3 Key Points in Sherry

Turkle’s “Connected, but

alone?” Speech and why it’s
important that they
are recognized
Sherry Turkle is a current professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
specializing in social studies, technology, personality and psychology. She has written
several notable publications and has a strong long-term interest in the effect that
technology has on personality, habits, and relationships.

In this particular video; Sherry’s Ted Talk titled Connected, but alone?, Sherry states her
stance in the issues regarding shifting foundations in interpersonal relationships because
of the influence of technology, and our ever-growing attachment to the “little devices” in
our pockets, backpacks, purses and briefcases. While watching this video in class today, I
was profoundly impacted by the points she made and the research she found in
correlation to the habits discussed and shifts in culture. Not only is Sherry an incredible
speaker, but she has a knack for putting things into perspective in a way that grabs your
attention and really makes you think. Not only was I shocked by her statements, but I was
also nervous for the future and almost scared for how much of these things I didn’t
realize I was doing myself.
Below are 33 of the most important ideas/statements that I found to be extremely moving
and eye-opening during Turkle’s address. As you watch the clip, formulate your own
opinions about the subject matter, but also take the time to analyze each of these key
points.

1. The idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about
ourselves/identity to live better lives in the real world was the hope back in 1996
2. [Fast forward to current times] We’re letting it [technology] take us places that
we don’t want to go.
3. Our little devices are so psychologically powerful that they not only change what
we do, they change who we are.
4. Being together while not being together.
5. It matters because we are setting ourselves up for trouble for how we relate to
each other and ourselves, self-reflection
6. People want to customize their lives, be wherever they want to be at all times,
escape
7. Hiding from each other even when we’re connected to each other
8. Goldilocks Effect: not too close, not too far,…. just right
9. People are afraid of conversation because it’s in real time and you can’t control
what you say, you can’t edit/delete/retouch
10. Human relationships are rich and messy and demanding, and we clean them up
with technology. When we do, we sacrifice conversation for mere connection.
11. Sips DO NOT add up to a gulp. The small messages don’t work for really getting
to know each other.
12. Siri will become more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others
won’t.
13. “No one is listening to me”-very important in our relationships with technology,
why it’s so appealing, so many automatic listeners.
14. People experience pretend empathy as if it were the real thing.
15. We expect more from technology, and less from each other
16. Technology appeals to us most when we are most vulnerable
17. We’re lonely but we’re afraid of intimacy
18. Designing technologies with the illusion of companionship without the debts of
friendship
19. 1)We can put our attention wherever we want it to be 2) we will always be heard
3) we will never have to be alone
20. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.
21. I share therefore I am
22. I want to have a feeling, I NEED to send a text
23. If we don’t have connection, we don’t feel ourselves
24. Setting ourselves up for isolation
25. Solitude is where you find yourself, so you can reach out to find other people and
make a connection
26. If we don’t teach our children how to be alone, they’re only going to know how
to be lonely.
27. We are smitten with technology, and we are afraid like young lovers that too
much talking might ruin the romance.
28. Time to talk. Develop a more self aware relationship with them, with each other,
and with ourselves
29. Start seeing solitude as a good thing.
30. We all need to learn to really listen to each other, inkling the boring bits.
31.When we stumble we reveal ourselves to each other.
32. Our fantasies of substitution have cost us
33. Focus on the many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives our own
bodies our own lives our own communities, politics, planet. They all need us.
That’s some heavy stuff isn’t it? Have you ever looked at communication and our modes
of transferring it this way? Too often we let our emotions disconnect us from the
foundations of relationships in trade for any connections. In particular, my favorite parts
of her speech was when she stated that “solitude is where you find yourself”, and that
“we are smitten with technology, and we are afraid like young lovers that too much
talking might ruin the romance”. I personally love my alone time, but I never realized
until today what an impact your alone time had on your well being. I think that our
generation is so focused on and driven by notifications, messages, heavy communication,
and constant confirmation that we are not alone, that we are afraid to be alone. We don’t
know how to deal with silence when all day everyday we are constantly bombarded with
buzzing noises, email notifications, and lit up screens whenever we receive something
new. In reality, our relationship with technology really is like a romantic one. We need
constant affirmation and attention, which is pulling us away from solid relationships in
the stance of Turkle. I definitely agree in most part with her, though I do have some of
my own reservations about the ways technology aids or doesn’t aid in the healthy benefit
of relationships of all kinds.
Additionally, I found an interesting article that speaks more on this subject that Turkle
arose. TIME.com did well to not only address some of the same points as Turkle, but to
expand on them even further and support ideas with statistics, facts, and graphs.
I am excited to learn more about this subject in the following weeks and report on it
further. Relationships and technology apart are perhaps two of the most talked about
subjects today, but together they become a whole other animal to be dealt with.

