Sherry Turkle TED.doc

In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And as a psychologist, what excited me most, was the ides, that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in real world. Now fast-toward to 2012, I’ still excited by technology, but I believe, that we are letting it take us places that we don’t want to go. And what I found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful, that they not only changed what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things that we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would found odd, or disturbing, but they quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook, during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. Parents text and do breakfast at breakfast or at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents full attention. But then the same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text on funerals, we remove our selves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones. It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We are getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. You can end up hiding