39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “No Need to Call”
Elaine, 17, prefers texting to calling because it gives her time to construct her thoughts without pressure and often while she is alone. Texting is also more efficient, which is why adults and professionals use it. It’s created a culture where asking for a call can feel like an imposition.
Audrey is 16 and shy and prefers texting to talking. Her parents are divorced, and her brothers are often busy. One reason she doesn’t like calling is she doesn’t like to end the calls. It’s a skill. Turkle’s analysis is that “ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences separation as rejection” (191). Audrey spends all day taking pictures to post on Facebook and implies that her profile is a more real representation of how she sees herself than her real-life self. She is also on Italian MySpace, which a group of exchange students introduced her to. She chats with men who message her sometimes. It feels like a fantasy, a place she can play outside the confines of the rigorous college-prep school path she’s on.
Audrey does reveal that when she had to move and say goodbye to a friend, the friend messaged Audrey, and Audrey wishes that had been done over the phone or in person.
While Turkle interviews many teenagers who prefer texting to calling, she also talks to a middle-aged woman who wishes to convert her needy, frequently telephoning husband to texting. Turkle finds claims that “a stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection” (202-03).
She talks with people—old and young—who express frustration with those who try to multitask when talking to them. She speaks to a lawyer, Tara, who is upset that a friend waited so long to tell her about a family loss, even though they’d been emailing for months. A teenager, Meredith, has the opposite reaction: she is glad she doesn’t have to talk to people when she finds out over IM that her friend died. Turkle says they are trading composure for equanimity.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Reduction and Betrayal”
Sherry creates a Second Life character named Rachel. She believes that “when we perform a life through our avatars, we express our hopes, strengths, and vulnerabilities. They are a kind of natural Rorschach” (212). She acknowledges that such “play” can have therapeutic or educational effects on one’s real life.
Joel, a successful computer programmer, uses Second Life to “explore his potential as an artist and leader” (213). His avatar is an elephant named Rashi who organizes and builds large art projects and buildings in the game and is respected for it. Psychologists distinguish “acting out” and “working through” behavior in online life. “Acting out” means virtually repeating the same conflicts you have in real life. You don’t grow. But in “working through,” you use the online behavior as a tool to find real resolution. This is how Joel uses Rashi.
He meets Noelle, a depressed Frenchwoman, in the game and spends a lot of time talking to her about her suicidal thoughts. He admits that if he were to learn the person behind the avatar wasn’t French, it wouldn’t feel like as much of a betrayal as if he were to learn the person wasn’t really depressed.
Many speak of Second Life as more exciting than real life but also state there is less commitment involved.
Adam is dissatisfied with his real life and his menial jobs but loves his virtual life in Quake, a first-person shooter game that he plays for fifteen-hour stretches and occasionally at parties with coworkers or friends. In Civilization, a game where users are able to develop their own societies, “he enjoys the gratitude of his (AI) subject” (222). Turkle points out that Adam feels compassion toward the inanimate and that his success, his feeling that he is creating something new, is simply a simulated feeling, not the real thing.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
Turkle labels our constant impersonal connections, our turn to texting over calling, as a kind of contemporary “Faustian bargain,” which she sums up as the idea that if we are left alone when we make contact, then we can handle being together.
She finds many examples of young girls who “prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net” (205). Two commonalities Turkle discovers in the younger generation who grew up with this technology are an impulse to withdraw and the preference of a call over a text.
But it’s not all negative. Turkle also points to “serious play,” the kinds of acting out young people do online that they use to “practice” for real life. Joel is a case study of this. But Turkle judges Adam more harshly, saying that he experiences in his games “the exhilaration of creativity without its pressures, the excitement of exploration without its risks” (224). In that way, his online gaming is much like others’ interactions with robots, which provide devalued social rewards without the risks.
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