Alone together: Is social media changing us?

The Information Superhighway is just a f***ing metaphor! Give me a break!

Randy Waterhouse, Cryptonomicon (1999)

During a 2012 Ted talk based on her book Alone Together, Social Studies of Technology Professor, Sherry Turkle said: ‘Technology is taking us to places we don’t want to go.’

Turkle admits that this is a contradiction to what she has said before, especially circa 1996 in another Ted talk, when she celebrated life on the Internet. As a psychologist, she went online to learn about herself in the virtual worlds of chat rooms and online communities, so that she could unplug and use this knowledge in the real world. Nowadays, she regretfully admits that she sleeps with her phone.

As a human-computer interaction researcher, I have watched users anthropomorphise computers and sociologists theorise about metaphors about the Internet instead of the Internet itself. Listening to Turkle, she seems to be doing both – which makes me ask:

• What sort of information was she looking to learn about herself online?
• Why did she think she would/could only learn this online?
• And why does she feel the need to sleep with her phone? (What does she even mean by that anyway? Is it on her pillow?)

Prior to the Information Superhighway of online communities, computers sat on your desk and as a human you interacted with them in order to achieve an end result e.g., an answer to a calculated problem, a neatly typed document, or a graph to explain some figures. As technology evolved, we shared this information over The Net as this documentary shows: The Internet in 1995 for work and for fun.

With our smart phones we now have the ability to interact with people on the other end of communicating technologies, as Turkle refers to them, aka social media, in real time – wherever and whenever we want. And particularly with social media, often, we are not interacting with a computer to solve a problem, we are just interacting with groups of people to share different types of information, for a number of reasons.

Turkle has found people using mobile technology during board meetings, lectures, meals, and funerals. She says this is bad because not only are people removing themselves from a situation e.g, a parent texting instead of listening to a child during dinner, but also from our feelings such as grief during a funeral.

The last funeral I went to was my Dad’s funeral. I didn’t grieve the whole time. Some of the time I laughed and chatted to people as we remembered my Dad and his great gift of being able to make you laugh no matter what. And since then, even on the saddest day when grief has felt unbearable, I had found that it is impossible to grieve non-stop. You don’t do full-on, full-time. Grief is exhausting.

Researchers are still trying to understand how many emotions we feel in one day, and where one emotion ends and another starts. When you are deep in grief and hit by an intense wave of it, on average it lasts 90 seconds and you have to hang on in there until it passes. You don’t get a choice.

So for me, people go into their phones not because they are escaping their emotions, but because they are choosing to stop one interaction and start a new one, like finding someone different to talk to at a cocktail party, or turning to the other side when seated at dinner. And Turkle in some way concurs with this by saying that people want to feel that they have control over their attention. But that is not because of technology. A few years ago, I was invited to attend a one hour meeting which went on for SEVEN HOURS. All, I can say is that I wish I had had a distraction that day. As it was, I was grateful for my zoning out abilities.

Turkle obviously has never had to suck it up, otherwise she would not believe that by tolerating the boring bits of meetings we help ourselves. She says that when we are in communication with others we are in communication with ourselves. But, we are not all psychologists and we don’t always want to examine ourselves like Turkle did in her 1996 brave new world. Often we just want a break, like I did from the guy who really had no respect for himself or anyone in the room as he droned on incessantly. The only thing I was learnt that day was that I wasn’t ever going to work with him again.

Turkle goes on to say that if we don’t have to reflect on ourselves, we don’t learn or know how to be alone. Again, I disagree, people have long found ways to avoid solitude and other people with work, alcohol, food, TV, radio, overeating, smoking, the list goes on… People have also engaged in meaningless interactions with many vs. quality time with few, and inattentive parents and friends are nothing new. Technology has not made us like this, we have always been seekers of distraction and stimulation.

One of the main disappointments of this talk is that Turkle doesn’t believe that people on Twitter have meaningful conversations or that they are learning and knowing about each other. Instead she thinks that we use online others as spare parts of ourselves, which makes me believe that she hasn’t really engaged with people on Twitter in a normal way in conversation. Especially, when she says that we believe that technology will listen when others don’t. Argh! It is not technology which is listening. It is a person at the end of a phone who is listening and responding. Which begs the question: Who are all these people Turkle has interviewed who are desperate to escape their lives? Why are they seeking an audience? Are they surrounded by people who are not listening and not giving them what they need?

Perhaps, or perhaps not?  They could be a certain type of person who enjoys taking a couple of hours off work to get paid to sit in a lab and talk about about themselves.  I have often met people like this whilst performing usability research and they are a perfect example of how we all want to be heard, we all want to be seen.

The world is changing and technology is making us able to connect with people regardless of time and space, which does change how we behave to a certain extent, i.e, many people have learnt to text on their phones whilst maintaining eye contact and a conversation with the person in front of them. However, I do not believe it is changing us to become incapable of connecting in a meaningful way. All the people in Turkle’s study demonstrated that. If they had found the connections they had in meetings and at dinner so stimulating, they would put down the technology which makes it so easy for them to connect elsewhere.

Turkle began the talk by saying that she got a text from her daughter and it felt like a hug! I was a bit surprised by this assertion. Perhaps hugs and texts do feel the same to her. Although, I would want to see her brain scanned during both events to see if it lights up in the same way. Personally, a text from one of my daughters – symbols on a digital screen – could never feel like their arms around my neck and their beautiful faces next to mine, never.

We have seen the end of society predicted many times with the advent of rock n’ roll and with television. With hindsight, we realise that the bad thing in question is not an agent of change but an agent of reflection. So, perhaps the question is not: is social media is changing us? But: How is social media reflecting us?

Alone together (2)