PROJECT #1
400-500 draft
Technology in relation to conversation – ENG 110.docx
800 WORD DRAFT
Technology is something that I have known for a good half of my life. Nearly everywhere I look, I see it, from grocery stores to my home and even in my schools. It is pretty hard to ignore the abundance of technology around every corner in our daily lives. It does a lot for us as well, as we have relied on technology to save many of our problems. However, it seems to also be causing a lot of new problems, specifically in terms of social problems. Sherry Turkle is a joint doctorate holder of sociology and personality psychology from Harvard, is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology and the director of the initiative on Technology and self at M.I.T. She has written ten books, all centered around this idea of technology and the self. The essay I wish to focus on is an excerpt from one of her books, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (2021). In this excerpt, Turkle describes the effect technology has had on people of all age’s ability to properly communicate with each other, as we seem to recede from the real world and rely on a release from it within our screens, and how this is affecting our ability to be empathetic. However, I believe what she fails to realize is that the effects of technology are more of a gray area than simply an all encompassing evil. While yes, it does ring true that digital technology has begun to hamper the ability for people to think empathetically towards one another due to the loss of needing to be face-to-face, digital technology also helps connect millions of people across the globe, I’d say completely changing the way we think about the world around us and giving people the chance to know what it’s like to “be in someone else’s shoes.” Not only that, the information it can spread is paramount to none, although this can be corrupted by nefarious parties.
Something that a lot of people, Turkle included, seem to be really worried about is the effects this reliance on digital technology is having on specifically young children. In one section of her essay, Turkle warns,
We begin to think of ourselves as a tribe of one, loyal to our own party. We check our messages during a quiet moment or when the pull of the online world simply feels irresistible. Even children text each other rather than talk face-to-face with friends – or, for that matter, rather than daydream, where they can take time alone with their thoughts (344, paragraph 4).
In other words, with the increasing use of digital technology, it furthers us away from one another and hampers the ability for children and/or adults to ever gain true connections with one another. It is true that as of right now, technology does indeed have a grasp on people’s attention spans and does lead to them using technology as a way of escaping the moment, and oftentimes it can be considered an addiction, and even can turn us into solitary people. Albeit, I believe saying children lose the ability to daydream altogether just due to a few screens is a little dramatic. It is almost hard coded into young children to be creative and imaginative. A screen does not stop them from doing that, it just alters the ways in which they outwardly express that creativity. However, one point she does talk about is the fact that “children text each other rather than talk face-to-face with friends” is something that I believe we can see not only in our children, but in ourselves. I cannot count the number of times someone who is maybe in the room next to me or close by has decided to text me a question rather than walk over to me and ask it. This reliance on technology to lead conversations is a concerning development and that is something I believe we as a society should truly be focused on understanding. It is the loss of empathy that truly scares me, not so much this far-fetched idea that our children are losing their creativity.
Technology, at the very least digital kinds, have spread knowledge and helped us to understand our world at such a rapid pace that it is incredible we as humans can even keep up with it. However, there is a big misunderstanding in our overzealous use of the “internet”. The internet lets me search up anything I want, to instantly learn about even the most obscure information around the globe. This doesn’t mean I actually understand what any of it means in context. Later on, Turkle brings up this point that knowledge and wisdom are two different things, specifically with teaching, saying, “[…]conversations with a good teacher communicate that learning isn’t all about the answers. It’s about what the answers mean (347 para. 2).” Something that the internet has a hard time conveying about boatloads of information is what it means in context of the time and place. I can specifically point to my history classes. Sure, I could look up when the American Revolutionary war happened and maybe even why, but that just turns to memorization, something that doesn’t actually help you understand something fully. A teacher on the other hand can teach it in an engaging way to help you understand that it was actually a war of a colony no longer wanting to pay the high taxes of the English government that had basically gone broke fighting the French, and a whole bunch of other reasons. The active use of conversation to explain things makes us as students become engaged with the subject, even if it is boring.
1000 word draft
Our Conversation Plight Thanks to Technology
