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 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
RSS