In the last chapters of Alone Together, Turkle continues the conversation about our relationship to teachnology in an interesting way, as she transitions away from criticism of robots, and towards criticism of media technologies. In this turn, Turkle interestingly relates the two together in that machines that we tended to also tended to us, in that the more people took care of the robots, the more that they felt like the robot filled a void in their lives. In a similar way, Turkle talks about social media as something that we are forced to “take care” of, and that in taking care of it, it seems to take care of us.
“Taking Care” of our technology
Turkle starts with talking about how our media becomes something that we have to “tend” in a similar way to how we would tend to a pet, except that tending the Net means tending our very identites. There are several stories from adolescents about how they have to manage their profiles in order to seem a certain way, and how the adolescents have to learn to negotiate stressful decisions about what to post on their pages. This type of personality management is, in Turkle’s opinion, overwhelming. This also goes for not only web media in terms of text messaging, where the constancy of being available to be messaged further forces us to “tend” the media. To some extent this was a comment that applied to radio, television, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone, but Turkle points out how it isn’t so much how the technology has changed, but how the social regulations have changed with the technology. Whether someone is in a meeting, or in a conversation, or what have you, the prevalence of texting has forced an expectation that the recipient will answer quickly.
As Turkle further interrogates this connection to texting technology, she points to more stories of teens and the negative repercussions of connectivity. There are many stories about what teens expect out of their conversations, which attempt to limit the excessiveness of conversation by converting sound and expression into typed letters. There were interesting stories about how teens try to send the right message with their texts. Their image as the “in” crowd, or being sexually sophisticated come from their texts, texts that can be sent from other people, that can be copy pasted off the Net. Part of the worry here is back to a thread of worry about authenticity and identity. How do these young kids know if the person talking to them is really the one that thought up the text?
Identity Ambiguity
Stemming from this worry about online identity, Turkle highlights the way teens shrug off the harmful effects of connectivity. In terms of identity, there is some trouble to the way new users to technology don’t care if the people they talk to online are “real.” This means real in terms of being who they say they are, what they say they feel, or even (as we saw in the section about robots) if they’re actually real at all. Teens seem to shrug off the responsibility to care about who actually is on the other side of the screen, as they experience the malleable indetity politics from their own seat. For example one girl has a completely different identity on an Italian chat site, where she can speak more promiscuously and post more risqué pictures. Turkle then talks about a how some people see these alternate spaces for identity as completely free, while ignoring the fact that the users become emotionally invested in these identities. For Turkle, identity play in itself isn’t dangerous, but it is dangerous to think that there are no consequences or connections that are made when we play with identity.
Ambivalence to Privacy
Another element that Turkle finds particularly problematic is how privacy is treated by the social media faithful. Not only adolescents, but even major players in industry are finding fewer and fewer reasons to include features that enable the privacy of their users, and even then it’s almost as if it is a privilege, and not a right. Many seem to think that their privacy is just something taken for granted, or that there will be an acceptance for inappropriate material that surfaces later in their lives. In the end these new users not only know that their posts are read, but expect that their posts will be read. Some even go so far as to claim that this loss of privacy is a good thing, as “we shouldn’t have anything to hide.” But in the end the breakdown of attention to privacy brings up important questions about our relationship to our words. If our Facebook walls are going to be up forever, then what should we be writing about? Should we be thinking about the way a wall post today will change the future 20 years down the line? In the end, Turkle has few answers, other than to point to our ability to be alone with ourselves, to disconnect on occasion. But these references to Thoreau speak poorly to a generation raised on Pokémon, so that while this message might work to persuade those that are already critical, it seems inconsiderate of how to speak to the actual mass of networked users.
Questions:
1. This book uses a multitude of interviews with adolescents, but uses those interviews to reference cultural emblems (Cyrano for example) that have little connection with these groups. Understanding that this is an academic text aimed primarily at the field of media scholarship, how does this book serve more to reinforce the mindset of anxious parents than to change the mindset of adolescents?
2. Turkle describes a dismal future for those that "grow up tethered," in what ways is this future a different argument than one's we have heard before against media, and in what ways is it another generalized concern for a younger generation that we do not have the tools to evaluate?
3. In what ways does Turkle's status as a psychoanalyst come to bear on the book in both fruitful and problematic ways?
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