ch. 10

In chapter 10 of Alone All Together, Turkle shares the views of several high school age students about how they communicate with friends. The students have become so accustomed to text messaging and other  forms of online communication that they not only loathe talking on the phone, but have created different rules and etiquette solely for online use.

For these students, and no doubt other adolescences and adults, the allure of  texting seems to stem from the fact that texting allows a person time to think about the message he or she is about to send, with time to edit and revise before sending. After all, if you answer the phone when a friend is calling and that conversation goes on longer than expected, nobody likes making up an awkward excuse to get off the phone. For the students, avoiding an awkward "good bye" is good enough reason to be completely tethered to your phone at all times.

As people become more and more tethered to digital forms of communication and new media, aren't also the abilities of those people to multi-task increasing? And is this a bad thing? Employers love an employee who can multi-task, after all. But at what point does multi-tasking and staying connected and always "on" become a problem, or even an addiction? Below is a video of Turkle taking questions from students, and she touches on the topics of addiction to digital forms of communication as well as where she sees the multi-tasker will be a few years from now.

So are you addicted to staying connected? Should the term addiction be applied to the droves of people who flock to games like Second Life, who use identity play to satisfy a thirst for adventure and newness that they're not able to achieve in real life? Do you agree with Turkle's views on addiction? Will students like Audry from chapter 10 in Alone All Together have to take classes in the future to learn how to unitask, as Turkle describes in the video above?