“Growing Up Tethered” by Sherry Turkle (428-443)
One. What kind of enslavement does Turkle point to in her essay?
An 18-year-old Roman “has” to text while driving. His personality has been shaped so that he “has” to text regardless of the dangers to himself and others.
Technology changes our brains, our souls, and our very being in a way that we lose some degree of free will. We are slaves to the machine.
I had a student, who by all accounts is friendly, smart, and sociable, and I had to tell him three times in a class to get off his smartphone.
Over and over again, Turkle gives examples of people who live in fear of “going off the grid.” People need to stay in contact with their social media connections or they face an abyss of abject panic and terror.
We can infer that our sense of security and identity hinges (rather precariously) on these false social media connections and texts.
“I have to answer my phone. I don’t have a choice.”
Turkle observes that people “live in a state of waiting for connection.” Our validity depends on these connections.
To further her point, she notices that people are constantly “waiting to be interrupted.”
These interruptions are equal to connections.
However, Turkle asserts, correctly, that these are false connections: Always hungry for social media interruptions, we use others to fill the fragile pieces of our broken lives. We are not whole people. We are fragile, broken people trying to feel whole by the feeble act of constantly distracting ourselves with social media connections.
Turkle observes that we cannot have real connection until we are whole and able to live with solitude first. We’ve failed to meet the prerequisite for real connection: the ability to enjoy solitude.
As long as we cannot enjoy solitude, we will be slaves to “constantly waiting to be interrupted” by social media. We will be like zombies so hungry for social media attention that we will text and drive with careless disregard for human life.
Two. What is the twofold curse of living in the age of social media?
On one hand, we want to be “stars of our own movie,” producing the Big Me, as we share our banal selfies with the world. On the other hand, our empathy and ability to connect with live people atrophies until the empathy branch withers and falls off the tree, so to speak.
By becoming creatures without empathy constantly hungering for attention and the false dream that the Big Me is the center of life’s movie, we become spiritual zombies.
Three. What is the rite of passage parents give their children?
Now parents give their children smartphones between fourth and eighth grade. The smartphone defines a child’s passage to young adulthood.
Here’s an interesting fact: Parents who work in technology often forbid their children to have phone and iPads and other gadgets. They send them to private schools where there is no plastic. Everything is made of wood and there’s no technology. Execs for Google, Apple, and others send their kids to exclusive private Waldorf schools where there is no tech, but they do make an organic vegetarian homemade soup every day and learn the principles of cooperation.
Turkle observes that too much tech creates a trap for adolescents: Social media feedback is like “spare parts” for the “fragile adolescent self.” The problem is that all the spare parts in the world are never enough to mend the fragile, fragmented self.
Four. How does social media create a false self?
We’re encouraged to inflate our image into the Big Me. “Thinking of yourself in a bad way” is to commit the error of reducing yourself.
On Facebook, we can gather “culture references to shape how others” see us.
We can even create an avatar, and this avatar becomes our mask as our real self withers behind the curtain.
Review of Internet Dangers
One. Multitasking results in divided energy and mediocre work as we live in a state of continual partial attention.
Two. Death of intimacy results from preference of control and convenience over compromise and reciprocity. Everyone is "pauseable."
Three. A networked life encourages narcissism and constant need for social validation from others; also a networked life makes us feel we're the center of the universe.
Four. A networked life flattens our personae into emoticans.
Five. We suffer off-the-grid anxiety because we have an always-on mentality.
Six. We live in the New Solitude, which means we're mentally absent from others but at the same time we're tethered to each other in a degraded way.
Seven. We live in present shock in which we see "the diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now--and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is" (Rushkoff).
Eight. We suffer from digiphrenia, as Rushkoff writes, using technology to be in more than one place at the same time.
Nine. Internet alters our brain circuits for the worse, turning us into "skimmers."
People are degraded by our social media addiction in these ways:
People want to be interrupted. They are waiting for it. This speaks to a particular type of desperation.
There is no downtime. Therefore, there is no solitude, which is necessary for processing experience and information. Most importantly, as Turkle observes in her Ted Talk, solitude is the prerequisite for intimacy and connection with others.
Everything is rapid response without reflection. We lose our humanity.
Emoticons simplify who we are and strip us of nuance and complexity.
We lose the boundary between public and private life, sharing smartphone photos around the room.
