As one who did not grow up with the internet, I was interested to see what Turkle's opinion is on where we began and where we currently are concerning the internet and how it has changed us.
Turkle’s writing is wonderfully readable and she has done a great job of translating facts and statistics into tangible, real-life scenarios we can all relate to in one way or another. One of the more interesting points Turkle makes in Alone Together, is that the average person might think with the explosion of an ever increasingly sophisticated technology, coupled with sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are reaching out to each other and enhancing human relationships. Not so, says the author. As a matter of fact, just the opposite. Technology has taken away that person-to-person contact. We have learned to text, to chat, to post, but not emotionally connect with each other, and face-to-face interaction is becoming a lost art. We might connect with each other more often, but not in a meaningful way showing support, caring, and compassion for each other on a human level that experts agree is a basic human need.
Turkle goes on to say it’s not too late to reverse the course, and I look forward to reading her other books that focus on her lifelong passion of “studying the relationship between people and technology”.