“Rather than seek to describe specific changes or uneven distributions in how we relate and communicate, this genre instead takes a medicalized view of digital connectivity and seeks to diagnose the threats it poses to our very humanity.”
“These critiques begin with a received definition of what makes us human — having “authentic” selves and “real” emotions, moral sensitivity and “deep” social connection.”
“Our capacity to experience these real truths and depths of feeling is posited as inborn and inherently fragile; at any moment insidious technologies can disturb the delicate balance and strip us our humanity, throwing organic order into cyber chaos.”
“To make its case, Reclaiming Conversation appeals to science and empirical observation, but the evidence it offers is convincing only to the extent that you share the presupposition that screens are inhuman and antisocial.”
“Turkle cherry-picks from social science literature on social media and mobile devices, while suppressing the general thrust of that research:”
“the relationship between digital connection and sociality is multivalent and complicated”
“This cycle of claim and counter claim is not new. For as long as there have been social media and mobile devices, there have also been articles or books aimed at lay audiences arguing that we’re trading real life for something digital.”
“And then come the replies from researchers who have found that the relationship is much more complicated — that people who text more often also meet face to face more; that the contemporary technologies of social isolation were, and are, the television and the automobile, not smart phones; that there’s been a recent reversal of the long post–World War II trend toward social isolation.”
“Turkle sees a world of connectivity as devoid of connection because she misunderstands digitality itself.”
“DIGITAL connection is deeply interwoven through social life; it is made of us and is thus as infinitely complex as we are.”
“Anything social is inherently shaded with both good and bad. It may be good or bad for some and not others, at some times and not others, in some places and not others.”
“Reclaiming Conversation, like too much other writing about new technologies, is invested in the false question of whether the Internet is centrally good or bad, as if technology were a separate thing that could be subtracted from social life rather than being part and parcel of it.”
“This oversimplification pre-empts her critique, so that she asks not what technology (including language itself) affords or discourages, and how and under what circumstances, but “what do we forget when we talk through machines?””
“This slanted question elides the issue of how communication is always mediated by power, space, bodies, language, architecture, and other factors as well as by the particular medium through which it occurs.”
“To prescribe one form of media — to privilege speaking over writing over texting — would require deep description and analysis of the context: who is speaking, to what ends, and why.”
“She refuses to understand digital connection as itself human and part of this world, seeing it instead as an appendage of the separate, virtual world of machines and robots.”
“This frames digitality as inherently antihuman, pitting society and technology as opposites.”
“She worries that online, “we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be,” as if such virtuality and self-presentation hasn’t always been basic to the traditional “real” world of human bodies.”
“Digital dualism allows Turkle to write as though she is championing humanity, conversation, and empathy when ultimately she is merely privileging geography.”
“this fetishization of contiguity has a long tradition and is echoed in our everyday language: Each time we say “IRL,” “face-to-face,” or “in person” to mean connection without screens, we frame what is “real” or who is a person in terms of their geographic proximity rather than other aspects of closeness — variables like attention, empathy, affect, erotics, all of which can be experienced at a distance.”
“We should not conceptually preclude or discount all the ways intimacy, passion, love, joy, pleasure, closeness, pain, suffering, evil and all the visceral actualities of existence pass through the screen. “Face to face” should mean more than breathing the same air.”
“To start from the prerequisite that co-presence is solely dependent on proximity in space devalues so many other moments where closeness occurs that happens to be mediated by a screen.”
“Physicality can be digitally mediated: What happens through the screen happens through bodies and material infrastructures.”
“The sext or the intimate video chat is physical — of and affecting bodies.”
“What she is implicitly claiming is that geography is the only form of proximity that counts and finds support for the idea in its supposed profitability: “The more the business world appreciates the importance of composure, attention, and face-to-face communication to its own financial interests,” she writes, “the more distance it will take from technologies that disrupt them.””
“As she does in the book, Turkle is willing to endorse the scripted, commercially motivated “conversation” Starbucks urges employees to have with customers simply because they are occurring between people who are geographically close — not because they produce or are the product of empathy.”
“Some people really are annoying with their phones; sometimes smartphones really do feel compulsive.”
“While this may seem like sensible middle ground, it is asking that we make our relationship to digital connection hyper-present in our lives — a constant preoccupation if not an obsession. It makes connection and disconnection a ritual practice to be tracked and confessed”
“The constant mindfulness and self-awareness she prescribes as the “healthy” or “normal” way to use your phone is also a form of internalized social control, leveraging the fiction of a stable “authentic” self to enforce boundaries around one’s behavior.”
“She writes that “a virtuous circle links conversation to the capacity for self-reflection” and that “in solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves.” She calls such self-consciousness a “path toward realism.””
“The prescription of this type of self-awareness assumes that there is some stable internal entity that is who you “really” are; it frames self-discovery in terms of who you are not and what you won’t do. It regulates and prohibits behavior in the name of this “true self.””
“Turkle writes that we are “torn between our desire to express an authentic self and the pressure to show our best selves online.” “Instead of promoting the value of authenticity,” Turkle complains, social media “encourages performance,” which she construes as a form of lying:
In theory, you know the difference between your self and your Facebook self. But lines blur and it can be hard to keep them straight. It’s like telling very small lies over time. You forget the truth because it is so close to the lies.”
“But performing the self is not lies; it is the essence of the self, as the history of identity theory, from George Herbert Mead to Erving Goffman to Judith Butler, can attest.”
“The idea that self-performance is somehow a new product of being online is as false as the idea that one can have any sort of self that is not in some way performed.”
“Focus less on your relationship to your device and more on your relationship to human beings.”
“Rather than constant self-regulation through “mindfulness” and “balance,” we might assess our relationship to digital connection in terms of our autonomy. Are we really “addicted” to phones, or do contemporary work demands make it impossible to disconnect?”
“In what ways is our control over how connected we are a privilege, especially when considering those for whom digital connection is prohibitively expensive or who cannot procure reliable internet access?”
“When connection is not treated as a controlled substance, it can transcend its relation to productivity.”
“Time away need no longer be seen as a kind of necessary recharging, as if humans were batteries. Whether we are pleasurably zoned out in front of a screen or a campfire, we might “waste” time for wastefulness’ sake, to burn it, to put it to no future productive use.”