About Clay Shirky's TEDTalk

The history of the modern world could read as a history of ways of arguing, social media guru
Clay Shirky says. During the Arab Spring, for example, we saw protesters battle their
governments' top-down control of news with Facebook, Twitter and text messaging.

As media evolve, Shirky asks, what sort of arguments will we have — and how will it change
the governments of nations?

About Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityʼs graduate Interactive

Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named Social Weather. He's the author
of several books, including his most recent, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes
Consumers into Collaborators.

Shirky's work focuses on the rise of networks and the use of decentralized technologies for social
creation and open-source development. "A group is its own worst enemy," he says; new
technologies can enable cooperative structures as alternatives to centralized and institutional
structures.
Copyright NPR 2019.

Transcript
ALISON STEWART, HOST:

This is the TED RADIO HOUR from NPR. I'm Alison Stewart.

(SOUNDBITE OF CLAPPING)

STEWART: Let's start with a really simple question: When does an individual clapping become
a round of applause? Is it two people? Is it 10 people?

(APPLAUSE)

STEWART: And how do those people signal to each other that we, as a group, approve?

A round of applause is its own thing. It knows when to start. It knows when to stop. It's a natural
example of when a lot of people come together as one. Shared expression springs up among
people all the time, and that's what we're exploring today on the TED RADIO HOUR - the
power of crowds.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: How do you organize a group of individual so that the output of the
group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos?

When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, are we just going to be a
crowd of voices? Or are we also going to be a crowd of hands?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I believe we're actually in a period when society, faced with great
challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a re-discovery of
collective good.

STEWART: TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It brings together
some really smart people to share powerful ideas from the stage at a TED conference.

On our program, we'll hear some of those TED Talks and discuss some big ideas with TED
speakers and other guests. Let's begin with Clay Shirky.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK, HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN
MAKE HISTORY")

CLAY SHIRKY: Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that
people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together. And so we're starting to see a
media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere and moving from one spot to
another. That is a huge transformation.

STEWART: Clay Shirky teaches about social media at New York University and wrote the book
"Here Comes Everybody," about the power of crowds. We're going to speak with Clay in just a
few minutes. But first, let's continue listening to his 2009 TED Talk: How social media can make
history.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK, HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN

MAKE HISTORY")

SHIRKY: The moment we're living through, the moment our historical generation is living
through, is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. There are only four
periods in the last 500 years where media's changed enough to qualify for the label revolution.

The first one is the famous one, the printing press. Moveable type, oil-based inks, that whole
complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside down, starting in
the middle of the 1400s.

Then a couple of hundred years ago, there was innovation in two-way communication.
Conversational media. First, the telegraph, then the telephone. Slow text-based conversations,
then real-time voice-based conversation.

Then about 150 years ago, there was a revolution in recorded media other than print. First,
photos; then recorded sound, then movies. All encoded into physical objects.

And finally, about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electro-magnetic spectrum to send sound and
images through the air; radio and television.

This is the media landscape those of us of a certain age grew up with and are used to. But there's
a curious asymmetry here. The media that's good at creating conversations is no good at creating
groups. And the media that's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations.

