Modern technology and the impact on our relationships

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…”

What price would you pay for faster web-surfing?

 
Today, Amazon launched its new Kindle Fire.

Read the announcement and an introductory video here.

This is basically a tablet PC running on Android 2.1. What is different though, is that – among many other changes that make the free Android surfing experience nearly invisible – the latest Amazon tablet uses a proprietary technology for browsing the internet. (watch a straight forward marketing video on the link below, which helped me understand what is behind that new technology http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/ ).

Faster browsing – for free!

In all simplicity, the new Silk browswer will send your request for internet content to the EC2 Amazon network, where the heavy computing, pre-loading and resizing of the content will be made, before it is sent back to your handheld device in smaller bits and pieces. As a result, an image that you wanted to see will not download with its original 3 MB of data, but after resizing is done, it may be as small as 10 KB, because your Kindle Fire does not need more resolution. Ultimately, this will speed up your browsing experience tremendously. – Sounds smart, doesn’t it?

Faster business – for free?

In fact, being a bit suspicious about such generosity of re-inventing the internet ‘for free’, I am wondering: what if Amazon would get a chance, to scan and pre-browse each of their user’s content ‘for free’, what could they do with it? What if they exploit their position as content bottleneck to the information, networks and products you are seeking? What opportunities would that bring to a company that controls both your browsing experience and your mobile device, while on the backend, acts as the largest online retailer in the online world? – Would you still want a device with these capabilities – for free?