The adolescent is denied alone time, a necessary rite of passage for independence. Instead of independence, the teenager becomes needy for approval and attention.
We have new emotional expectations. I know a young man who is mad at Facebook because his Facebook friends were either not commenting at all or enough at his posts.
We develop an unbalanced need for the validation of others rather than from our inner strength.
Being tethered makes us narcissistic: “. . . one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. So, the narcissistic self gets on with others by dealing only with their made-to-measure representations.”
Writing Assignment Option
In the context of the Media Studies essays in Chapter 13, support, refute, or complicate Turkle’s argument that technology is degrading our humanity in many ways, not the least of which is our “tethered self.” Be sure your 1,000-word essay has a counterargument section and three sources in your Works Cited page.
Thesis Examples (some weak; others strong)
We need to turn off our cell phones and computers and turn on to life.
We need to acknowledge that social media addiction is a disease that afflicts many of us.
Facebook is overrated.
I'm burned out from being on Facebook too much.
While there are obvious benefits from social networking, the empirical evidence so abundantly clear in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together points to a widespread social network-fueled pathology consisting of narcissism, false expectations of others, the distortion of time, the addiction to one's fictional cyber life, and compromised brain function from multi-tasking.
While social media is only about a decade old as of writing this research paper, Turkle makes a convincing case that our connection to social media is self-destructive in many ways, which include __________, __________, ____________, and ______________.
Turkle's diatribe against social media is a failed argument because her data cannot include long-term studies with such a new technology, she focuses on extreme cases, which can be found in anything, she uses too much anecdote rather scientific study, and she fails to counterbalance her claims with the prevailing benefits of social media.
Even though Turkle makes many valuable insights about the deleterious ways social networking affects us, her warning has come too late. Her book should have spent less time diagnosing our inevitable malaise and devoted more pages to the ways social networking can and should be used for our self-interests.
Those who dismiss Turkle as a Luddite offering no reasonable solutions to the problems she describes are misguided in their critique when we consider that ________________, _______________, _______________, and ___________________.
Turkle's pessimism is an exercise in intellectual charlatanism and buffoonery evidenced by her sensationalistic exaggerations of social network "mental diseases," her refusal to acknowledge the vast benefits of social networking, and her bullheaded stubbornness, which compels her to resist inevitable social and technological change.
Turkle's shrill diatribe against social networking is little more than a gloomy cloud of fraudulent brouhaha evidenced by _________, ___________, ___________, and _______________.
Sample A Introduction and Thesis in Support of Turkle
Recently I wrote something mildly amusing on Facebook about my twins, how they preferred to be lazy and take the elevator rather than be strong and take the stairs as I had urged them, and I started getting a torrent of “likes” and comments. I found myself checking my Facebook status more often than necessary to monitor the growing attention my post was getting and I realized I was enjoying a pathetic dopamine ego massage from all the adulation I was receiving. I was, for a brief while anyway, Facebook’s King of the Mountain and Super Funny Man, a talented force who no doubt, my post proved, could have made a handsome living doing the stand-up comedy circuit.
And then it hit me. I am pathetic. I am woefully and egregiously needy. I am a disgusting wretch who’s allowed the technology of his time, social media and Facebook specifically, to ratchet up his neediness.
Gloating over all my perceived exaltation was not a sign of my wit and strength. To the contrary, it showed how bereft and pathetically trivial my life had become. I was yet another pathological pawn in the social media game, trying to connect with my Facebook friends when in fact I was “together” on Facebook but woefully alone, or as Sherry Turkle’s book succinctly puts it, I was another casualty in the social media’s merciless mouth, a member of those who are Alone Together. Turkle’s book of the same title remarkably analyzes the way technology has changed who we are degrading us in many ways, not the least of which is ______________, ___________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.
