Group's final assignment: Connected, but alone?

And here we are, back again for our eighth and final assignment, which is kind of sad because it means that it's the end of our work together.

For this week's assignment, brace yourselves because we are about to reveal the ugly truth about our so-called relationships.Beginning our reflexion with Sherry Turkle's TED Talk, we start to ask ourselves: what is our own relationship with Technology?

Sherry Turkle's TEDTalk

Are we "alone together?"
We are the generation concerned by the phenomenon. We use every day devices that allow us to do anything, from anywhere, with anyone. Such possibilities would have been qualified as odd or disturbing before but are seen as familiar today because they have changed who we are.This behavior even led us to create the term "alone together", meaning that even when you meet with your friends, everyone is on their phones or other devices and don't pay attention to their surroundings anymore. What's the point of getting together then?

We feel like we always need to be "on", connected. We text, shop, browse the Internet in every situation meaning we don't get or give people our full attention.We are together without being together; as people pay more attention on what they see on their phone than to the person in front of them.

That's something we notice everyday in our society, people don't know how to have a conversation anymore; by using our devices, we gain control over it which is something you can't have in a real face-to-face conversation. We get to edit,  delete, change, retouch..."We sacrifice conversation to connection" as Sherry Turkle says.

We seem to rely more and more on those devices when real-life people could help us. How many time have you relied on the Internet for a question or information you could easily get from someone next to you? We would rather do that to avoid any awkwardness. Same thing with conversation, it's easier to "discuss" via text or mails rather than call or talk face to face. 

Worse, we don’t get the feeling that people care about us and we develop more interest in our devices, and become more vulnerable to their artificial companionships, that seem to care about us; making us expect less from each other and more from the technology.Technology appeal to us when we are the most vulnerable to it

Her, a movie about a writer who develops a relationship with a intelligent computer operating system 

What Sherry Turkle says is interesting and directly aimed to us.
We are the generation who learned how to embrace the technology, we went through the cultural gap and the devices are set in our everyday lives. So well actually, that we don’t know how to be alone anymore.
Conversation face to face is a good thing for us because it allows us to have some self-reflection. We are never really alone, always reaching for a device. We use technology as a fantasy of substitution.

Take for example a day in your life. You usually wake up with to your phone and catch up on social networks. You go to work, spend your day facing a computer, using your phone during breaks, texting, or scrolling the Internet. You go home, spend the rest of your day facing your TV, computer or video games, with your phone by your side.
How long do you really spend without a device near you? The only time we really take a break form our devices is when we sleep and even then, our phone is near by, just in case.
It’s appealing to us, to have automatic listeners that seem to care about us because being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.
Sherry Turkle describes it as being in “the cold hard centre of a perfect storm” .
We’ve come too far, as technology appeal to us when we’re vulnerable, lonely or afraid of intimacy. So we design robots, technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

What they offer us are fantasies, they shape a new way of being; "I share therefore I am.”
Technology is good, but it’s time to talk and listen. There’s still work to do on it, how to use it or build it. We need to have a better relationship with it; embrace solitude, make it a value. Talk, and listen.  The problem is not the technology, it’s us with our vulnerability, the fact that we want it to make life simpler, hopeful….We need to see technology as a way to take us back to our real lives.

L.B