Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

• There is a new state of the self, itself
• Are we losing the time to take our time?
• The tethered adolescent
• Virtuality and its discontents
• Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).