Analysis Of Reclaiming Conversation By Sherry Turkle

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Technology is simply a tool for our lives, and we get to chose whether we allow it to be for good or for bad. In Sherry Turkle’s book entitled Reclaiming Conversation, she addresses the issue of the misuse of technology in the everyday incorporation of it in the lives of people just like us. Turkle does not write this book to show how technology is ruining our lives and creating a dumb generation, while some might argue it is, but rather to show that technology is a great advancement in human history that like many other things has been distorted. She tackles the issues of empathy and romance and the effect technology has made on these emotions in every day places such as the family, workplace, …show more content…
The workplace was once a place filled with amiable people who enjoyed each others presence, got involved in each other's lives, and raising their children together. Now it is the opposite. People today see their job as an obligatory time commitment. They have no emotional investment nor any communication. Turkle found that while the workplace has great efficiency as the result of technology, there is an apparent lack of personal connection. One company she studied required its employees to be in the office three days a week. The employees worked from home the other days. Because the employees were accustomed to solitude they experienced significant communication issues when placed in a social environment. When coworkers did talk, which was usually over the phone, they were working on tasks instead of listening. The task at hand receives their partial attention and they were not mindful of one another. They lack empathy for one another and see each other as less human and more a voice they must listen to a few times a week. This way of dealing with work problems has broken communication. Another example Turkle talks about is employees preferred methods of engaging clients. In the olden day, employees would take their clients out for lunch or a round of golf. In doing this, they made those meaningful connections that occur in person. However, today most employees would much sooner send off a general email thanking potential clients …show more content…
Technology has created a false comfort in the public domain. We feel free to share everything on our Instagram and Twitter and express who we want to be; however, we are not truly secure. The internet is a mysterious realm that most people do not understand, and what you post, retweet or share is not kept private. Turkle discusses this through a memory she has with her grandmother. In this memory, she details how her grandmother grew up in Germany at a time when they would spy on your mail to see what you were up to and it frightened her. Nowadays, no-one seems to be frightened that everything they put online is not private. Our society has decided that cybersecurity is really not that big of a deal. I think that the idea that we know and accept that our lives are no longer private leads into Turkle’s next point. We are creating digital copies of ourselves. Since we understand that what we post is not private we seek to create a “better” version of ourselves online than what we really are. In portraying this digital copy, we lose more of our humanity and fall further away from conversation as we get confused as to which persona we want to portray in front of certain people. Technology’s presence has changed the way that we interact with strangers and causes us to become further separated from one another. Technology formed a rift between our privacy and our