Cyber-scepticism: not that we are actually unplugging and switching off, but that more and more people are questioning whether our frantic social networking is really helping us to connect, to deepen our relationships, to share our lives.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle is one of many people wondering where we are really going in the information age. Her new book is appropriately titled Alone Together. Paul Harris reports:
Turkle’s book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert’s late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: “We all say goodbye in our own way.”
Turkle’s thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.
But Turkle’s book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. “It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people,” said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.
The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of “slacktivists”. It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.
Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims “the intellectual future of the US looks dim”– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.
Turkle’s book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. “We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” she writes.
Bridges and Tangents 
A very interesting post Father Stephen! It is clear from the learned people you quote that some have allowed social networking sites and other technology to take over their lives. However, my own experience has been that such sites are used to improve communication with people already known to the user as well as to make contact with those with similar interests. I particularly like the title of Carr’s article about Google. Rather than research in the ‘old fashioned’ way, many ‘google’ a subject and take for granted the validity of what they read without further ado which can lead to some misleading conclusions. I would further agree with Carr’s suggestion that the internet is making us less capable og digesting large amounts of information. If I need to, I use the internet as a starting point then try to back up this with information from books. Call me old fashioned, but you just can’t improve on a book, even though it may not be as quick as a click of a mouse.
Was this post produced by a Stephan Wang’s automatic psot generator machine? ;-)
I agreed with everything in this post.
*Sent from my laptop, whilst reading blogs, when I should be hard at work.
This is a fascinating debate that’s begun to unfold. It can be hard to engage in critique of current trends in communication without sounding Luddite and there is also a risk of producing a romanticised version of pre-internet communication processes and networks. However, the critics’ concerns do seem to be well placed and their points about the impoverishment of (our understandings of) communication processes and their place in our world will surely resonate with those of us who have experience of the world pre- and post-email, facebook, twitter and other social networking contexts.
It’s important not to lose sight of the benefits that these media have brought to many people who would otherwise be marginalised in social communication. Yet these need to be weighed against the negative impacts that the critics identify – and these impacts go beyond an impoverishment of human communication and may extend into a blunting of capacities for information processing. Ideally there needs to be consistent integration of virtual and face-to-face communication, with the appropriate amount of each varying from situation to situation.
I wonder about the positive and negative role of social networking media in developing and disseminating ideas about faith and in shaping the development of faith communities. I’m sure there must have been lots of research conducted on this and so I must do some searching (online, of course) and inquiring with relevant colleagues (by email, of course) when I get back to work next week…