In a NYRB piece, Jacob Weisberg has reviewed a slate of books which consider, in one way or another, how the supercomputers in our pockets are quietly remaking us and our relations with one another, including two Sherry Turkle titles, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation. While the psychologist unfortunately quotes studies that claim a “40 percent decline in empathy among college students over the past twenty years”–wow, I wouldn’t trust such findings–her work ultimately leads Weisberg to what I think is a true and underappreciated consequence of our new normal: While we endeavor to make machines more like us, we’re becoming more like them, disappearing a significant portion of our humanity into the zeros and ones. An excerpt:
For young people, she observes, the art of friendship is increasingly the art of dividing your attention successfully. Speaking to someone who isn’t fully present is irritating, but it’s increasingly the norm. Turkle has already noticed considerable evolution in “friendship technologies.” At first, she saw kids investing effort into enhancing their profiles on Facebook. More recently, they’ve come to prefer Snapchat, known for its messages that vanish after being viewed, and Instagram, where users engage with one another around a stream of shared photos, usually taken by phone. Both of these platforms combine asynchronicity with ephemerality, allowing you to compose your self-presentation, while looking more causal and spontaneous than on a Facebook profile. It’s not the indelible record that Snapchat’s teenage users fear. It’s the sin of premeditated curating—looking like you’re trying too hard.
More worrying to Turkle is that social media offer respite from the awkwardness of unmediated human relationships. Apple’s FaceTime feature hasn’t taken off because, as one college senior explains, “You have to hold it [the phone] in front of your face with your arm; you can’t do anything else.” Then again some younger teens, presumably with an ordinary number of arms, are using FaceTime as an alternative to spending time with one another in person. The advantage is that “you can always leave” and “you can do other things on social media at the same time.”
The thing young people never do on their smartphones is actually speak to one another.
…
In the Spike Jonze film Her, the romantic partner constituted through artificial intelligence provides emotional support without the demands of a real person. Here, the real person thinks that the modulated self he presents in disembodied conversation is more appealing. This turns the goal of affective computing on its head; instead of getting machines to seem more like people, it’s something closer to a man imitating a robot. Turkle comments that digital media put people in a “comfort zone,” where they believe they can share “just the right amount” of themselves. But this feeling of control is an illusion—a “Goldilocks fallacy.” In a romantic relationship, there is no ideal distance to be maintained over time. As she sums up her case: “Technology makes us forget what we know about life.”•
