The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading US sociologist.
“A behavior that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.
Turkle’s book has caused a sensation in the US, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert’s late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report.
When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: “We all say goodbye in our own way.”
Turkle’s thesis is simple: Technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.
However, Turkle’s book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in the US is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications.
“It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people,” said William Kist, a professor of education at Kent State University.
The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the Internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in The Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-skepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of “slacktivists.” It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.
Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein — in which he claims “the intellectual future of the US looks dim” — and We Have Met The Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.
The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In Cyburbia, published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern technological world and found some dangerous possibilities. While Harkin was no pure cyber--skeptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well as pleased about the new technological era. Elsewhere, the hit film The Social Network has been seen as a thinly veiled attack on the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.
Turkle’s book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter.
“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” she writes.
Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 “friends” on the site. Yet none called for help — instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall.
Turkle’s book has also hit home because her previous works, The Second Self and Life on the Screen, seemed more open to the technological world.
“Alone Together reads as if it were written by Turkle’s evil Luddite twin,” Kist joked.
However, even the backlash now has a backlash, with many leaping to the defense of social media. They say that e-mails, Twitter and Facebook have led to more communication, not less — especially for people who may have trouble meeting in the real world because of great distance or social difference.
Defenders say theirs is just a different form of communication that people might have trouble getting used to.
“When you go into a coffee shop and everyone is silent on their laptop, I understand what she is saying about not talking to each other,” Kist said. “But it is still communicating. I disagree with her. I don’t see it as so black and white.”
Some experts believe the debate is so fierce because social networking is a new field that has yet to develop rules and etiquette that everyone can respect and that is why incidents such as Simone Back’s death appear so shocking.
“Let’s face it, I see no sign of anyone unplugging,” Kist said. “But, perhaps, we need to involve a ‘netiquette’ to deal with it all.”
He also said that the “real world” that many social media critics hark back to never really existed. Before everyone traveled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just traveled in silence.
“We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers. They were just keeping to themselves,” Kist said.
The government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus
The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
Art and cultural events are key for a city’s cultivation of soft power and international image, and how politicians engage with them often defines their success. Representative to Austria Liu Suan-yung’s (劉玄詠) conducting performance and Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen’s (盧秀燕) show of drumming and the Tainan Jazz Festival demonstrate different outcomes when politics meet culture. While a thoughtful and professional engagement can heighten an event’s status and cultural value, indulging in political theater runs the risk of undermining trust and its reception. During a National Day reception celebration in Austria on Oct. 8, Liu, who was formerly director of the
RSS