Ted Talks: Sherry Turkle

https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-1038042

I watched this Ted talk by Sherry Turkle about humans and technology. A lot of the things she was saying were completely true.

The object I chose is the telephone and more specifically the first telephone. I wanted to explore how it was made and its main purpose and how over the years its changed. I believe its original purpose was to communicate at a distance with other people and over the years we have become familiar with this distance and we need this distance (Goldilocks effect). Sherry said that we are "alone together". If you look at a group of people at the bus stop, in a pub, in the canteen you are guaranteed to see people on the phones, possibly with headphones in. Completely isolating themselves from everyone else. I have experienced on the bus, an older person striking up a conversation with me and I really enjoyed it. It never happens with anyone my own age. We are so socially awkward because we are used to communicating through a screen. I don't see most of my friends because I'm busy with college and they have work. Our only form of communicating is on social media. When you are talking on social media you can take as much time as you want replying to them, edit what you are saying. You are literally putting a filter over everything. Even writing this blog post, I'm editing words around.
Sherry stated that "conversations happens  in real time and you can't control what you are going to say."
Now if you grow up spending most of your time communicating on a digital device where you can edit everything you say and post, you won't have the complete confidence to communicate face to face with someone. I know that I get a bit flustered when I'm talking and at the end of the conversation, in my head I'm thinking of how I could have phrased that better.

Another thing Sherry said is that "no-one is listening to me".
I agree with her. I find sometimes when I'm talking to certain people they are bored with what I'm saying. I go on a passionate spiel about a topic or story and the response I get is a bored yeah. Sherry said that we" control where we put our attention". I can read peoples facial expressions, body language and I am well aware when they aren't interested in what I am saying or if they are annoyed with what I am saying. I am in my final year where I am pretty much glued to my laptop working. I don't have time for a social life. Most of the time I find that I am just talking about assignments or modules. Recently I came to the conclusion that people are finding this annoying. So I made the decisions to not talk about college with anyone. But it's all I am doing at the moment so what else can I talk to people about? This goes back to Sherry's point about "no-one listening to me". I feel as though I can't talk about certain topics to people and they are topics I need to talk about. So therefore I post my tweets online where there's "automatic listening".

"We expect more from technology and less from other".