“It’s not quite reality. It’s like a totally filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is.” – Joshua Leonard 1. Envy: according to Moya Sarner at The Guardian this deadly sin is more present in our everyday lives than ever before, thanks to social media. More than a mere […]
Another Week Ends: Aretha Franklin, Robot Lovers, Instagram Repetitions, Submarine Parents, Forever 37, and Forgiving Spouses
1. This weekender would have been done so much sooner had I not gotten completely entranced by Aretha Franklin YouTube videos, which I’ll smatter throughout this post. While the Queen of Soul has a litany of songs you have heard for decades, there are so many live performances (and so many stories) (and so many […]
From the Archives: Not Much of a Technology Person?
Been a while since we’ve talked about this, or heard from this guy. So here you are, a classic DZ technology rant. Throwback! We were heading in the same direction, an awkward number of steps apart, close enough that we might as well have been walking together. He was maybe ten years older than me, well […]
Another Week Ends: Turklean Empathy, OK GO, The Cursed Child, Religious Skepticism, Couples Fooling Themselves, and Hail, Caesar!
Click here for the accompanying episode of The Mockingcast, featuring JR Rozko, Aaron Zimmerman and EKR. Sherry Turkle, at it again, people. In The New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg samples a troop of tech-related books released this year, one of which is Sherry Turkle’s new one, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in […]
Empathy Lessons for the App Generation
This week, Sherry Turkle picked up where she left off in her NYT article a few years ago, “The Flight from Conversation.” This time, Turkle, who has a new book out, is talking about the lack of conversation skills in today’s young people, but more importantly, how their lack of face-to-face interaction has deeper consequences for learning the lessons of […]
Vulnerability and Control in Online-Only Love Affairs
Writing about technology and social media is tricky. It’s incredibly easy to come of as a Luddite. When you describe the emotional and spiritual fallout catalyzed by particular devices or programs, no matter how many disclaimers you give, it’s almost impossible not to sound like you’re scapegoating the technology (Facebook or Twitter or smartphones, etc) […]
Lessons Learned from a Summer Fling
This reflection comes from Chelsea Batten. I probably shouldn’t have gone back to his place. But I was leaving the next morning, and I didn’t want to leave him a moment before. A proper Christian lady would say that she regretted staying the night at his place. But I don’t regret that. What I do […]
Another Friday Sherry Turkle Ticker: Elderly Care and Nursing Robots
Last time we gathered round for a Turkle Ticker we talked about the Second Life phenomenon, the use of technology to recreate identity or, at least, to use technology to impute to oneself whatever one feels one lacks. Whether it’s good looks, an interesting career, a different outlook on life, this is true not only […]
Another Friday Sherry Turkle Ticker: Second Life and Taking People at "Interface Value"
Second Life is an online community, a social network of sorts, revolving around created avatars, called “Residents,” who interact with one another–they live with, get jobs with, get married to other created “residents” on the program. The possibilities are endless and the identity markers are completely unhinged: a man can be a woman, a woman […]
Rapid Responses and the Paradox of Time-Saving Technology: Have You "Untethered"?
This from her technology manifesto, Alone Together, social psychologist Sherry Turkle points to our longing to simplify complex lives in an utterly counterproductive way–by “saving” time, we get into the game of time-saving, by nature a losing game because it is a game of measures. Turkle thinks this brings us to an impasse: we have […]
The iLife Pursuit and Adultescent Loneliness: A Conference Breakout
Bryan J’s recent post on The Law of Social Media (which could not have been a more apt primer on the subject) looks into a TED talk given by Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and author of Alone Together, who has become something of a clarion caller upon the state of our lonely lives as […]
The Wounded Soul of Social Media = Connected but Alone
This post may not break any new ground, but it does summarize about two years worth of Mockingbird analysis on the psychology and law of social networking. We’ve profiled Sherry Turkle’s work before, noting her front-line work on the psychological impact of social networking. We’ve profiled the internet-ubiquitous TED talks, and their exquisite use of […]