The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Is technology reshaping our human relationships?

While you’re reading this article in the staff room, microwaving your coffee and texting your colleague (who is standing three feet away) on your BlackBerry, you are re-enacting similar narratives featured in Sherry Turkle’s latest book.

Turkle stands on the stage of Barnett House’s audience-packed auditorium. She is dressed in a charcoal-coloured outfit. The respected researcher and social anthropologist is engaging, and her observations about technology’s illusory promise to fill our lives with meaning elicit affirmative head nods and murmurs of agreement on this May 30 evening.

Don’t be dismayed by what Turkle says in Alone Together, but be forewarned. As the author notes, paraphrasing a line from The Godfather: "Technology is making us an offer we can’t refuse."

Don’t be disheartened by her observations that we are our smartphones and that we are experiencing technological gadgets "as extensions of our bodies."

Turkle—a professor at the ­Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self—has been called "the Margaret Mead of digital culture."

Indeed, Turkle’s digital roots go back to the late 1970s at MIT, when she and a group of ­researchers and scientists—the inventors of information technology—met to discuss ways to keep technology busy. It was the beginning of the personal computer revolution, she says. "How would we keep these computers busy?"

The learned group agreed that computers could be useful for such mundane tasks as preparing taxes, writing (it was agreed that only academics would use computers for this purpose), scheduling (a notion that was mocked, given the existence of wall calendars and day planners) and playing games (everyone agreed there would be games).

"Now we know, once computers connected us to each other, once we became connected to the network, we really didn’t need to keep computers busy. They keep us busy—very busy. It is as though we are their killer app."

In the days of the "early Internet," Turkle saw the opportunity for "identity experimentation," the ability to "try out aspects of self." She did not foresee the ­advent of portable Internet devices that would enable us to escape reality at any time. Over the years, she has moved from optimism about technology to what she now characterizes as "cautionary ‘let’s get a grip’ism."

Technology is bountiful, Turkle acknowledges. And although it brings much good, it threatens to break up "the sacred space of our classrooms, our communities, our families and our conversations—at any moment when we are together, we can bail out and be somewhere else with other people."

Everyone takes phone calls and texts during meals, while driving and while socializing. She laments the fact that the "special time for bonding" between children and parents is endangered and warns that we’re breaking the contract with each other while "staring down our messages, so entranced by what is there, so into this other world that we don’t recognize our own children."

Nowhere is this more evident than with the hordes of hard-core obsessives, their eyes fixated on the glowing screen they brandish in their hands like a New Age divining rod that will uncover the nourishing and refreshing bounty of countless connections—this, rather than casting their gaze ahead and skyward, finding solace and richness in the imagination, daydreaming and life around them. We risk being "consumed by that which nourished us," she says, noting that the average American 16- to 18-year-old receives 10,000 text messages a month (333 per day).

Turkle has studied our relationships with digital culture for 30 years, tracking cohorts of children over the course of their "digital life." What she has found are ­children and youth who have grown up "in a culture of distraction." They have memories of their parents pushing them on the swing while texting.

Technology is competing for parents’ attention. Technology is competing for children’s ­attention. Technology is our competition, she says.

"Technology proposed itself as the architect of our intimacies," and there is no argument that it substitutes life on the screen for real life. Living an online life poses profound challenges for human development, Turkle says. Parents and teachers are responsible for the psychological growth of children in their care. "Fundamentally, it is our job to make them love, appreciate, value and honour their first love—their mind, who they are and their identity—and get them out into the world." This is essential in order to supplant the fabrication of a pretend self on the Internet that a child feels is better than his or her true self.

"Technology is seductive when its affordances meet our human vulnerabilities," she says, explaining that affordances refers to what technology offers. And a major vulnerability is that "we are lonely but fearful of intimacy." This was a common cross-generational theme Turkle found among the people she interviewed.

"We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control." Turkle calls this the Goldilocks effect: "Not too close, not too far, just right—connection made to measure." People are comforted by being in touch with many people whom they’re also keeping at bay.

The irony is that "we’re so busy communicating, that we end up feeling alone." Her subjects described short-lived feelings of euphoria after spending hours being connected through Twitter, Facebook, texting and e-mail, and "in the next moment feeling depleted as though in a tenuous complicity with strangers." In other words, if you’re afraid to be alone, don’t join Facebook.

What is especially worrisome to Turkle is the sense of dislocation she is observing among young people. At one time, "feelings of being stranded in adolescence" were considered a necessary step toward autonomy. Today, however, connectivity makes it possible to "bypass those types of feelings." Seeking autonomy from our parents is a normal, natural and necessary part of growing up, but technology is actually short-circuiting that process.

Constant connectivity threatens to undermine children’s ability to grow up and learn to appreciate that being alone is an opportunity to gather oneself and mature in order to disengage from one’s narcissistic personality. If children are not taught how to be alone, Turkle warns, they’ll only end up being lonely.

By not disengaging our ­children from online engagement, we risk neglecting a "growing child’s need for stillness," that place where "childhood reverie" is possible.

Where is that sacred space of childhood? she asks. It is paramount that the modern classroom create and nurture a place "to honour the non-virtual," a place to honour the physical. It is equally important that teachers "know when to use the virtual" in their classrooms and when to shut it off. "A healthy part of ­democracy is to have sacred spaces and [that] is central to education in the 21st century." The cult of constant connectivity threatens to overwhelm our lives and rob us of the "kind of solitude that energizes and restores."

Technology offers many opportunities, however. "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we assume it is all grown up." The Internet is still in its infancy and now is the time to be forgiving, make corrections and strive to use it correctly, advises Turkle.

The challenge facing everyone is to make healthy choices about technology; we need to go on a "digital diet" and ask ourselves: How do we want to live? Does technology serve our human purposes?

Despite its many shortcomings, Turkle says, technology is the "new life partner of the human adventure."