I’m not going to bother reading their article, because I’ve heard this argument before. Claiming the reduction of face-to-face interaction, and the increase of interaction over mediums such as facebook, IM and the like are ruining social interaction in general forever. *ahem* BULLSHIT. That is all.

As review and criticism goes, this piece is worthless. It misses–without comment–the valid points (which Turkle makes only too weakly).

It’s easy to trivialize and dismiss what one doesn’t understand. But that doesn’t mean such responses are interesting–except for what they show us about the level of misunderstanding that prevails.

If you don’t even understand in the first place the points you’d feign to criticize, then you should stop and reconsider offering your criticism.

Here, again, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y f-o-r y-o-u:

F-i-r-s-t u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d,

t-h-e-n c-r–i-t-i-c-i-z-e.

TC:DR

too condescending …. didn’t read

You call it ‘living’.

That’s part of the problem. How many people living today have ever tasted a real, fresh, home-garden grown tomato? If you don’t understand that question, you probably have never tasted one and, by the same token, you’re apt to confuse what your daily existence with something else you’ve never tasted, “living” as that occurs “off-line.”

That’s good. Right. Don’t read the article. That way you’ll be “safe” from thoughts you neither like nor understand. Good work, blogger!!!

I understand her argument. She isn’t saying that internet communication is inherently a bad thing. Rather, she’s (trying to) explain how some people seek to interact with people on social networks and whatnot in order to feel included, yet still wind up feeling lonely due to the lack of human factor which technology cannot emulate. Technology is fine for distributing information and relaying messages back and forth but is in no way a substitute for real-life human interaction.

These replies (except for ‘I have’…(below)) are what’s known as ‘sour grapes’. (You could look that up.)

How very fitting in this context.

The thing is, you see (Not!): as a society, we had a good shot at saving the genuine tomato. And, in general, it’s been squandered. The Wppley-mamouth, modern society couldn’t save–though it managed to save the buffalo. We should be proud of that, too.

Maybe the old-fashioned garden tomato will be salvaged. But that’s isn’t how things look right now. To argue that we no more need nor should miss the tomato than we should need or miss the Wooley-mamouth is typical of the impovershed thinking that characterizes our times.

Your comments put you right in the crowd that so spectacularly “doesn’t get it” –and doesn’t even care that it doesn’t.

Whoooopeeeee!!!

I do not believe she is presenting an “argument”, but instead expressing a personal opinion that for all the benefits accorded by new means of communication, there is lost in many of these exchanges person-to-person conversations of the voice-to-ear and back again. What is lost are facial expressions, tone of voice, word emphasis, real-time exchanges that are more nuanced in person than on a screen, etc.

While I do use e-mail, snail mail, and some on the more recent means of communication, I have never found a more informative and beneficial substitute for person-to-person meetings. These are, of course, not always practical, but are my first choice whenever cirsumstances permit.

So Mike, when did you get your psychology degree, anyway?

Perhaps a little balance would be to find someone qualified to address the issue, rather than just showing off your skills?

I have a garden. I hate tomatoes. These days I do the majority of my socialization online.

I majored in outdoor rehabilitative experiences (hoods in the woods programs was mostly what I actually worked in) I have spent years of my adult life without a computer/internet access. I have spent weeks alone in the woods. I have spent months in the wilderness with people.

Your argument is worthless. You have never climbed Everest so you have never lived. You have never walked in the woods with just a knife and survived for weeks, so you have never survived. You have never fasted so you don’t know hunger.

Its all subjective bullshit. It a bullshit holier than thou attitude to think the way to live life is the true way of living and other people are wrong because of their ignorance to your great and important life.

If people are fulfilled and content living their life without harming others around them then their life is valid and just as substantive as yours.

Of course you get out of having to think about this and explain your reasoning by being vague and saying “you don’t get it” congratulations. People don’t get the shit you make up to make you feel more important than them.

either or
no other option
I don’t get that

my life (irl)is full of people and I spend lot’s of time online. I also grow my own strawberries in a windowbox in my apartment. ( no room for a tomato plant )

Mind blown yet ?

ps.
If I had the money , didn’t have the family responsibility , I would travel the world and see all the internet cafe’s , maybe sample some of that high speed South Korean broadband.
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t also go to Amsterdam and sample the well known delights there.

