Alone together sherry turkle essay

MICHAELA CULLINGTON

4. Cullington focuses on how texting affects on writing, whereas Sherry Turkle is concerned with the way it affects communication more broadly (pp. 373-92). How do you think Cullington would respond to Turkle's concerns?

5. Cullington "send[s] and receive[s] around 6,400 texts a month" (paragraph 21). About how many do you send and receive? Write a paragraph reflecting on how your texting affects your other writing. First write it as a text, and then revise it to meet the standards of academic writing. How do

the two differ?

No Need to Call

SHERRY TURKLE

"So MANY PEOPLE HATE THE TELEPHONE," says Elaine, seventeen. Among her friends at Roosevelt High School, "it's all texting and messaging." She herself writes each of her six closest friends roughly twenty texts a day. In addition, she says, "there are about forty instant messages out, forty in, when I'm at home on the computer." Elaine has strong ideas about how electronic media "levels the playing field" between people like her-outgoing, on the soccer team, and in drama club-and the shy: "It's only on the screen that shy people open up." She explains why: "When you can think about what you're going to say, you can talk to someone you'd have trouble talking to. And it doesn't seem weird that you pause for two minutes to

SHERRY TuRKLE teaches in the program in science, technology, and

society at MIT and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

She has been described as the "Margaret Mead of digital culture." Her

books include Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology

and Less from Each Other (2011), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age

of the Internet (1995), and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) . This essay is from Alone Together.

SHERRY TURKLE

think about what you're going to say before you say it, like it would be if you were actually talking to someone."

Elaine gets specific about the technical designs that help shy people express themselves in electronic messaging. The person to whom you are writing shouldn't be able to see your process of revision or how long you have been working on the message. "That could be humiliating." The best communica- tion programs shield the writer from the view of the reader. The advantage of screen communication is that it is a place to reflect, retype, and edit. "It is a place to hide," says Elaine.

The notion that hiding makes it easier to open up is not new. In the psychoanalytic tradition, it inspired technique. Classical analysis shielded the patient from the analyst's gaze in order to facilitate free association, the golden rule of saying whatever comes to mind. Likewise, at a screen, you feel protected and less burdened by expectations. And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encourag- ing feeling of already being together. In this curious relational space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic com- munications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, suc- cumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. 1 It is a seductive but dangerous habit of mind. When you cultivate this sensibility, a telephone call can seem fearsome because it

reveals too much. Elaine is right in her analysis: teenagers flee the telephone.

Perhaps more surprisingly, so do adults. They claim exhaustion and lack of time; always on call, with their time highly lever- aged through multitasking, they avoid voice communication

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outside of a small circle because it demands their full attention when they don't want to give it.

Technologies live in complex ecologies. The meaning of s any one depends on what others are available. The telephone was once a way to touch base or ask a simple question. But once you have access to e-mail, instant messaging, and texting, things change. Although we still use the phone to keep up with those closest to us, we use it less outside this circle.2 Not only do people say that a phone call asks too much, they worry it will be received as demanding too much. Randolph, a forty-six-year-old architect with two jobs, two young children, and a twelve-year- old son from a former marriage, makes both points. He avoids the telephone because he feels "tapped out .... It promises more than I'm willing to deliver." If he keeps his communications to text and e-mail, he believes he can "keep it together." He explains, "Now that there is e-mail, people expect that a call will be more complicated. Not about facts. A fuller thing. People expect it to take time-or else you wouldn't have called."

Tara, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer who juggles children, a job, and a new marriage, makes a similar point: "When you ask for a call, the expectation is that you have pumped it up a level. People say to themselves: 'It's urgent or she would have sent an e-mail."' So Tara avoids the telephone. She wants to meet with friends in person; e-mail is for setting up these meetings. "That is what is most efficient," she says. But efficiency has its downside. Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs. In friendship, things can't always wait. Tara knows this; she feels guilty and she experiences a loss: "I'm at the point where I'm processing my friends as though they were items of inventory ... or clients."

