Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?
These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.
Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.
We’re smitten with technology. And we’re afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it’s time to talk.
I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.
What I’m seeing is a generation that says consistently, ‘I would rather text than make a telephone call.’ Why? It’s less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don’t have to get all involved; it’s more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face.
There are moments of opportunity for families; moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school – a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent!
The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesnt teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
Hold on to your passion – you’ll need it!
If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.
Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy – about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude – the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.
We used to think, ‘I have a feeling; I want to make a call.’ Now our impulse is, ‘I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.’
As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.
It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.
The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.
We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.
I love sharing photographs and websites, I’m for all of these things. I’m for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.
Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much.