Admit it… your one sided mind is now blown

The teen and twenty somethings that are associated with my household, and there are many, all have their smart phones out and spend much of the time with them.
Though they do seem to interact when it is convenient or necessary.

That’s a fairly short-sighted and elitist view you have there. “Maybe the old-fashioned garden tomato will be salvaged. But that’s isn’t how things look right now.” Spoken like a pot who regularly calls the kettle black. Society as a whole is changing, and thats not a bad thing. And to think that many good things of the past are going to go the way of the wooly mammoth because of that is pretentious.

I’m as much a ‘netizen’ as any one else you condecend towards, but get what? I’m not a basement dwelling cityslicker. I live in a rural community in the mid-west. Every day I get online is also a day I go outside, look at the trees, enjoy my family’s guarden, help take care of our animals (not a farm, btw; we just have lots and lots of animals), etc. I spend time with my friends both online and irl.

Some people don’t do that, and thats fine. There’s nothing wrong with living a different way and enjoying different things.

Being different does not make anyone less of a human being than anyone else.

ok… I will prove the content wrong.

Communication on the web is different , NOT worse or non existent

You are a moron.
You pretend to read books.
You make no sense.
You assume a greater power of thought.
finally….
You probably smell of cat urine.
Now go say that to someone IRL. ( I wouldn’t )

There is something genuinely enlightening and unique , with “multiple way” anonymous conversations and other online communication FORMS.

Something that can not be found reading a “”one way”” book or even in a “multiple way” board room discussion.

Different is just different.

When asked about my opinion on the matter I list books by smart people who have opinions on the matter. I do not want to form or express my own thoughts or opinions just condescend you and list books. This way I can maintain my superiority over you with out actually having to explain or express a single lucid thought.

Can you actual put any of these wonderful ideas into your own words? Do you actual understand these old and how to apply there themes and ideas into a modern context? I doubt it it. But you know they exist so you are better than everyone, so much better that you don’t even have express a single thought or idea because explaining yourself to these people is beneath you.

He doesn’t understand the books or their points. He has just read them. If you right a book then he will someday tell other people that they are idiots for not reading you but he still won’t be able to actual state your ideas and why they are relevant and important. Don’t confuse him by applying a modern context to a 4 decade old book.

I don’t just know those books ‘exist’. I’ve read (with one exception *) them.–

* which I’m reading.

“So what?”, one may ask. So this: I bring something to this discussion which is informed by the knowledge (pro and con) drawn from those authors–the insights of many of whom are not only brilliant but absolutely central to the issues being argued about here. Now, I don’t think bringing that background reading and the awareness it offers to the discussion is something to apologize for—but some of the critics’ comments here seem to imply that it is.

And, yes, I can speak for myself. I began above by doing that.

Your kidding about the tomato right? I have so many different varieties of heirloom tomatoes that I can’t plant them all in any given year.

Besides, not everybody lives somewhere that they can easily grow tomatoes even if they wanted to. Back in Kansas the only thing you have to do to get great tomatoes is to make sure you water them as much as possible. In the northwest you barely get a long enough summer to get a ripe tomato. In the northwest, if you water it too much, or don’t add calcium, iron, and other important stuff to your soil, you will get the most bland non-yummy tomatoes imaginable.

Besides, for those who aren’t willing to spend hours every week tending a garden in the summer, you can get good quality tomatoes from farmer’s markets or CSA’s.

Forget the tomato. How many people living today have ever tasted real, fresh, home-garden grown okra?! I haven’t had any since I left Kansas 15+ years ago. 🙁

Here you go. You want details –or a discussion here that includes them?

Then you need, at a minimum to bring something of interest to the discussion–which I do from my reading of Debord.

You could join that discussion but not if you’re determined to remain ignorant of the points he made.

His text is here–and the translation isn’t really awful, either!– for those who have enough interest and ambition to actually inform themselves on this:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

“Then you need, at a minimum to bring something of interest to the discussion–which I do from my reading of Debord.” Stating you read a book is not bringing something interesting to the conversation. If you actually expressed the ideas of the book in your own words that would be contributing to a conversation.

See below.

that address to the text of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, again, is

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

PS, on reading Guy Debord via an on-line text—

Having just turned to the on-line text and started to read it, what strikes me immediately is how hard it is to focus on, concentrate on, the ideas behind those words. I read–and am continuing to read–the original french text from a bound paperback book edition and the difference strikes me.

It’s simply a difficult challenge to keep my attention focused—and the Aqua blue background doesn’t help.