Leonora, fifty-seven, a professor of chemistry, reflects on her similar practice: "I use e-mail to make appointments to

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see friends, but I'm so busy that I'm often making an appoint- ment one or two months in the future. After we set things up by e-mail, we do not call. Really. I don't call. They don't call. They feel that they have their appointment. What do I feel? I feel I have 'taken care of that person."' Leonora's pained tone makes it clear that by "taken care of" she means that she has crossed someone off a to-do list. Tara and Leonora are discontent but do not feel they have a choice. This is where technology has brought them. They subscribe to a new etiquette, claiming the need for efficiency in a realm where efficiency is costly.

Audrey: A Life on the Screen

... Audrey, sixteen, a Roosevelt junior[,] talked about her Facebook profile as "the avatar of me." She's one of Elaine's shy friends who prefers texting to talking. She is never without her phone, sometimes using it to text even as she instant-messages at an open computer screen. Audrey feels lonely in her fam- ily. She has an older brother in medical school and a second, younger brother, just two years old. Her parents are divorced, and she lives half time with each of them. Their homes are about a forty-five-minute drive apart. This means that Audrey spends a lot of time on the road. "On the road," she says. "That's daily life." She sees her phone as the glue that ties her life together. Her mother calls her to pass on a message to her father. Her father does the same. Audrey says, "They call me to say, 'Tell your mom this .... Make sure your dad knows that.' I use the cell to pull it together." Audrey sums up the situa- tion: "My parents use me and my cell like instant messenger. I am their IM."

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Like so many other children who tell me similar stories, Audrey complains of her mother's inattention when she picks her up at school or after sports practice. At these times, Audrey says, her mother is usually focused on her cell phone, either texting or talking to her friends. Audrey describes the scene: she comes out of the gym exhausted, carrying heavy gear. Her mother sits in her beaten-up SUV, immersed in her cell, and doesn't even look up until Audrey opens the car door. Some- times her mother will make eye contact but remain engrossed with the phone as they begin the drive home. Audrey says, "It gets between us, but it's hopeless. She's not going to give it up. Like, it could have been four days since I last spoke to her, then I sit in the car and wait in silence until she's done."3

Audrey has a fantasy of her mother, waiting for her, expect- 10 ant, without a phone. But Audrey is resigned that this is not to be and feels she must temper her criticism of her mother because of her own habit of texting when she is with her friends. Audrey does everything she can to avoid a call.4 "The phone, it's awkward. I don't see the point. Too much just a recap and sharing feelings. With a text ... I can answer on my own time. I can respond. I can ignore it. So it really works with my mood. I'm not bound to anything, no commitment .... I have control over the conversation and also more control over what I say."

T exting offers protection:

Nothing will get spat at you. You have time to think and prepare

what you're going to say, to make you appear like that's just the way

you are. There's planning involved, so you can control how you're

portrayed to this person, because you're choosing these wQrds,

editing it before you send it .... When you instant-message you

can cross things out, edit what you say, block a person, or sign off.

A phone conversation is a lot of pressure. You're always expected

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to uphold it, to keep it going, and that's too much pressure ....

You have to just keep going ... "Oh, how was your day?" You're

trying to think of something else to say real fast so the conversa-

tion doesn't die out.

Then Audrey makes up a new word. A text, she argues, is better than a call because in a call "there is a lot less bound- ness to the person." By this she means that in a call, she could learn too much or say too much, and things could get "out of control." A call has insufficient boundaries. She admits that "later in life I'm going to need to talk to people on the phone. But not now." When texting, she feels at a reassuring distance. If things start to go in a direction she doesn't like, she can eas- ily redirect the conversation-or cut it off: "In texting, you get your main points off; you can really control when you want the conversation to start and end. You say, 'Got to go, bye.' You

Teenagers plugged into their devices but not each other.

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just do it ... much better than the long drawn-out good-byes, when you have no real reason to leave, but you want to end the conversation." This last is what Audrey likes least-the end of conversations. A phone call, she explains, requires the skill to end a conversation "when you have no real reason to leave .... It's not like there is a reason. You just want to. I don't know how to do that. I don't want to learn."

Ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences separation as rejection; she projects onto others the pang of abandonment she feels when someone ends a conversation with her. Feeling unthreatened when someone wants to end a con- versation may seem a small thing, but it is not: It calls upon a sense of self-worth; one needs to be at a place where Audrey has not arrived. It is easier to avoid the phone; its beginnings and endings are too rough on her.

Audrey is not alone in this. Among her friends, phone calls are infrequent, and she says, "Face-to-face conversations happen way less than they did before. It's always, 'Oh, talk to you online."' This means, she explains, that things happen online that "should happen in person .... Friendships get bro- ken. I've had someone ask me out in a text message. I've had someone break up with me online." But Audrey is resigned to such costs and focuses on the bounties of online life.

One of Audrey's current enthusiasms is playing a more li social, even flirtatious version of herself in online worlds. "I'd like to be more like I am online," she says. As we've seen, for Audrey, building an online avatar is not so different from writ- ing a social-networking profile. An avatar, she explains, "is a Facebook profile come to life." And avatars and profiles have a lot in common with the everyday experiences of texting and instant messaging. In all of these, as she sees it, the point is to do "a performance of you."

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Making an avatar and texting. Pretty much the same. You're cre-

ating your own person; you don't have to think of things on the

spot really, which a lot of people can't really do. You're creating

your own little ideal person and sending it out. Also on the Inter-

net, with sites like MySpace and Facebook, you put up the things

you like about yourself, and you're not going to advertise the bad

aspects of you.

You're not going to post pictures of how you look every day.

You're going to get your makeup on, put on your cute little outfit,

you're going to take your picture and post it up as your default, and

that's what people are going to expect that you are every day, when

really you're making it up for all these people .... You can write

anything about yourself; these people don't know. You can create

who you want to be. You can say what kind of stereotype mold you

want to fit in without ... maybe in real life it won't work for you,

you can't pull it off. But you can pull it off on the Internet.

Audrey has her cell phone and its camera with her all day; all day she takes pictures and posts them to Facebook. She boasts that she has far more Face book photo albums than any of her friends. "I like to feel," she says, "that my life is up there." But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life. Audrey is preoccupied about which photographs to post. Which put her in the best light? Which show her as a "bad" girl in potentially appealing ways? If identity play is the work of adolescence, Audrey is at work all day: "If Facebook were deleted, I'd be deleted .... All my memories would probably go along with it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of that would be lost. If Face book were undone, I might actually freak out .... That is where I am. It's part of your life. It's a second you." It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar: "It's your little twin on the Internet."

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Since Audrey is constantly reshaping this "twin," she won- ders what happens to the elements of her twin that she edits away. "What does Facebook do with pictures you put on and then take off?" She suspects that they stay on the Internet forever, an idea she finds both troubling and comforting. If everything is archived, Audrey worries that she will never be able to escape the Internet twin. That thought is not so nice. But if everything is archived, at least in fantasy, she will never have to give her up. That thought is kind of nice.

On Facebook, Audrey works on the twin, and the twin works on her. She describes her relationship to the site as a "give-and-take." Here's how it works: Audrey tries out a "flirty" style. She receives a good response from Facebook friends, and so she ramps up the flirtatious tone. She tries out "an ironic, witty" tone in her wall posts. The response is not so good, and she retreats. Audrey uses the same kind of tinkering as she experiments with her avatars in virtual worlds. She builds a first version to "put something out there." Then comes months of adjusting, of "seeing the new kinds of people I can hang with" by changing how she represents herself. Change your avatar, change your world.

Overwhelmed across the Generations

The teenagers I studied were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many were introduced to the Internet through America Online when they were only a little past being toddlers. Their parents, however, came to online life as grown-ups. In this domain, they are a generation that, from the beginning, has been playing catch-up with their children. This pattern continues: the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is adults from

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·conventional thirty-five to forty-four.5 Conventional wisdom stresses wisdom" Is the how dt'«erent these adults are from their children-lay-"standard view." Ill

For more on ing out fundamental divides between those who migrated this move, see h

pp. 23-24. to digital worlds and those who are its "natives." Butt e migrants and natives share a lot: perhaps above all, the feeling of being overwhelmed. If teenagers, overwhelmed with demands for academic and sexual performance, have come to treat online life as a place to hide and draw some lines, then their parents, claiming exhaustion, strive to exert greater control over what reaches them. And the only way to filter effectively is to keep

most communications online and text based. So, they are always on, always at work, and always on call. 20

