Sherry Turkle – Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at the MIT – speaks about the impact that modern technology has on our relationships:
she speaks about phantom phone ringing, where people are anxious to get more exciting news; global connectivity that makes us always on; and how remote and alone we finally remain within this illusion of being connected.
– A speech so brutally true, that I should rather not have posted it on Facebook where people tend to create the ideal image of themselves. Even if Sherry puts her words with quite some drama and does not really provide solutions, we should THINK TWICE how we want to treat technology better, before it is treating us worse…

Some quotes:
“from multi-tasking to multi-lifing” – “technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies” – “technology is seductive when its affordances meet our human vulnerabilities”

“we are lonely, but fearful of intimacy; connectivity offers for many of us the illusion of companionship, without the demands of friendship. We can’t get enough of each other if – if – we can have each other at a distance in a manner (?) that we can control. Think of Goldilocks (siehe Wikipedia: ‘Goldlöckchen und die drei Bären‘), not too close, not too far, just right.”

“connection made to measure [..with..] the ability to hide from each other” – “too put it rather too simply: we would rather text than talk”

“often we are too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to create, too busy communicating to really connect with the people we’re with in the ways that would really count, in continual contact, we’re alone together…”