12 years ago

Is Facebook making us lonely? (VIDEO) 

Connected, but alone? as Sherry Turkle (BA in Social Studies and Ph.D degree Sociology and Personality Psychology) sharply notes in her perceptive January 2011 book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.”  Sherry recently has been focusing on researching the psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. College and High school students who wonder how much they should tilt their Facebook profiles toward what their friends will think is cool. Or Teenagers who send and receive six to eight thousand texts a month. Mourners who send text messages during a memorial service because they can’t go an hour without using their BlackBerries. These are examples of the ways technology is changing how people relate to one another and construct their own inner lives. Sherry is concerned here not with the political uses of the Internet, as manifested in the Arab Spring for example, but with its psychological side effects. Instead of real friends, we “friend” strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writes, “makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.” If you are interested in what you are reading here I highly recommend reading Sherry Turkle’s “subtle and very much enlightening”  book here. And as we both agree on the fact that the World nowadays (22%) is spending most of our time in front of a computer, we are having less and less ”face to face” time. I feel that we must create internet moderation guidelines for the youngsters. When do we realize to do so? Watch Sherry’s Feb. 2012 TED Talk here