Because of the format–mainly short theses, numbered and presented in a kind of list-like form–one is tempted to read the text quickly, and the temptation is much stronger when one is reading a screen. With the paper book in hand, you have an immediate and physical awareness of the general length and substance of the book. Looking at the text on-line, you don’t have any sense of its length and thus, you can’t take from your sense of the length of the text any appreciation of the fact that it demands more than merely a superficial glance. –Eventhough by 20th century standards, this isn’t at all a “long book”. However, that standard has been chopped down so much that, indeed, many people who read little of anything would look at the book –210 pages in the pocket-size paperback french edition–and say that it is a “long book”.

The point is, the online version is hard to focus on and to read with attention. We’re simply not used to reading things on a computer screen that way. With a book, you feel its heft, you know immediately the time its reading will ask of you. These are things that contemporary “readers” look upon with an aversion because it’s so foreign to their digital habits of length, time, effort, concentration and focus. Books demand these, the internet, the pixelated screen, places everything on the same basic level—light, quick, unreflective. Such an approach–the very core stuff of the society of spectacle–is deadly to the careful reading that Debord’s book, not to mention thousands of others more demanding, require if they’re to be taken seriously. But in the society of spectacle, taking things seriously is an odd out-of-sync way to think, behave, interact.

Food for thought (if you care to feed that), from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

excerpt:

(24)

The spectacle is the ruling order?s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true character as relations between people and between classes: a second Nature, with its own inescapable laws, seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content.If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the ?mass media? that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle?s internal dynamics. If the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this ?communication? is essentially unilateral. The concentration of these media thus amounts to concentrating in the hands of the administrators of the existing system the means that enable them to carry on this particular form of administration. The social separation reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern state ? the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.

(25)

Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. In this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But this earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted. The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines, and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunited.

I remember first hearing about Sherry Turkle on an obscure humor blog (before they were called such things) called suck.com. It was a tongue-in-cheek article called “Global Village Idiots” about her book on the wonders of the internet.

It called into question, quite poignantly, her high minded points about the potential of the internet… mainly because the internet is made up of ordinary people. Having read that at least a decade (maybe two) ago, I find it humorous to see her point-of-view come full circle.

That said, she has a point, but it’s more of a “too much of a good thing.” It’s amazing the learning and communication power at our fingertips, but if we sacrifice our ability to cope with the real world of real people & real things, are we any better off with that power and knowledge?

God you are an insatiable suck-up Marcus. Does every implied criticism of your master need a double-barreled response from you? Fact is Turkle implies what we all know: most of you are socially awkward losers living in your mother’s basements who have eschewed personal interaction in favor digital communication due to decades of social rejection. Obviously, Masnick is particularly stung by this.

Nerdocide? Nerdocaust? Hell I could care less that you live in Mom’s basement, have the pallor of skim milk and delude yourself about what a socialite you are because you have 5000 Facebook friends.

TAke your own advise and understand the issue before you try to troll as not to be so obvious.

The fact is for me that Guy Debor looks like a crackpot.

He is all wrong starting from the assumption that trying to live by appearances is not a real experience, it is just as real as any experience you will ever have, you will fall into all the pitfalls of “real life” in there too, the basics don’t change, he was wrong then and it is wrong today.

One great example is the movie Idiocracy (2006).

The movie is full of assumptions about the future and how the dumb spread faster than the smart people, but if people were smart wouldn’t they realize it is was more important to procreate than to care about economic conditions? wouldn’t they have realized that with actual knowledge you have a better safety net that allows you to produce the things you need on your own and that economy is just a dreampipe?

Of course not, it is entertainment, it is as dumb and retarded as the object of the criticism and so is Debor, he fails spectacularly to understand the basics and try to show something that is not there, reality is whatever you make off of it, at some point people are unable to live by appearances or spectacles and they fall into real situations, what he seems to be objecting to really is because he is unable to clearly see what others are doing and can’t experience what others experience he somehow lost something, he is poorer because of it, but it is not others, is only himself and his inability to see past the “spectacle” that hampers his interactions.

You’re great at being an ass online (which isn’t complementary since anyone with a keyboard can do it), but you are terrible at debate. This is a discussion thread. We discuss. In the process of discussion we present our views and back up our beliefs. You, however, have done none of this. Pointing to a list of books and saying ‘think critically’ does nothing to bolster your argument. Perhaps we are thinking critically and we come to different conclusions than you do? What then?

