Antisocial media

An MIT professor and psychologist argues our modern wired lifestyle is damaging us and our relationships, but she may be a bit premature

January 16, 2011|David Weinberger, Globe Correspondent

In her important, controversial new book, Sherry Turkle reads our leap into digital technology not as the unfettering of a deep, human urge to connect, but as a dire symptom to be understood within an older framework: psychoanalysis. Whether you find this book’s analysis convincing depends on how you read the Rorschach test that is the Internet.

Turkle, an MIT professor and licensed clinical psychologist, was one of the first cartographers of the new digital territory. In “Alone Together,’’ she lays out technology’s effect on the self by presenting dozens of stories drawn from 15 years of observing people, especially youths, interacting with it. She unfailingly acknowledges the benefits technology brings, but in every case then moves to a far longer catalog of harms. “Alone Together’’ reads like a cry from the heart of the researcher, parent, and trained psychologist that Turkle is.

In the first half, Turkle worries about our willingness to believe that robots can care about us — although this “robotic moment’’ is perhaps further off than Turkle thinks: Few of us have gotten close to robots, and the stores were not filled with robot toys this holiday season. In the second half, she turns to our current technologies of connection, particularly the Internet. Joining the two halves is the central question of the book: “Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead?’’

Turkle’s answer is a resounding no. According to her, our uses of new technologies demean real friendships, lead us to treat others as objects, lower our expectations for real human connection, create immense stress, turn emotion into performance, make us confused about when we are alone and when we are together, and is creating a generation of narcissists so fragile that they need constant social reassurance.

Turkle reads as diseased much that many of us see as signs of robust social health. So, for Turkle, those posting cellphone photos from the presidential inauguration in January 2009 were not sharing the moment with distant friends, but were pathologically escaping from the here and now. Turkle reads teens’ texting not as a sign that they’re more socially connected than ever, but as evidence of a need for constant reassurance. When a teen reports that she was glad that news of a friend’s death came via an instant message because “she was able to compose herself’’ and “had time to think, ’’ Turkle sees it as retreating to the “safe haven’’ of the Internet to avoid strong emotions, rather than as a reasonable way to deal with a fraught moment.