#ENGL295 StopGooglingLetsTalk SherryTurkle

[harshalipadmanabh-blog]

Face-to-Face conversations, remember those?

As time goes by, the pace of life increases. We have lesser time to relax and soak in the moment. We often find ourselves wound up in work, for students it is academics, for adults it is balancing work and personal life, for kids it may be school and extracurricular activities. Now as the lack of time becomes a growing concern, individuals strive to find ways for doing things in a way where they can save time. Texting is easy, quick and efficient as compared to meeting up with someone to discuss something. This brings up the question of the century, “are we living online?” 

Sherry Turkle’s opinion piece explores this question. She asks, “what happened to face to face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk?” She tries to draw a parallel between solitude and empathetic conversations. It is true that conversing ‘online’ takes away the human component from conversations since there is a clear lack of emotions, expressions, mood, etc. While we try to fill this gap with the use of emoticons, it has not helped much. The younger generation these days often wonders “why did they send me the straight face emoji, something seems off” instead off “Hey, you don’t seem alright, do you want to talk about something?” 

In the pursuit of staying on track in our own lives, we get caught up and lose the sense of empathy. Sherry claims that by spending time by yourself and gaining solitude we recognize emotions of our own and that translates into empathetic conversations. I agree with her, I also believe that cellphones are often the barrier in this solitude to conversation transition. We get distracted, we do not engage, and conversations are ‘superficial.’ While we can pick up on textual clues through chat, we fail to engage in the same way face-to-face. 

The phone has become a ‘time saving escape’ which is a rather global reason for why we converse the way we do. This may not be the solution, we need to be more aware about the actual world around us, the real people and the physical environment. It’s almost like we have lost our ability of ‘activating the human senses’ to understand the world, the world is now only what we see on our screens. We are missing out; we are not actually ‘living’ and so we shall act soon before our ‘online’ identities start to fade, and we are left alone ‘offline.’