Another Successful Example
I am a nineteen-year-old student taking McMahon’s English 1A class, which features a final essay, the most heavily weighted essay in class, about the dangers of social media. I belong to a generation immured in Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine, to mention a few. Is McMahon’s choice of book, Alone Together, an implicit excoriation of my generation? The book in question, by MIT professor Sherry Turkle, sounds off the alarm bells about the grave dangers of social media: It’s addictive; it makes us dumb; it disconnects us from others; it makes us insecure narcissists. The alleged weaknesses of Turkl’s argument are several and include the following: Because social media is such a new phenomenon, we don’t have any long-term data to support her claims; her extreme anecdotes point to outliers but not mainstream users of social media and we can always find outliers in any category of human behavior; her zeal to wean us off social media blinds her to its benefits for those of us who are not pathologically addicted to it; technophobe and Luddite arguments have been around for centuries and they always prove to be shrill, paranoid overreactions to inevitable change. Having examined these criticisms in the face of a careful reading of the book, I have concluded that Turkle has written a legitimate, relevant, and compelling argument, supported by empirical research and sound logic, about the ways social media is destroying, not a fringe, but a pervasive segment of society in the realm of addiction, physical injury, narcissism, dehumanization, attention deficit disorder, and generalized loneliness.
Sample B Intro and Thesis Against Turkle
Is MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, a healthy voice in the wilderness decrying the pathologies of social media or is she a shrill technophobe alarming us to the coming Technological Dystopia? As a nineteen-year-old college student, am I well served by heeding the vivid warnings in Turkle’s polemic? I doubt it, for while Turkle does a good job of showing the variety of pathologies engendered by social media, her argument collapses under the weight of her one-sided bias, her excessive focus on extreme, outlier anecdotes, her Procrustean exposition (picking only the data that serves your purposes and ignoring the data that contradicts your claims) forcing a narrative of dystopian madness to fit into her rigid, preconceived thesis; and her lack of access to any real long-term studies to give us an accurate, objective look at the alleged self-destructiveness from social media.
The above would be an A; however, it suffers from mapping overlap. Let's try to fix it.
Here's an A grade Revision
Is MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, a healthy voice in the wilderness decrying the pathologies of social media or is she a shrill technophobe alarming us to the coming Technological Dystopia? As a nineteen-year-old college student, am I well served by heeding the vivid warnings in Turkle’s polemic? I doubt it, for while Turkle does a good job of showing the variety of pathologies engendered by social media, her argument collapses under the weight of her one-sided bias, her excessive focus on extreme, outlier anecdotes, her rigid either/or fallacy regarding the worthiness of the Internet; her confusion with correlation and causation; her willful ignorance of Sturgeon's Law to push her over-simplistic argument, and her lack of access to any real long-term studies to give us an accurate, objective look at the alleged self-destructiveness from social media.
Sample Introduction and Thesis
If our posts on Facebook get us a lot of attention in the form of “likes” and comments and we find this attention makes us gloat like we’re the King of Facebook, we have to ask ourselves: Should we be getting our thrills in this manner? Of all the things to get thrilled about, the birth of a baby, the expulsion of a fascist leader, the discovery of a cure for some terminable disease, why do so many of us jump for joy upon getting Facebook “likes” and comments?
Could the answer be we’ve lowered our expectations about what defines our own happiness? Before Facebook, we had more exalted expectations that drove us, that defined our goals, which made us truly happy. But now we sit in a robe while eating a Pop Tart and copy and paste something someone else wrote on Facebook and the attention we get from our posts makes us happy.
Maybe we shouldn’t be happy. Maybe we should be ashamed. Maybe we should be full of self-loathing. Maybe we should be full of disgust.
In addition to a Facebook “like” category, there needs to be a “Get a Life, You Pathetic Loser” category, so that my real friends can remind me how far down the rabbit hole of a wasted life I’ve allowed Facebook and Twitter to send me.
Such are the sentiments of Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together who argues convincingly that Facebook and other forms of social media have denigrated the human condition by ________________, ________________, __________________, ___________________, and ___________________________.
Example Thesis Structures
Turkle's argument that social media has diminished our humanity is convincing when we consider ______________, ___________, _____________, ______________, and ________________.
Turkle's argument that social media presents dangers to our humanity is both exaggerated and erroneous evidenced by ___________, ___________, ________________, ____________, and _______________.
While Turkle does a good job of showing the narcissism and disconnection from the misuse of social media, her vision of a future techno-dystopia is misguided because _______________, ____________, _______________, and _________________.
Objections to Sherry Turkle's Argument
One. She is too one-sided with only negative anecdotes and examples of the way technology disconnects us and makes us narcissistic.
Two. She exaggerates the pitfalls and dangers of social media.
Three. She offers no solutions to social media addiction and dehumanization.
Four. She resists the inevitability of change brought on by technology.
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