I remember the time, not many years ago, when I celebrated Thanksgiving with a friend and her son, a young lawyer, who had just been given a beeper by his firm. At the time, everyone at the table, including him, joked about the idea of his "legal emergencies." By the following year, he couldn't imagine not being in continual contact with the office. There was a time when only physicians had beepers, a "burden" shared in rota- tion. Now, we have all taken up the burden, reframed as an

asset-or as just the way it is. We are on call for our families as well as our colleagues.

On a morning hike in the Berkshires, I fall into step with Hope, forty-seven, a real estate broker from Manhattan. She carries her BlackBerry. Her husband, she says, will probably want to be in touch. And indeed, he calls at thirty-minute intervals. Hope admits, somewhat apologetically, that she is "not fond" of the calls, but she loves her husband, and this is what he needs. She answers her phone religiously until finally a call comes in with spotty reception. "We're out of range, thank goodness," she says, as she disables her phone. "I need

a rest."

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Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available for calls. It is poignant that people's thoughts tum to technology when they imagine ways to deal with stresses that they see as having been brought on by technology. They talk of filters and intelligent agents that will handle the messages they don't want to see. Hope and Audrey, though thirty years apart in age, both see texting as the solution to the "problem" of the telephone. And both rede- fine "stress" in the same way-as pressure that happens in real time. With this in mind, my hiking partner explains that she is trying to "convert" her husband to texting. There will be more messages; he will be able to send more texts than he can place calls. But she will not have to deal with them "as they happen."

Mixed feelings about the drumbeat of electronic communi- cation do not suggest any lack of affection toward those with whom we are in touch. But a stream of messages makes it impos- sible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don't reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.

We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make a new Faustian* bargain. It goes something like this: if we are left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together.

The barrier to making a call is so high that even when people z; have something important to share, they hold back. Tara, the lawyer who admits to "processing" her friends by dealing with

*Faustian Relating to Faust, a character of German folklore, and used to describe something or someone that is concerned only with present gain and not future consequences.

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them on e-mail, tells me a story about a friendship undermined. About four times a year, Tara has dinner with Alice, a classmate from law school. Recently, the two women exchanged multiple e-mails trying to set a date. Finally, after many false starts, they settled on a time and a restaurant. Alice did not come to the dinner with good news. Her sister had died. Though they lived thousands of miles apart, the sisters had spoken once a day. Without her sister, without these calls, Alice feels ungrounded.

At dinner, when Alice told Tara about her sister's death, Tara became upset, close to distraught. She and Alice had been e-mailing for months. Why hadn't Alice told her about this? Alice explained that she had been taken up with her family, with arrangements. And she said, simply, "I didn't think it was something to discuss over e-mail." Herself in need of support,

Alice ended up comforting Tara. As Tara tells me this story, she says that she was ashamed

of her reaction. Her focus should have been-and should now be-on Alice's loss, not on her own ranking as a confidant. But she feels defensive as well. She had, after all, "been in touch." She'd e-mailed; she'd made sure that their dinner got arranged. Tara keeps coming back to the thought that if she and Alice had spoken on the telephone to set up their dinner date, she would have learned about her friend's loss. She says, "I would have heard something in her voice. I would have suspected. I could have drawn her out." But for Tara, as for so many, the telephone call is for family. For friends, even dear friends, it is

close to being off the menu. Tara avoids the voice but knows she has lost something. For

the young, this is less clear. I talk with Meredith, a junior at Silver Academy who several months before had learned of a friend's death via instant message and had been glad that she didn't have to see or speak to anyone. She says, "It was a day

No Need to Call

off, so I was at home, and I hadn't seen anyone who lives around me, and then my friend Rosie IM'ed me and told me my friend died. I was shocked and everything, but I was more okay than I would've been if I saw people. I went through the whole thing not seeing anyone and just talking to people online about it, and I was fine. I think it would've been much worse if they'd told me in person."