Never even heard of him, thanks, but I do offer something I feel is much more important than quotations and ‘I agree with this author’ posts: My own critical thought. We can base our opinions on our own experiences. We do not need others to lead us by the nose to whatever they feel is important. Remember this, it is an important point, and one they usually make a big deal of in university.

Now, to my thoughts: I tend to agree with her based on my own experiences with these things. Why? Because I feel that people need to be able to disconnect, as well, but if we are constantly bombarded with other people’s babble, then we never get used to the quiet of truly being alone. The mind just cannot cope as well with solitude if it does not experience it from time to time.

That’s the thing about real critical thinking. You don’t need citations to back it up. Otherwise it’s not thinking.

The video explains it better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Xr3AsBEK4 For example, in one part of it she has a picture of her daughter hanging out with her friends who are pretty much ignoring each other while they use their cell phones.

Anyway, she’s not saying, “OMG, no one should ever use the internet!!11” just noting that the balance is a bit skewed too far towards machine-based interactions, to the point it takes away from human-based interactions. It’s a reasonable observation.

There’s a definite difference between interacting with someone face to face and interacting with a TV screen (excuse me, monitor) as a proxy for direct interaction.

Please realize that there are legitimate things to criticize about the internet, and that not everyone who says anything negative about it is some meanie trying to take away our toys. I mean, just take a look at this anti-WoW PSA 😉 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc57rsKERNM

There seem to be an awful lot of assumptions in her article. She assumes that people who are comfortable being alone will automatically engage in self reflection (which is a rather stupid assumption), that conversation is somehow more valuable when its in person (experience has shown me that’s not always the case), and that there’s some sort of hard line between “connection” and “conversation” (and anyone who’s been in a relationship should know that’s just beyond ridiculous) to name a few. Oh, and I love the part about how “conversation” slows things down, teaches us patience… Really? That’s where you learned patience from? Quite honestly, if the “conversation” requires that much patience, that means its boring, unimaginative, and you’d rather be somewhere else. All the conversations I’ve had with friends covering the entire spectrum of topics from politics, humor, relationships, psychology, fantasy, biology, evolution, religion, etc. did the exact opposite of teach me patience. I found their points of view interesting, insightful, sometimes stupid, humorous, and I couldn’t wait to talk to them again. If anything, it taught me impatience… enter: technology and now I can hear their points of view whenever I want even though most of them, quite literally, live thousands of miles away.

This is just my opinion, but anyone who automatically starts thinking about themselves when they’re alone probably has some sort of narcissistic disorder. You can call it “self reflection” all you want but doesn’t sound normal to me. As for the whole “face to face” thing, that’s great if your friends are all supermodels (most of mine are kind of ugly and you know…dudes) but it seems to me that learning to read between the lines is equally as valuable as reading body language. Learning to discern why someone used a certain choice of words and that what they don’t say is equally important as what they do is a critical thinking skill that seems quite valuable in any shape or form. And as anyone who’s ever had a relationship should know, words are not always necessary to communicate. I don’t think the way Turkle defines “conversation” is as important as she thinks it is. You can have an entire conversation without saying a word. Take my friend’s ex-gf for example. She could’ve told me she didn’t like me but instead she came up to me and slapped me. Not a playful slap, a really hard one, right across the face. I think that speaks volumes.

Social networks become more and more popular with the development of the Internet, and, so, many are involved there. Human-to-human communications become less important. But when you just communicate online, you can`t see eyes or gestures of your interlocutor, and in such way the dialogue become much less sincere.

You Sir are a Misanthropist

Oh and the female friends that are either exes I was still friends with or just always been friends with? Once they get a steady man, they disappear from physical interaction too.

You guys have succeeded in making this sunday morning depressing. Happy new year, heh.

>Paranoid
>2014
>Still thinking “conspiracy theory” is an effective >pejorative term not invented by the CIA to discredit people >who didn’t buy the FBI’s magic bullet at the Warren >commission

Even people I know who were super enthusiastic about facebook barely post anything at all anymore, they either installed Pidgin or Facebook Chat, although I try to have them use Pidgin and install pidgin-otr so we can chat in encrypted mode. The kinda stuff that only works if everybody does it.

There’s platforms to develop your own social network site like Tent which could be much better and less intrusive than Facebook, haven’t seen anybody make any use of it though.