Are we becoming technology’s willing slaves instead of its guiding masters?

Are we becoming technology’s willing slaves instead of its guiding masters?

To  reduce costs,  our company encouraged us to request customers who bought our internet packs to install the applications themselves from a CD. This in spite of our ad stating that our technician would be sent on request. One day, a customer phoned me asking for a technician.  “Sir, it’s so easy,” I told him.  “Even a five-year old can install it, so let’s try…”

“Fine,” the customer snapped, “then send a five-year old.”

I am reproducing excerpts from the Amazon Review of the third of a trilogy from the MIT Technology and Society specialist Shery Turkle. Ironically it came as a pleasant surprise while browsing and talking to my son about his constant use of his cell phone. I chanced upon this publication that caught my attention and soon had me riveted to its message.

I am not an alarmist, nor do I spend much time worrying about anything. I enjoy every moment of each day and kind of respond spontaneously to most of the work and,or other chores that need taking care of as a work from home father and husband. The following is a somewhat similar view and observation I've had, not to mention a gnawing dis-ease with the way society is 'taking to' technology.

Sherry Turkle’s message to the human species—to restrain ourselves from becoming technology’s willing slaves instead of its guiding masters—loud and clear.

Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication.As technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.

Alone Together is the result of Turkle's nearly fifteen-year exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based on hundreds of interviews, it describes new unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy, and solitude.

Turkle argues that people are increasingly functioning without face-to-face contact. For all the talk of convenience and connection derived from texting, e-mailing, and social networking, Turkle reaffirms that what humans still instinctively need is each other, and she encounters dissatisfaction and alienation among users: teenagers whose identities are shaped not by self-exploration but by how they are perceived by the online collective, mothers who feel texting makes communicating with their children more frequent yet less substantive, Facebook users who feel shallow status updates devalue the true intimacies of friendships. Turkle 's prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other.

There is more  good stuff, I suggest those interested could get the book from Amazon - I am not promoting the book, just the thought, and intrinsic way in which we are slowly but steadily being 'over-run' by the very technology we help to create.

But this leads me to a Carl Rogers (1951- client centered therapy) observation:

(In the same way), our elaborate societies, complex cultures, incredible technologies, for all that they have helped us to survive and prosper, may at the same time serve to harm us, and possibly even destroy us

 http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/rogers.html

Sherry Turkle’s message to the human species—to restrain ourselves from becoming technology’s willing slaves instead of its guiding masters—loud and clear.

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