Mikey Curry
- Turkle explains by the goldilocks effect that people can’t get enough of each other if and only if they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control.
- The reason people don’t want to have a conversation is because it takes place in real time and you can’t control what you are going to say. Texting allows us edit and present ourselves as we want to be to keep moderation.
- We sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We only get discrete bits of conversation and we don’t get to learn about and understand each other and so we compromise capacity for self reflection.
- She thinks robot copanionship is tragic because robots can only offer pretend empathy. They can’t empathize and they don’t have any knowledge about life. Robots aren’t really there for us as we feel.
- Three gratifying fantasies we get from technology are: 1. that we can put our attention where we want it to be. 2. we will always be heard, and 3. that we will never have to be alone
I feel that what Turkle is arguing is in fact true, that technology is blocking our ability to have real conversations with each other. It’s the mess ups and wrong choice of words that reveal who we truly are. I experienced this many times. One of the many times that I experienced this is when I talked to this guy over text for a few days. He seemed pretty cool and nice. I had never met him in real life so we decided to meet. When we finally met, he was so different than what I was expecting. He presented himself much different through texting than how he was in reality. He was much meaner and less caring than I had perceived through text.
Another occasion much like this one but reversed was with the guy I am currently dating. I had met this guy very briefly before we started to text each other but I hadn’t remembered. When we texted he seemed to have a dull personality, just like there wasn’t much to him. The simplicity of his personality was something I found unattractive. After a while of texting, we decided to meet. I didn’t actually want to meet though, because I didn’t think that I would like him. We had been texting for weeks and I felt that his personality was boring but after only a few days of hanging out with him in person, I found that this was quite opposite. He was very interesting and funny. When we had been hanging out for two weeks I felt like we had a very good connection. The edits that he made with our conversation before I met him didn’t allow me to truly see him as himself. I saw a version that so cleaned and edited that it didn’t even portray the same person as I had came to know later. If we had never gotten the chance to have real conversation with each other then I would have completely missed out on one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. All those mistakes and too muches and too littles painted a picture of a much more caring and complicated person. I saw the happy and sad and angry that he would have viewed as over emotional; if he would have had the chance to delete those emotions then he might have. but because he was unable to, I was able to see the true person he was.
These type of situations have happened to me very often. I knew this girl named Janette. We had played volleyball and junior year had many classes together so we saw each other every day. By the end of junior year we had created so many memories and such a thick bond that just being in each other’s presence was enough to make us happy. Senior year however, I’m sad to say wasn’t the same. We had no classes with each other at all so once volleyball was over, we no longer saw each other in person as often. In fact, we rarely saw each other at all. It was heart breaking to feel the string connection we had slowly fade from existence. Those edited texts that we sent back and fourth to each other was not even close to enough to feed and grow the delicate relationship that we once had. Technology was far from able to allow us to make the same connection we once had been able to make in person.