Sherrie Turkle’s TED Talk “Connected, but Alone?” – Summary

In Sherrie Turkle’s TED talk Connected, but Alone?, she claims a lot about how she feels about technology and what she believes that it is doing to us as humans and as individuals interacting with one another. The main idea of Turkle’s TED talk was that we, as individuals and as a group, are letting technology take us places that we don’t necessarily want to go. We are allowing the smallest of devices to control us, they are so powerful that they change who we are. In her talk, Turkle insists that individuals now are way too invested in their devices, reminding us that people are often on their cellular devices during board meetings, classes, presentations, and even funerals. She also emphasizes that a common trend in today’s day and age is that people want to be with each other but in other places at the same time, as well as the fact that we are so used to having limited face to face conversations that we wouldn’t mind getting rid of them all together if given the option. Turkle expresses the idea of what is called the “Goldilocks Effect,” meaning that people want to remain not too close but not too far away from other people either. They like having a lot of someone as long as it is at a distance and they can control it. As the talk moves along, Turkle again makes a strong point. She argues that the reason behind why we expect more from technology and less from one another is because technology is always there when we are at our most vulnerable stages. It gives us three things to look forward to: attention when we want it, gives us a sense that we are always heard, lets us know we are never alone. All in all, she believes that one of the most import things that we need to do is to learn how to be alone. This is because, if we don’t know how to be alone, we are just going to make ourselves more lonely by diving deeper into technology and moving away from reality. Turkle strongly encourages that we develop more self-aware relationships with others, with ourselves, and with technology, if we want to really love the life we live in.