Bookshelf – Are we masters or servants of technology?

ALONE TOGETHER By Sherry Turkle BASIC BOOKS DO we expect more from technology and less from each other? This is the basic question posed in Alone Together by Sherry Turkle, an author who has made the study of the global infatuation with communications technology her infatuation. About 15 years ago, she published a very optimistic book, Life on the Screen, where she outlined her vision of a brave new world of shared information, new friends, hands across the globe sort of stuff. Today, the optimism is gone. More and more people are finding their phones and the Internet to be a ball and chain from which they can't escape, and she's not happy about it. She wonders have we been sold a pup. Have we been plugged into the world at the cost of perpetual solitude. Are we acquiring hundreds of new â€Ëœfriends' but have no one to chat with over an actual cup of coffee? Is the cyber-life technology makes possible overwhelming us? In the first half of this book she deals with robot technology. Will robots really do the washing and mow the lawn as we were promised, or are we evolving to a stage where we will need them for companionship, to stave off loneliness â€â€ and mow the lawn? In the second half she explores the online world and how it allows us now to â€Ëœescape ourselves' and become whoever we want to be. We can change personalities like we change clothes. Sounds fun but is there a tipping point where we would rather shine in the fantasy world than exist in this one? There was a time when scientists laboured over the quest to make machines that are as smart, or smarter, than humans. Film buffs will recall Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and a plethora of cyborg movies based on the same general theme. But it seems this is now old hat. The shrinks have teamed up with the boffins and discovered that they don't have to make machines so intelligent, just make them better at faking intelligence. You know the fakers who inevitably hide behind the old 'they would say that, wouldn't they' ploy, which spares them the need to elaborate and reveal ignorance. Well they've spawned monsters. The discovery that machines only need to act clever and we dumb humans will play along is more worrying than the thought of intelligent machines calling the shots. We've grown accustomed to being both scared silly and buoyed up with silly optimism by those who purport to tell us what the future holds for us. This book is different in that it is dealing with technologies that are already here and looks at how they're shaping our methods of interacting with each other. The author asks whether our mobile phones, Internet access and truncated lingo are still serving us as they were originally devised to do, or are we now serving them. Have we gone from using our phones as convenient tools, to a situation where we live in fear of being without them. Then there is the issue of being available 24/7. If we are never out of contact, then when are we on our own? Blaise Pascal said: 'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.' The question now is who is ever alone? Has it become unacceptable for people to tell their bosses that they can't be contacted over the weekend? In the author's world it seems to be, but there again, she's Professor of the Social Studies of Science at MIT. Incidentally, I remembered the general gist of what Pascal said but without even closing down this piece I'm writing, I checked it online and within seconds I had the exact quote. I cut and pasted it in and here I am carrying on. Would I rather have paraphrased it or called down to the library to look it up? No, definitely not. So technology can act as a servant, but how long will it be before it's the master is the question being asked here? Turkle uses email to illustrate her point. For the most part it works fine but mails can breed like rabbits because it's so easy to keep balls in the air. We can find ourselves swamped by emails and waste the time that the technology was supposed to save in keeping up and replying to them. The examples she chooses to bolster her arguments are generally taken from the world of business, when not dealing with young people. She writes about people who can't afford to be out of the loop. Messages have to be checked first thing in the morning and last thing at night. As a result, children find themselves competing with mobile phones for their parent's attention. Interestingly, the research she cites indicates that children are less and less inclined to â€Ëœwaste' real time on phone conversations and prefer to use text or Facebook instead. She also notes that many young people have given up on the idea of personal privacy; it's a lost cause. They perform on a digital stage and are aware that they're constantly being judged by the harshest critics known to man, their peers. Worryingly, she argues that the web promotes narcissism, encouraging young people to think of other people as nuisances to be managed or resources to be exploited. Turkle is a psychoanalyst by training and she tends to over emphasise the 'we're all doomed' approach, whereas I, as a professional communicator working in a field that has absorbed and accommodated enormous changes over the past 30 years, tend to go along with the notion that everything will work itself out in the end. I liked Alone Together because it provided a window into an aspect of contemporary life with which I'm not very familiar. I actually sat by my fire and read this book. Strange to think that there are millions and millions of people who now regard such activity as a ludicrous waste of time while I regard their activities as banal and somehow life denying. Who represents the future and who's the dinosaur?