Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT,
believes that social media can isolate us and cause us a lot of harm. She has
written a book, Alone Together: Why We
Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and in it she writes
about how we have so many opportunities to communicate today, using emails,
texts, instant messages, Facebook messages, Twitter messages, phone calls and
Skype.
Such light-speed communication is great for
making links. Which is good. Yet, as messages bombard us and as we make hurried
responses, we can slowly but noticeably dumb down such conversations. Conversation
with depth and meaning -- the kind of thing that connects us as humans -- often
gets lost. We find ourselves linked by technology, but, sometimes, we also (as
a consequence) feel alienated, estranged from community and from God.
Alone. Cut off. Isolated. Even in the middle
of a bustling city.
Well, such reflections have become
common. A picture has ruined them for me. The picture is from a 1940s New York
train, in which everyone has their heads buried in a newspaper. The point is
that we are social creatures. We will seek society, regardless of how
independent technology might make us.
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