Sherry Turkle Interviews

Unpleasant, imposing, detached, all of these are what a phone call represents now a day’s, or that’s at least what Sherry Turkle is trying to prove. Along with her argument that texting is leading people to lose valuable social skills and to become more emotionally detached from each other. Turkle utilizes large amounts of pathos to portray the damaging effects texting has on different people.
Elaine is one of the teenagers that Turkle interviews, about the effects texting has on people. Elaine states that technology offers “a place to hide” (374) and a way for us to censor and edit what we put out there. These are examples of pathos because it makes us feel that technology is forcing us to hide who we really are. Turkle sees our need to only project our perfect …show more content…
Turkle and Joyce both feel that a call would have been intrusive and instead waited till they met in person to discuss the good news. They feel “constrained by a new etiquette but were also content to follow it.” (386) Why should we just go along with this new etiquette? Someone shouldn’t feel restrained by the social norms put in place that deem what is worthy of a phone call and what isn’t. Turkle makes us feel like we should fight against the ever growing power of texting and not let it completely replace the phone call and even meeting in person.
Sherry Turkle utilizes pathos to support her argument that texting is damaging to our social skills and to our ability to connect with people emotionally. Turkle’s powerful pathos allows the reader to realize that what she is arguing is very relevant and is happening more than we allow ourselves to believe. Teens are using technology as a crutch and as a place to hide behind a façade of perfection. But not just teens are the ones that are being affected, there are also negative effects on the older generations as well. We are no longer a generation of the spoken word, but of the written