete is a middle-aged man in an unhappy marriage. He has a virtual wife in Second Life, which he claims helps his real-life marriage because it gives him an outlet to talk about the anxieties his real wife doesn’t want to hear about. He also claims that he feels most “himself” in the game.
Turkle turns a skeptical eye to the rise of multitasking as a skill—indeed the skill for working in the digital age. She points out that studies show multitasking reduces one’s overall productivity. She notices the students who take notes on their laptops do worse in class than those who force themselves to remain undistracted.
Diane, a museum curator, points out a problem that seems universal: she feels on top of the world when in the midst of all her programs, though Turkle points out that, ironically, she seems completely at the mercy of all of her sites and devices.
People’s patience is decreasing as communications technology gets quicker, and as a result, nuance falls away. In a world of instantaneous responses, questions that can be instantly answered are prioritized. Demands become depersonalized. A “fearful symmetry” emerges: as robots get promoted to being more alive, people online get demoted to being “maximizing machines.”
Chapter 9 Summary: “Growing Up Tethered”
A group of teens expresses their compulsion to look at their incoming phone messages, even while driving, which they know is dangerous. Turkle points out that this is the first generation who takes technology and this “always on” social connection for granted. It hampers self-reflection.
When young people are always tethered to a cell phone, it raises this question: “[W]hen does one have the right to be alone?” (173). Relationships with parents and peers can be “both sustaining and constraining” (174). And Turkle worries that such an impinging sense of social connection can “support an emotional style in which feelings are not fully experienced until they are communicated. Put otherwise, there is every opportunity to form a thought by sending out for comments” (175).
Julia, age 16, and Claudia, age 17, describe the way they use texting as an emotional balm for even the smallest setbacks or celebrations. They become anxious when they don’t get a quick response.
Turkle questions the shifting line between what is considered normal and what is considered a pathology—how it changes as social mores change. She considers a college student who texts home fifteen times a day. Twenty years ago, as a practicing psychologist, she could have classified this behavior as problematic. But today it is “not unusual” (178).
Trish, a physically-abused 13-year-old, creates a non-abusive family in the Sims Online, another online game that simulates real life. Katherine, age 16, “practices” being other people in this game. This kind of “identity-making” can take place on social media sites, too, or anywhere where you use an avatar to represent you. Mona, a high school freshman, worries about creating the “real her” on Facebook. One high schoolers says that, between Facebook and college applications, each of which has to be tailored for the specific college, “what I learned in high school was profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me” (183).
Turkle talks with a number of students who are tired of the constant auditing of what should and shouldn’t be on their profile. In summation: “Social media ask us to represent ourselves in simplified ways. And then, faced with an audience, we feel pressure to conform to these simplifications” (185).
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
There is a parallel between the ways robotics and the internet tend to draw us in and keep us engaged: nurturance. Robots of the previous section routinely make the user take care of them and thus feel that the robot needs them; the internet does the same thing, with its constant beeping and bussing, as it is always on and always needs tending to.
This is where the title of the book comes from: the idea that we can be alone but connected to so many people. And Turkle points out that being alone can feel like a precondition for being together: to have the solitary time to focus on what one wants to say or project of oneself can feel like an essential part of social interaction.
Another detrimental consequence of this always-on connection is the cultivation of a “collaborative self” (176), which is a fragile identity that exists only in the context of a flood of social support. Turkle argues that with these identities “[w]hat is not being cultivated here is the ability to be alone and reflect on one’s emotions in private” (176).
This idea of fragility is important because it comes back when Turkle talks about the idea of technology appealing not to our needs but our vulnerabilities. Social networks can enable narcissism characterized by “a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use” (177).
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