Compare And Contrast Alone Together By Sherry Turkle And The Shallows

Jade McElroy

Professor Jeffrey

English 1C

11, October 2014

Essay #2

Today we have the World Wide Web, cell phones, pagers, television, and computers. All of these tools affect the way people live their daily lives. With technology society has instant communication, virtual reality, and access to loads of information. So how are these tools affecting the users relationships and minds? These are two topics Alone Together by Sherry Turkle and The Shallows by Nicholas Carr have addressed.

While Turkle and Carr both discussed how technology affects the lives of modern society, Turkle mainly focused on how personal relationships are being affected. Carr on the other hand stressed that technology is interfering with the utilization of the "linear mind".

Both of these works explain the negative aspects of technology. Turkle and Carr imply technology has changed the way people live. Without it, the world’s overly dependent society would eventually crash. Turkle states, “People take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay." Continuing with this theme, Carr states, "The Nets interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing

levers to get tiny pellets of social or

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Intellectual nourishment." – The Shallows (p 117). It is obvious that Turkle and Carr recognize the fact technology has manipulated people’s social skills in a negative way.
Unlike Carr, Turkle concentrates on how personal relationships are being affected due to technology.

This is because people tend to become absent in the real world by logging into a virtual world. Turkle states, "Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other, wed rather text then talk” – The Shallows p 36. This is because people are beginning to believe that they have some sort of companionship with technology. This way of thinking tends to result in a loss of basic social skills. Everyone is so “plugged in” they avoid interacting with the real people around them. This is a problem because social interactions are what we need for proper

development.
Carr’s beliefs differ than Turkle’s in the sense he thinks our physical mind is being affected the most. Carr states, “As we use our intellectual technologies ‑ the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities – we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.” Think of the Net. People have become so used to absorbing loads of information quickly, and in bits and pieces that they are not even realizing they are making this their primary way of thinking. The mind has begun to lose its ability to think deeply, and concentrate. It has become a primitive and distracted mind, and is thinking less like a leader and more

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as a technological hunter and gatherer. Society is throwing away what makes their mind so interesting.