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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle
PRE-LOVED, PAPERBACK
Sherry Turkle
PRE-LOVED, PAPERBACK

RM15.00

 Insightful Exploring The Power of Our New Tools & Toys To Dramatically Alter Our Social Lives

ISBN 9780465031467
Book Condition PRE-LOVED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher INGRAM PUBLISHER SERVICES US
Publication Date 12/2/2013
Pages 384
Weight 0.43 kg
Dimension 20.9 × 14.1 × 2.6 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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1 in stock

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  • Detail Description

Description

A groundbreaking book by one of the most important thinkers of our time shows how technology is warping our social lives and our inner ones

Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.

Based on hundreds of interviews and with a new introduction taking us to the present day, Alone Together describes changing, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, and families.

And new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

Consider Facebook—it’s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid.

Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.

In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives.

It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A clinical psychologist takes a critical and sometimes disturbing look at the psycho-social dangers of mixing technology and human intimacy.

Turkle paints a bleak picture of a robotically enhanced future in which humans become increasingly emotionally dependent on technology.

As this dependency on technology for meaningful social interaction increases, writes the author, the more humans will lose their ability to have authentic and meaningful relationships with one another.

Turkle begins her study with possibly the creepiest findings from her fieldwork: the ongoing development and acceptance of “sex robots,” and the zeal of the scientific community’s crackpots who’d like to exalt robots to equal relational status with human beings.

Essentially this means programming robots as not only a sexual supplement to humans’ sex lives but also as an actual surrogate for an intimate bedfellow.

From there, the author’s examples of a society gone technologically wild can only seem tame:
✔ children getting robotic pets and cell phones before they hit puberty;
✔ insecure teens seeking a new self through avatars and virtual-reality games;
✔ young Facebookers afraid of the permanency and nakedness of their information on the Internet.

Turkle advances the notion that Internet-based social networking and communication via texting and e-mail can only lead to alienation and awkwardness when facing inevitable person-to-person confrontations.

But the author is careful not to blame technology and its handlers for corrupting the easily corruptible.

Many of the technological slaves that Turkle profiles are—one hopes—exceptional examples.

The author seems confident that human instinct will eventually intervene and prompt us into evasive action as soon as technology begins to increasingly dominate our lives.

This cautious optimism is admirable, but it can’t quite brighten the dystopic pallor the book ultimately casts on the future of human relationships.

Despite the dry, clinical writing, Turkle provides potentially valuable social research.

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Review From Publishers Weekly:

As the digital age sparks increasing debate about what new technologies and increased connectivity are doing to our brains, comes this chilling examination of what our iPods and iPads are doing to our relationships from MIT professor Turkle (Simulation and Its Discontents).

In this third in a trilogy that explores the relationship between humans and technology, Turkle argues that people are increasingly functioning without face-to-face contact.

For all the talk of convenience and connection derived from texting, e-mailing, and social networking, Turkle reaffirms that what humans still instinctively need is each other, and she encounters dissatisfaction and alienation among users: teenagers whose identities are shaped not by self-exploration but by how they are perceived by the online collective, mothers who feel texting makes communicating with their children more frequent yet less substantive, Facebook users who feel shallow status updates devalue the true intimacies of friendships.

Turkle ‘s prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other.
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Review From Booklist:

With the recent explosion of increasingly sophisticated cell-phone technology and social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, a casual observer might understandably conclude that human relationships are blossoming like never before.

But according to MIT science professor Turkle, that assumption would be sadly wrong.

In the third and final volume of a trilogy dissecting the interface between humans and technology, Turkle suggests that we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

In her university-sponsored studies surveying everything from text-message usage among teens to the use of robotic baby seals in nursing homes for companionship, Turkle paints a sobering and paradoxical portrait of human disconnectedness in the face of expanding virtual connections in cell-phone, intelligent machine, and Internet usage.

Despite her reliance on research observations, Turkle emphasizes personal stories from computer gadgetry’s front lines, which keeps her prose engaging and her message to the human species—to restrain ourselves from becoming technology’s willing slaves instead of its guiding masters—loud and clear.

About the Author
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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