I ask Meredith to say more. She explains that when bad news came in an instant message, she was able to compose herself. It would have been "terrible," she says, to have received a call. "I didn't have to be upset in front of someone else." Indeed, for a day after hearing the news, Meredith only communicated with friends by instant message. She describes the IMs as fre- quent but brief: "Just about the fact of it. Conversations like, 'Oh, have you heard?' 'Yeah, I heard.' And that's it." The IMs let her put her emotions at a distance. When she had to face other people at school, she could barely tolerate the rush of feeling: "The second I saw my friends, it got so much worse." Karen and Beatrice, two of Meredith's friends, tell similar sto- ries. Karen learned about the death of her best friend's father in an instant message. She says, "It was easier to learn about it on the computer. It made it easier to hear. I could take it in pieces. I didn't have to look all upset to anyone." Beatrice reflects, "I don't want to hear bad things, but if it is just texted to me, I can stay calm."

These young women prefer to deal with strong feelings from w the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to pro- cessing emotions in real time. Under stress, they seek compo- sure above all. But they do not find equanimity. When they meet and lose composure, they find a new way to flee: often they take their phones out to text each other and friends not in the room. I see a vulnerability in this generation, so quick

SHERRY TURKLE

to say, "Please don't call." They keep themselves at a distance from their feelings. They keep themselves from people who

could help.

Voices

When I first read how it is through our faces that we call each other up as human beings, I remember thinking I have always felt that way about the human voice. But like many of those I study, I have been complicit with technology in removing

many voices from my life. I had plans for dinner with a colleague, Joyce. On the day

before we were to meet, my daughter got admitted to college. I e-mailed Joyce that we would have much to celebrate. She e-mailed back a note of congratulations. She had been through the college admissions process with her children and under- stood my relief. At dinner, Joyce said that she had thought of calling to congratulate me, but a call had seemed "intrusive." I admitted that I hadn't called her to share my good news for the same reason. Joyce and I both felt constrained by a new etiquette but were also content to follow it. "I feel more in control of my time if I'm not disturbed by calls," Joyce admit-

ted. Both Joyce and .I have gained something we are not happy

about wanting. License to feel together when alone, comforted by e-mails, excused from having to attend to people in real time. We did not set out to avoid the voice but end up denying ourselves its pleasures. For the voice can be experienced only in real time, and both of us are so busy that we don't feel we

have it to spare. Apple's visual voicemail for the iPhone was welcomed

because it saves you the trouble of having to listen to a message

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to know who sent it. And now there are applications that auto- matically transcribe voicemail into text. I interview Maureen, a college freshman, who is thrilled to have discovered one of these programs. She says that only her parents send her voice- mail: "I love my parents, but they don't know how to use the phone. It's not the place to leave long voice messages. Too long to listen to. Now, I can scroll through the voicemail as text messages. Great."

Here, in the domain of connectivity, we meet the narra- s tive of better than nothing becoming simply better. People have long wanted to connect with those at a distance. We sent letters, then telegrams, and then the telephone gave us a way to hear their voices. All of these were better than noth- ing when you couldn't meet face-to-face. Then, short of time, people began to use the phone instead of getting together. By the 1970s, when I first noticed that I was living in a new regime of connectivity, you were never really "away" from your phone because answering machines made you responsible for any call that came in. Then, this machine, originally designed as a way to leave a message if someone was not at home, became a screening device, our end-of-millennium Victorian calling card. Over time, voicemail became an end in itself, not the result of a frustrated telephone call. People began to call purposely when they knew that no one would be home. People learned to let the phone ring and "let the voicemail pick it up."

