The Flight From Conversation By Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is a professor that teaches Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In her article called The Flight from Conversation, and she talks about how technology has evolved and changed the way we interact with each other. She argues that society in the 21st century has become drawn to their mobile devices and that they lack the ability to have a face to face conversation with someone. The title of her essay has a symbolic meaning in regards to her argument. Turkle states that we have adapted our conversations by learning how to be “alone together”, like how planes are alone in the skies but are connected via GPS and radar. This can be seen as to the meaning of the “flight” from the title. …show more content…
While Turkle’s claim is trustworthy because she is a college professor, she fails by saying that “all” teenagers have that problem. I can personally disagree with that because I was never faced with that problem. It might be that I am an only child, but I certainly had no complications with talking to strangers or even my friends in person. I did use my phone often, but I understood the social cues and etiquette of starting, continuing, and ending a discussion with an individual. But I do acknowledge the fact the younger generations will have a problem with interpersonal communication if they do not learn how to act around people in …show more content…
A 3D conversation has the traits of being able to see, hear, and read a person’s body language. A 2D conversation is along the line of only being able to see some text and having to assume certain emotions the other individual is feeling when you are talking to them. I associate this type of conversation with what Turkle called a “sip.” Her definition of a sip is for example, asking someone in a text how their day was. You might be able to get a message that is not just “okay” from that individual through text, but it would be easier for them to just reply with a one-word answer rather than elaborating and giving details of what they did that day. It takes a considerable amount of time to provide that detail through a message unless you are able to text like a Supreme Court stenographer. A typical answer through text takes about a minute to send and for the other person to read and reply back to you. Face to face conversations removes that delay, allowing for a nonstop stream of verbal speaking to occur between the two people. Texting can be seen as the norm for the next decade or so until something else takes its place, or our society learns to go back as if the internet was never