CityReads│Alone Together

97

Alone together: why we expect more from the technology and less from each other?

In the social media age, we know how to connect: but are we forgetting how to talk to each other?

Sherry Turkle, 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,Basic Books.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/alone-together-sherry-turkle-review

How technology will change the human relationship and intimacy is a long-standing question, be it telegraph, telephone, TV, computer, internet, smartphone, and robot. There are mainly three arguments: intimacy lost, intimacy saved, and intimacy liberated.

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle adds to a growing body of cyber-sceptic literature: recent examples include Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, warning that our cognitive faculties decay as we skim distractedly from one webpage to another, and Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, which rebuts fashionable notions of the web as a tool for advancing democracy. These are correctives to what Turkle calls the "heroic narrative" of the internet – the effusions of digital evangelists who confuse technological advance with human progress.

Alone Together is the culmination of years of empirical research. Turkle has watched people interact with machines and socialize on digital networks. Her inquiry starts out clinical and becomes philosophical: can humanity transform the way it communicates without altering, at some level, what it means to be human?

The robotic moment: in solitude, new intimacies

Humanity is nearing a "robotic moment". We already filter companionship through machines; the next stage is to accept machines as companions. Soon, robots will be employed in "caring" roles, entertaining children or nursing the elderly, filling gaps in the social fabric left where the threads of community have frayed. Meanwhile, real-world interactions are becoming onerous. Flesh-and-blood people with their untidy impulses are unreliable, a source of stress, best organized through digital interfaces – BlackBerries, iPads, Facebook. Millions of us appear to find simulations of life more alluring than life. We are training ourselves to fear a world unmediated by computers.

What sociable robotics may augur—the sanctioning of “relationships” that make us feel connected although we are alone.

Social robots will one day sweep the kitchen floor, take care of our aging parents and kids and provide us with reliable companionship. Turkle begins with the troubling observation that we often seek out robots as a solution to our own imperfections, as an easy substitute for the difficulty of dealing with others.

Just look at Roxxxy, a $3,000 talking sex robot that comes preloaded with six different girlfriend personalities. On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with the kind of desperate loneliness that would lead someone to buy a life-size plastic gadget with three “inputs.” And yet, as Turkle argues, Roxxxy is emblematic of a larger danger, in which the prevalence of robots makes us unwilling to put in the work required by real human relationships. Dependence on a robot presents itself as risk free. But when one becomes accustomed to “companionship” without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky—it makes us subject to rejection—but it also opens us to deeply knowing another. Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal, but it consigns us to a closed world.

An extremely realistic computer-generated schoolgirl

For the kids who grow up with robot, Turkle worry that the first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Without alterity, there can be no empathy. Growing up with robots in roles traditionally reserved for people is different from coming to robots as an already socialized adult. Children need to be with other people to develop mutuality and empathy; interacting with a robot cannot teach these. Adults who have already learned to deal fluidly and easily with others and who choose to “relax” with less demanding forms of social“life” are at less risk. But whether child or adult, we are vulnerable to simplicities that may diminish us.

Robot’s popularity revealed more than people’s willingness to talk to machines; it revealed their reluctance to talk to other people. The idea of an attentive machine provides the fantasy that we may escape from each other. The disappointments in human begin to make a machine’s performance of caring seem like caring enough.

We come to sociable robots with the problems of our lives, with our needs for care and attention. They promise satisfactions, even if only in fantasy. Getting satisfaction means helping the robots, filling in where they are not yet ready, making up for their lapses. We are drawn into necessary complicities. What we ask of robots shows us what we need.

Networked: in intimacies, new solitudes

The second half of the book deals with our addiction to the web. Turkle has interviewed people of all ages and from a wide range of social backgrounds and finds identical patterns of compulsive behavior. We start with the illusion that technology will give us control and end up controlled.

We get Blackberries to better manage our email, but find ourselves cradling them in bed first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Children compete with mobile phones for their parents' attention.Those children, meanwhile, are absorbed in the digital world in a way that older generations, with memories of analogue living, can barely comprehend. Turkle interviews teenagers who are morbidly afraid of the telephone. They find its immediacy and unpredictability upsetting. A phone call in "real time" requires spontaneous performance; it is "live". Text messages and Facebook posts can be honed to create the illusion of spontaneity.

In the evening, when sensibilities such as these come together, they are likely to form what have been called “postfamilial families. Their members are alone together, each in their own rooms, each on a networked computer or mobile device. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention.The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. We go online because we are busy but end up spending more time with technology and less with each other. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other.

With sociable robots we are alone but receive the signals that tell us we are together. Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.

With sociable robots, we imagine objects as people. Online, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects. These are fearful symmetries.

Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life—and both robotics and networked life do that—we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.  Our attraction to even the prospect of sociable robots affords a new view of our networked life. And the network prepares us for the“relationships with less” that robots provide.

As we live the flowering of connectivity culture, we dream of sociable robots. Lonely despite our connections, we send ourselves a technological Valentine. If online life is harsh and judgmental, the robot will always be on our side. The idea of a robot companion serves as both symptom and dream. The robot will provide companionship and mask our fears of too-risky intimacies. As dream, robots reveal our wish for relationships we can control.

We love our objects, but enchantment comes with a price. We expect more from technology and less from each other. This puts us at the still center of a perfect storm. It is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we shall have better.

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