Sherry Turkle TED_sherryturkleted

Sherry Turkle TED由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“sherryturkleted”。

In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities.We were exploring different aspects of ourselves.And then we unplugged.I was excited.And as a psychologist, what excited me most, was the ides, that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in real world.Now fast-toward to 2012, I’ still excited by technology, but I believe, that we are letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.And what I found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful, that they not only changed what we do, they change who we are.Some of the things that we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would found odd, or disturbing, but they quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.People text or do email during corporate board meetings.They text and shop and go on Facebook, during claes, during presentations, actually during all meetings.Parents text and do breakfast at breakfast or at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents full attention.But then the same children deny each other their full attention.This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together.And we even text on funerals, we remove our selves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones.It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection.We are getting used to a new way of being alone together.People want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to all the different places they want to be.People want to customize their lives.They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention.You can end up hiding from each other, even as we’re all constantly connected to each other.Acro the generations, I see 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.I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right.But what might feel just right can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships.When I asked people ‘what’s wrong with having a conversation?’ people say ‘I tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation.It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.’ So that’s the bottom line.Texting, email, posting, all of these things, let us present the self as we want to be.We get to edit, and that means we get to delete and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body, not too little, not too much, just right.Human relationships are rich and they’re mey and they’re demanding.And we clean them up with technology.And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection.We short-change ourselves.And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to shop caring.Connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information, but they don’t really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other.And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection.For kids growing up that skill is the bedrock of development.Over and over I hear, ‘I would rather text than talk.’ And what I am seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversations, so used to getting by with le that they’ve become almost willing to dispense with people altogether.So for example, many people share with me with this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital aistant on Apple’s iphone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen, when others won’t.I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I’ve learned in the past 15 years.That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology.That’s why is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed—so many automatic listeners.And the feeling that no one is listening to me makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.We have developed robots, they call them sociable robots, and they are specifically designed to be companions— to the elderly, to the children, to us.Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? One day I came into a nursing home and I saw a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in a shape of baby seal, it comforted her.But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of human life.That robot put on a great show.And we’re vulnerable.People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing.And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn’t find it amazing;I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.But when I stepped back, I felt myself, at the cold, hard centre of a perfect storm.We expect more from technology and le from each other.I believe it’s because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.And we’re vulnerable.We’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy.So we’re designing technology that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demand of friendship.We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies.One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be;two, that we’ll always be heard and three;that we will never have to be alone.And that third idea, that we’ll never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches.Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, and they reach for the devices.Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.And so people try to solve it by connecting.But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure.It exprees, but it doesn’t solve, an underlying problem.But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves.It’s shaping a new way of being.The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am.We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we’re having them.So before it was: I have a feeling;I want to make a call.Now it’s: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.The problem with this new regime of ‘I share therefore I am.’ Is that if we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves.We almost don’t feel ourselves.So what do we do? We connect, more and more.But in the proce, we set ourselves up to be isolated.How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to separate, to gather yourself.Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel le anxious or in order to feel alive.When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are.It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel le alone.But we’re risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true.If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be lonelier.And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they’re only going to know how to be lonely.I used to say ‘those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-refection.’ And that’s what I am calling for here now, reflection and more than that, a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us, what it might be costing us.We’re smitten with technology.And we’re afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance.But it’s time to talk.We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up.But it’s not, it’s early days.There’s plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it, how we built it.I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.I see some first step.Start thinking of solitude as a good thing, make room for it.Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children.Created secret spaces at home—the kitchen, the dinning room, and reclaim them for conversation.Do the same thing at work.At work, we’re so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to think, we don’t have time to talk about the things that really matter.Change that.Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.Because it’s when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection—how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves—but it’s also giving us the opportunities to affirm our values and our direction.I’m optimistic.We have everything we need to start.We have each other.And we have the greatest chance to succe if we recognize our vulnerability.That we listen, when technology says ‘it will take something complicated and promises something simpler.’ So in my work, I heard that life is hard, relationships are filled with risks.And then there’s technology—simpler, hopeful, optimistic, and ever-young.It’s like calling in the cavalry.But our fantasies of substitution have cost us.Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, and our own planet.They need us.Let’s talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life, the life we can love.