In a next step, the voice was taken out of voicemail because communicating with text is faster. E-mail gives you more con- trol over your time and emotional exposure. But then, it, too, was not fast enough. With mobile connectivity (think text and Twitter), we can communicate our lives pretty much at the rate we live them. But the system backfires. We express ourselves in staccato texts, but we send out a lot and often to

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large groups. So we get even more back-so many that the idea of communicating with anything but texts seems too exhaust- ing. Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that

which we are nourished by."6

I sketched out this narrative to a friend for whom it rang true as a description but seemed incredible all the same. A professor of poetry and a voracious reader, she said, "We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted among of us has this incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotion. Why would we deprive ourselves

of that?" The beginning of an answer has become clear: in text mes-

saging and e-mail, you hide as much as you show. You can present yourself as you wish to be "seen." And you can "process" people as quickly as you want to. Listening can only slow you down. A voice recording can be sped up a bit, but it has to unfold in real time. Better to have it transcribed or avoid it altogether. We work so hard to give expressive voices to our

robots but are content not to use our own. Like the letters they replace, e-mail, messaging, texting,

and, more recently, Tweeting carry a trace of the voice. When Tara regretted that she had not called her friend Alice-on the phone she would have heard her friend's grief-she expressed the point of view of someone who grew up with the voice and is sorry to have lost touch with it. Hers is a story of trying to rebalance things in a traditional framework. Trey, her law partner, confronts something different, something he cannot

rebalance.

My brother found out that his wife is pregnant and he put it on his blog. He didn't call me first. I called him when I saw the blog entry. I was mad at him. He didn't see why I was making a big

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deal. He writes his blog every day, as things happen, that's how he lives. So when they got home from the doctor-bam, right onto the blog. Actually, he said it was part of how he celebrated the news with his wife- to put it on the blog together with a picture of him raising a glass of champagne and she raising a glass of orange juice. Their idea was to celebrate on the blog, almost in real time, with the photos and everything. When I complained they made me feel like such a girl. Do you think I'm old-school?7

Trey's story is very different from Tara's. Trey's brother was 4l1 not trying to save time by avoiding the telephone. His brother did not avoid or forget him or show preference to other family members. Blogging is part of his brother's intimate life. It is how he and his wife celebrated the most important milestone in their life as a family. In a very different example of our new genres of online intimacy, a friend of mine underwent a stem cell transplant. I felt honored when invited to join her family's blog. It is set up as a news feed that appears on my computer desktop. Every day, and often several times a day, the family posts medical reports, poems, reflections, and photographs. There are messages from the patient, her hus- band, her children, and her brother, who donated his stem cells. There is progress and there are setbacks. On the blog, one can follow this family as it lives, suffers, and rejoices for a year of treatment. Inhibitions lift. Family members tell stories that would be harder to share face-to-face . I read every post. I send e-mails. But the presence of the blog changes something in my behavior. I am grateful for every piece of information but feel strangely shy about calling. Would it be an intrusion? I think of Trey. Like him, I am trying to get my bearings in a world where the Net has become a place of intimate enclosure.

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NoTES

1. In the object relations tradition of psychoanalysis, an object is that

which one relates to. Usually, objects are people, especially a significant person

who is the object or target of another's feelings or intentions. A whole object is a person in his or her entirety. It is common in development for people to

internalize part objects, representations of others that are not the whole person. Online life provides an environment that makes it easier for people to relate to part objects. This puts relationships at risk. On object relations theory, see, for example, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black, Freud and Beyond:

A History of Modem Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 2. See Stefana Broadbent, "How the Internet Enables Intimacy," Ted.com,

www.ted.com/ta!ks/stefana_broadbent_how _the_intemet_enables_intimacy. html (accessed August 8, 2010). According to Broadbent, 80 percent of calls

on cell phones are made to four people, 80 percent of Skype calls are made to two people, and most Facebook exchanges are with four to six people.

3. This mother is being destructive to her relationship with her daughter.

Research shows that people use the phone in ways that surely undermine rela·

tionships with adult partners as well. In one striking finding, according to Dan

Schulman, CEO of cell operator Virgin Mobile, one in five people will interrupt

sex to answer their phone. David Kirkpatrick, "Do You Answer Your Cellphone During Sex?" Fortune, August 28, 2006, http:l/money.cnn.com/2006/08/25/

technology/fastforward_kirpatrick.fortune/index.htm (accessed November 11,

2009). 4. See Amanda Lenhart et a!., "Teens and Mobile Phones," The Pew

Foundation, April 20, 2010, www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Teens-and-

