Bill Moyers: Technology Is Turning Society into Something We Experience Alone, Together
October 28, 2013 |
From BillMoyers.com:
If you think a lot of people are looking down these days, it’s because they are. We often see people focused so intensely on the latest text or tweet coming from their smartphone, that they seem virtually oblivious to the world around them. This week, Bill talks to MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who has studied our relationship with technology for over three decades, about what this constant engagement means for our culture and our society. Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, says our devices are not only changing the way we communicate and interact with each other, but also who we are as human beings. “What concerns me as a developmental psychologist is watching children grow in this new world where being bored is something that never has to be tolerated for a moment,” Turkle tells Moyers. “Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of people [they're] with and this ‘other’ reality.”
Full transcript below the video:
BILL MOYERS: Enough of politics, the debt and that spectacle in Washington. Let’s change the subject.
If you’ve ever lost your smartphone, as I have, you know it can feel like a death. The experience highlights just how our world has been engulfed by social media and how our technology has become a vital organ of our being.
And it's happened so fast. Facebook is not quite 10 years old, Twitter is younger still. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told a reporter that in 2016 -- just three years from now -- “people are going to be sharing eight to ten times as much stuff.”
Like anything hurtling us forward at breakneck speed, the advancements are great, and so are the dangers. For every Arab Spring or political movement using social media to foment change, there may also be campaigns of abuse and hate. For every Wikileak and revealed secret, there’s the encroachment on personal privacy by the NSA. For every new friend meeting through cyberspace, there’s the risk of estrangement from the real world.
Our devices change not only what we do but also who we are. So I’ve come to Sherry Turkle to try to explain how and why. She’s a clinical psychologist who was one of the first to study the impact of computers on culture and society.
A professor at MIT and Director of that school’s Initiative on Technology and Self, she’s written several important books based on deep research and hundreds of interviews with children and adults alike. Her most recent sums up her conclusions: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
BILL MOYERS: Sherry Turkle, welcome.
SHERRY TURKLE: Pleasure to be here.
BILL MOYERS: I saw a video the other day that I want to share with you. It's now been seen 25 million times –
SHERRY TURKLE: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: --on YouTube. Here it is.
WOMAN #1 in I Forgot My Phone: …This guy…I’m not, I’m not…
WOMAN #2 in I Forgot My Phone: Wow.
WOMAN #1 in I Forgot My Phone: …But like if you…it’s not – it’s not real –
MAN in I Forgot My Phone: I don’t think it’s real. I don’t think it’s real.
WOMAN #2 in I Forgot My Phone: Maybe there’s a –
WOMAN #1 in I Forgot My Phone: Did you guys see the lineup for cars …wasted … the Empire State Building is like, really close to it.
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