Passing Of Reality

Is Reality Affected By the Passing of Time? Technology has come a long way in the past decade. It has helped humanity evolve faster than ever. However, not everything about technology is great. Technology has affected the way that humans perceive reality now. It gives people the wrong idea of how the real world works by creating a world that people can easily adjust to. In this essay, I argue that the virtual world lowers your expectations of the real world, that using technology connects and isolates people, and that technology creates artificial outcomes that cannot tell someone how a situation will turn out. A person’s concept of reality can be easily altered by how much time he or she spends in the virtual world and how it allows you …show more content…
It opens up new possibilities for people to stay in contact with friends and loved ones. Besides calling, people have multiple options now like emailing, texting, and video chatting. Turkle explains in her essay how she met a thirty year old named Ellen in Paris at a dinner party and the situation Ellen faced. Ellen would Skype call her grandmother, who lived in Philadelphia, weekly. Skype offered video chatting for free while calling international was a lot more expensive. Although the situation seems positive, Ellen was depressed by it. While Ellen Skyped her grandmother, she would multitask and do other things without her grandmother even knowing. The two were easily connected together, but at the same time they were not. In Turkle’s essay she says, “I thought of how Sigmund Freud considered the power of communities both to shape and to subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun came to mind: ‘connectivity and its discontents’” (Turkle 275). With all these new ways to link together, it also creates this barrier between one another. It is very contradicting. Even though Ellen and her grandmother are able to Skype each other every week, every time they do Skype Ellen is too preoccupied to focus on the real matter at hand. When Ellen worked on other things during the Skype calls, she really did not pay attention to the conversation at hand. Ellen’s work distanced her from the call. These new …show more content…
They are fake and artificial. That is what makes human interaction so special. Everything a human does is authentic. However, this does not mean that technology is bad. Technology allows for better convenience and can more controlled than with interacting with other humans. It is just that technology does not provide real life outcomes. In Turkle’s essay, she looks back at the time when she got into an argument with British entrepreneur and computer scientist, David Levy, on the discussion of robots. Levy claims that robots can be used as a tool to help us improve being better humans and lovers. We can practice on the robots instead of humans. Turkle argues back that: “Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death. A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop.” (Turkle 268). All the responses that you would get out of a sociable robot are artificial and are pre-programmed into the robot. None of the interaction with the robot is real. With humans, even if something bad comes out of the situation, it provides you with a real outcome that can be used as a future reference. This idea that Turkle presents also clashes with Gopnik’s idea of counterfactual thinking and pretend play. Counterfactual gives you the ability to see into the