Technology has changed the world as we know it

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In the article “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self”, Sherry Turkle talks about communication technologies. There is a special focus on the way our lives are constantly mediated by ubiquitous devices that surround us, and how these technologies have totally transformed us and the communities we all belong to.

By giving some familiar examples of the prevailing need to constantly be “on” something, the author introduces the concept of the “tethered self”, namely a new sense of the self, which she clearly states, cannot be distinguished by device, due to a persistent craving for them and “the people and things [it] reaches through them”.

The author goes on by saying that experiencing digital relationships is more important that paying attention to people who are physically there.

Without technological devices we would feel out of the loop since – I quote Turkle – they “become a badge of our networks, a sign that we have them, that we are [somehow] wanted”. Not only are we tethered to technology for communication, the author suggests, but we are even more dependent on it for the gratification it offers us.

She then contends the powerful appeal of these devices for constructing new subjectivities for adults and especially for adolescents, who are here the main focus of Turkle’s case-study.  By providing a number of “teen tethered” informants’ samples, the author points out how being always electronically connected could constitute as a burden or release, especially at an age when identity assumes such an important role in an adolescents life.

Turkle goes on referring to the issue of “continuous partial attention” and the fact that today’s dependency on technology has encouraged the body to develop new gestures to incorporate technology into our lives. People are strictly fastened to their technological devices to the point that ordinary conversation, she argues, is continuously endangered by the  “demands of tethering”.

Beings so accessible and mobile, technological devices invade every moment of our lives, resulting in a world which, according to Turkle, has become difficult to separate ourselves from “the machines that tether us to each other and to the information culture”.

At last she raises the question of whom, or better, what are we “tethered to” arousing the  idea that it’s human sociality that is actually affected by our new intimacy with technological devices.

References:

TURKLE, S. (2008), Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self, in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz, 121–38. Cambridge: MIT Press.