If you want to have a conversation in this world, you have it with one other person. If you want
to address a group, you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group, whether
you're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press. That was the media landscape as
we had it in the 20th century.
And this is what changed. The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for
groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern and
television, radio, magazine, books gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the
many-to-many pattern, right? For the first time, media is natively good at supporting these kinds
of conversations.

That's one of the big changes. The second big change, right, is that as all media gets digitized,
the Internet also becomes the motive carriage for all other media. Meaning that phone calls
migrate to the Internet, magazines migrate to the Internet, movies migrate to the Internet. And
that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium, right?

Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information and is increasingly more
a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now
gather around and talk to each other as well, right?

And the third big change, right, is that members of the former audience can now also be
producers and not consumers. Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new
producer joins as well, because the same equipment - phones, computers - let you consume and
produce. That is a huge change.

And it's still changing as the media becomes more social. It's still changing patterns even among
groups who know how to deal with the Internet well.

STEWART: I am going to show my age on this, but you gave the four examples of how
technology changed - I'm using technology in terms of the printing press - the way we
communicate. Four big monumental shifts.

SHIRKY: Right, right.

STEWART: And I thought back to, gosh, when I was a teenager, it was the telephone chat room
that you could get all your friends together or people you didn't know and you could all get on
the phone and talk to each other. So why wasn't that the breakthrough?

SHIRKY: Why wasn't that - yes, right. So that wasn't this for a couple of reasons. Real time
doesn't scale, right? You can't get hundreds of people into a phone chat room and have it work.
Phone conversations can't easily be stored or searched or forwarded.

So all of the things we take for granted about I said something now, you read it three days from
now, she reads it three months from now, somebody else finds it and reads it three years from
now, that doesn't happen in phone chat rooms. And distance doesn't cost money on the Internet.
So even though you could have these small, real time audio groups, you couldn't have large non-
real time global groups.
And it's that very flexibility of the Internet as the underlying tool that makes for what Seb Paquet
calls, "Ridiculously easy group-forming."

STEWART: Clay, I want to follow up on a point you made high up in your talk. You said:

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK, HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN

MAKE HISTORY")

SHIRKY: These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

STEWART: Technologically boring.

SHIRKY: Right.

STEWART: Why is that?

SHIRKY: You know, these are tools that change the user. These are tools that, because they
affect how we think of ourselves in relation to others - it's not just like giving someone a better
shovel where you just go and do all the old jobs you did with a shovel, but it works better.

When people have a sense of themselves, of being able to reach out and communicate with more
people than they could fit in their living room, that is, for most of us, a novel experience. But it
takes some getting used to.

So the techies and the neophiles get excited when a shiny new tool shows up. But it's really when
your mom takes it for granted, that that's the moment at which you can actually start to see it
change society, because it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm using this special Internet thing, or I'm using
this special email thing or web thing.

It's Facebook has actually become routine enough that I can take it for granted, that I can use it to
send a message. Email has become routine enough. That moment is really the moment of
potential social change, because the bulk of a society will then have adopted these tools, gotten
used to them, and be ready to use them in new ways.

STEWART: You spent a good amount of your talk, Clay, discussing what was happening in
China.

SHIRKY: Yeah.

STEWART: And this was in 2009.

SHIRKY: Mm-hmm.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK, HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN

MAKE HISTORY")

SHIRKY: Last May, China, in the Sichuan province, had a terrible earthquake - 7.9 magnitude.
Massive destruction in a wide area, as the Richter scale has it. And the earthquake was reported
as it was happening, right? People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of
buildings. They were taking videos of buildings shaking.

They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service. They were Twittering it, right?
There were people listening all over the world, hearing this news. The BBC got their first wind
of the Chinese quake from Twitter. Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes
before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to view.

The last time China had a quake of that magnitude, it took them three months to admit that it had
happened, right? Now, they might have liked to have done that here, rather than seeing these
pictures go up online, but they weren't given that choice, because their own citizens beat them to
the punch. Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens, rather than
from the Shinhwa News Agency.

