The promise of technology is connectedness. But could modern gadgetry be making us more lonely than ever?
How many times a day do you check your email? When you wake up? Before bed? A dozen times in between? If you’re like many of us, the red blinking light of a BlackBerry is the first thing you see each morning—you’ve got mail!—and the last glimpse of color to fade out before bedtime. It’s constant and nagging—yet most of us say we can’t live without it. Add Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of our social-media obsessions to the mix, and the technology that was supposed to simplify our lives has become the ultimate time-suck: the average teen spends more than seven hours a day using technological devices, plus an additional hour just text-messaging friends.
The advantage to all that gadgetry, of course, is connectedness: email lets us respond on the go, and we are in touch with more people during more hours of the day than at any other time in history. But is it possible we’re more lonely than ever, too? That’s what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book, Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology.
