Alone Together, again - Carl Creasman

Fast Company has again shared a solid piece of writing about the challenge of balancing technology and life. Sherry Turkle is a professor from MIT and her recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other hits many of the same points that we’ve talked about here. I remember telling you of how I needed to turn off my headphones to have a powerful conversation on a flight to a speaking engagement. I’ve told you about Wendell Berry more than once. In the end, Turkle is touching on the point of our need for community, for one another. Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone,spoke to this reality and how our society is weaker without the connections.

Here are some of the salient points from the interview:

You conducted a lot of fieldwork and clinical interviews to write this book. Who did you talk to?

I interviewed lawyers, architects, management consultants, and businessmen. They talk about the volume and the velocity [of communications]. They’re never off; the communication is constant; and they talk in terms of 500, 1,000, 1,500 [emails per day]. It’s more life than they can even read, and they say things like, “I can’t even keep up with my life.” When you have that kind of volume and velocity, you start to notice that people ask you questions expecting a quick answer, and you start to ask questions that you can give a quick answer to. The questions can get dumbed down so that the answers will be quick. We’re not necessarily putting our investment in the ties that bind; we’re putting our investment in the ties that preoccupy.

The title of your book, Alone Together, is chilling.

If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you’re alone, you get into this situation where you’re continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You’re alone but looking for approval as though you were together–the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody’s validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We’re raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it’s your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook…we’re losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.

You only mention Twitter a few times in the book. What are your thoughts on Twitter?

I think it’s an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It’s not “I think therefore I am,” it’s, “I share therefore I am.” Sharing as you’re thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you’re thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you’re thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don’t have an anti-Twitter position. It’s just not everything.