And, within half a day, donation sites were up and donations were pouring in from all-around the
world. There was just an incredible coordinated global response. And the Chinese then, in one of
their periods of media openness, decided that they were going to let it go, that they were going to
let this citizen reporting fly.

And then this happened: people began to figure out in the Sichuan province that the reason so
many school buildings had collapsed - because tragically the earthquake happened during a
school day - the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken
bribes to allow those buildings to be built to less than code.

A citizen journalist started reporting that as well and there was an incredible picture - you may
have seen it on the front page of The New York Times - a local official literally prostrated
himself in the street in front of these protestors, in order to get them to go away. Essentially to
say we will do anything to placate you, just please stop protesting in public.

STEWART: If citizens are the truth-tellers, as you describe in the situation in China, what
happens when the citizens are untruthful? Where's the accountability?

SHIRKY: Right. So this is the great epistemological question about democracy, which is in what
people or mechanism do you vest the idea of truth? And there has always been this checks and
balances problem. So I would never say that the citizens are the truth-tellers.
What I would say is citizens are now welcomed into the media environment. I think the recent
upwelling and interest around this stuff, because in part of the James O'Keefe video, because of
the Kony 2012 video, because of the Mike Daisy piece...

STEWART: Mm-hmm.

SHIRKY: ...that there is a conversation going on in which people are unable to reconcile this is
an emotionally resonant story that gets people to act and this is a dry recitation of facts that no
one would disagree with. And that conversation is not resolving itself in part because there is no
way to resolve that conversation.

If you say essentially everyone must be convinced before we will call a fact a fact, then things
like global warming will remain forever contentious. If you were not willing to say some degree
of consensus has been reached and therefore we are going to act, even as there are still people
who, for one reason or another, deny what we've taken to be proof.

The sad dilemma - Richard Rorty, I think, the philosopher, put it best. For any society, truth is
whatever anybody declines to be arguing about at the moment. Once you expand participation to
everybody, then everybody provides the checks and balances.

The system has to operated isometrically enough so that no one person is given an unobstructed
platform and can speak without having other people raise objections. And then you have to have
some motive arriving at consensus in that environment.

STEWART: This is the TED RADIO HOUR from NPR.

This is the TED RADIO HOUR from NPR. I'm Alison Stewart.

SHIRKY: Historically, we have always over-estimated the value of access to information and we
have always under-estimated the value of access to each other. The first two protocols that were
debuted were remote access to files and remote access to computers.

But email turned out to be the first killer app. Within three months of bringing email onto the
Internet, it was 75 percent of the backbone traffic, because it turns out access to files and access
to computers is incredibly boring compared to access to each other.

STEWART: That's NYU professor Clay Shirky talking about how we are intuitively drawn to
communicating with each other.

Social media tools are providing new clout, new command for like-minded groups of people, as
well as creative ways for all involved to collaborate. The power of those crowds, both real and
virtual, is changing the way things get done in the world.
The power of crowds is the subject of our program today. Let's listen to Clay Shirky on this very
topic, speaking at TED in 2009 in a prescient talk called "How Social Media Can Make History."
We'll talk with Clay in just a few minutes.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVE RECORDING "TED TALK, HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN

MAKE HISTORY")

SHIRKY: We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama
campaign, and I don't mean most imaginative use in politics. I mean most imaginative use ever.
And one of the things Obama did, which famously the Obama campaign did, was they famously
put up mybarackobama.com, mybo.com.

And millions of citizens rushed in to participate and to try and figure out how to help, right? An
incredible conversation sprung up there. And then, this time last year, Obama announced that he
was going to change his vote on FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

He had said in January he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly
warrant-less spying on American persons. By the summer, in the middle of the general
campaign, he said I've thought about the issue more. I've changed my mind. I'm going to vote for
this Bill.

And many of his own supports on his own site went very publicly berserk. Within days of this
group being created, it was the fastest-growing group on mybo.com. Within weeks of its being
created, it was the largest group. And Obama had to issue a press release. He had to issue a reply.