Mobile-Phones.aspx?r=i (accessed August 10, 2010). 5. "Number of US Facebook Users over 35 Nearly Doubles in Last 60

Days," Inside Facebook, March 25, 2009, www.insidefacebookcom/2009/03/25/ number-of-us-facebook-users-over-35-nearly-doub!es-in·last-60-days (accessed

October 19, 2009). 6. This paraphrases a line from Sonnet 73: "Consum'd with that which it

was nourish'd by . .. " 7. The author of a recent blog post titled "1 Hate the Phone" would not

call Trey old-school, but nor would she want to call him. Anna-Jane Grossman

admits to growing up loving her pink princess phone, answering machine, and

long, drawn-out conversations with friends she had just seen at school. Now she

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hates the phone: "I fee! an inexplicable kind of dread when I hear a phone ring,

even when the caller ID displays the number of someone I like .... My dislike for the phone probably first started to grow when I began using Instant Mes-

senger. Perhaps phone-talking is a skill that one has to practice, and the more

!Ming I've done, the more my skills have dwindled to the level of a modem

day 13-year-old who never has touched a landline .... I don't even listen to my [phone) messages any more: They get transcribed automatically and then are sent to me via e-mail or text." The author was introduced to SkYPe and sees its virtues; she also sees the ways in which it undermines conversation:

"It occurs to me that if there's one thing that'll become obsolete because of video-chatting, it's not phones: it's natural flowing conversations with people far away." See Grossman, "! Hate the Phone."

In my experience with SkYPe, pauses seem long and awkward, and it is an effort not to look bored. Peggy Ornstein makes this point in "The Over-

extended Family," New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2009, ww.nytimes. com/2009/06/ZB/magazine/28fob-wwln-t.html (accessed October 17, 2009). Ornstein characterizes Skype as providing "too much information," something that derails intimacy: "Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions

always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff

to the back of your head while you're driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient's sightline."

Joining the Conversation

1. Sherry T urkle was once optimistic about the potential for technology to improve human lives but now takes a more complex view. What does she mean here by the title, "No Need to Call"? What pitfalls does she see in our increasing reluctance to talk on the phone or face-to-face?

2. This reading consists mainly of stories about how people communicate on social media, on the phone, and face-to· face. Summarize the story about Audrey (pp. 376-81) in one paragraph.

SHERRY TURKLE

3. According to Turkle, we "hide as much as [we] show" in text messages and email, presenting ourselves "as [we] wish to be 'seen"' (paragraph 38). Is this so different from what we do in most of our writing? How do you present yourself in your academic writing, and how does that presentation differ from what you do in text messages or email?

4. Is digital communication good or bad--or both? Read Chapter 13, which summarizes both sides of that discus- sion. Which side (or sides) do you come down on? Where

do you think Turkle stands? 5. Turkle says she sees "a vulnerability" in those who prefer

social media to phone calls or face-to-face communication: "I see a vulnerability in this generation, so quick to say, 'Please don't call"' (paragraph 30). Write an essay about your own views on communicating with social media, draw- ing upon this and other readings in the chapter for ideas to

consider, to question, and to support your view.

3 9 2

I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight.

On the App.

JENNA WORTHAM

LAsT SuNDAY, I spent a lazy afternoon with my boyfriend. We chatted while I made brunch, discussed the books we were reading, laughed at some cat pictures and then settled down with dinner, before bidding each other good night.

We did all of this despite living more than 3,000 miles apart, thanks to smartphone applications and services that helped to collapse time and space. Video chat apps like Google Hangouts, Face Time and Skype, of course, already make it possible to see and talk to one another in real time. But those formats can be awkward and require both parties to coordinate a time to talk and find someplace quiet with a decent Internet connection-a challenge with busy schedules in different time zones.

I prefer to use applications that already figure into my daily routine, like Google's instant-messaging application, Gchat, as

]ENNA WoRTHAM writes about technology for the New York Times. Her work also has appeared in Bust magazine, Vogue , and Wired,

and she is a cofounder of the zine Girl Cmsh. Her Twitter handle

is @jennydeluxe. This column first appeared in the New York Times

on April 6, 2014.