And he said, essentially, I've considered the issue. I understand where you're coming from. But,
having considered it all, I'm still going to vote the way I'm going to vote, but I wanted to reach
out to you and say I understand that you disagree with me and I'm going to take my lumps on
this one.

This didn't please anybody. But then a funny thing happened in the conversation. People in that
group realized that Obama had never shut them down. Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever
tried to hide the group or make it harder to join, to deny its existence, to delete it, to take it off
the site. They had understood that their rule with mybo.com was to convene their supporters, but
not to control their supporters.

And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media. The media
landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea
that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, right, is increasingly slipping away.

In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the
former audience are now increasingly full participants, right? In that world, media is less and less
often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and is more and more often
a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups.

And the choice we face, I mean, anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere
in the world, isn't whether that's the media environment we want to operate in. That's the media
environment we've got. The question we all face now is how can we make best use of this
medium, even though it means changing the way we've always done it? Thank you very much.

STEWART: You leave your audience with a question in your talk that I'm going to pose back to
you. How can we make the best use of this media?

SHIRKY: What I had gotten interested in between the first book on social media, "Here Comes
Everybody" and that talk and the subsequent book is the observation that you had Lolcats, right?
You have people doctoring up...

STEWART: Mm-hmm.

SHIRKY: ...pictures of cute cats and mailing them around to crack each other up on their lunch
breaks. And you also get Wikipedia and you also get, you know, open source software. And you
started to get...

STEWART: Mm-hmm.

SHIRKY: ...by the period I was giving that talk, you started to get, and now visibly have all over
the environment, the most significant political questions conducted at the highest national levels,
in part based on pressure from ordinary citizens.

And I asked myself essentially what's on that spectrum? And, for all that getting large groups of
people involved in campaigning for or pressuring politicians or governments in certain
directions, the core to any of the really civically valuable stuff is a small group of highly-
committed people who are going back again to those tools today. The people who are obsessed
with an issue.

If we design power tools for them, they design the situations that can bring everybody else into
the fold. So this is the beginning of Wikipedia, right? You have a small group of people who are
committed to making the Wikipedia project as a whole work.

And those people created a convivial environment for people writing about U.S. highways or the
nature of asphalt or Dr. Who or the planetary system or whatever, who only care about their
subject. They were given a platform by - that the Wikipedia itself conceived.

And that pattern, I think, which we're not very good at that's the pattern that makes this medium
as civically useful as it can be. We're just trying to figure out not how do we attract the average
user, but really how do we design power tools for the obsessives? And let them do that work of
trying to attract the average user.

STEWART: Clay Shirky is the author of "Here Comes Everybody" and...

SHIRKY: "Cognitive Surplus."

STEWART: Thank you so much, Clay.

SHIRKY: Thank you.

Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good

http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown?language=en#t-645820

In this video about many different global issues we are facing, Gordon Brown presents by showing
everyone illustrations about how kids in other countries are suffering and how they are mistreated. I
believe its very sad that no one has stand up for their rights for kids who are in poverty, being shot,
standing up for what is right and so on. Gordon talks about how no one is showing concern for what is
needed and how much people are blind in not seeing what is happening around us in circles. Also, how
these events that we are encountering are going in circles that no one is not taking action for what is
right for what is not wrong to do. It doesn't matter what race you are and what religion you are but we
are a union who are trying to help for a better global world. No one deserves to be visible to the truths
of the events that are occurring because of modern use of the internet is very fast to see everything
that is global now. People are the most important is taking their opinions to the public and sharing
their ideas through the modern communication because its the best way for the government to see.
Also, many people have blog database where they to get talk about their reactions and ideas about
issues they might have to publicize. The modern age has come with great technological innovations
since a century ago when the first slaves came during the slave trade period, people who didn't had the
rights to vote, and the civil rights movement. This was a very interesting video to learn how many
people can be influence by this Ted talk by Gordon Brown on global issues and making the internet a
very good tool to use for the better of the world.