"Let the rich be alone together, the rest of us will find something to talk about."

Beautiful. I was agreeing with every word you were saying, and then you fire off this shotgun shell. Well bloody put, David.

This is a great post! It really resonated with me for a few reasons.

1) I have noticed on facebook how a lot of networks/friendship groups are connected to 'RL' relationships. I noticed this from the 'outside' when I set up a FB profile relating to my online presence - my blog. And I realised I had some 'critics' or 'adversaries' on FB they did things like deleted my comments on their walls, or encouraged their FB 'friends' to block me. Due to their RL connections/allegiances. I have yet to set up a FB profile of my RL identity. Or indeed to use that in relation to my online identity.

2) related to this i was 'outed' recently online. so people who know me and my blog, and my internet handle (Quiet Riot Girl) gained information and revealed my RL name and identity. I had not backed this up by being my 'real ' self online, in many arenas, so I felt very exposed and vulnerable.

I think what i am trying to say is that our 'real' selves are very much intwined with whatever we do/say/are online. I challenge anyone who has any kind of online presence to try and separate those complex relationships.

Quiet Riot Girl/Elly

David, you make some great points throughout. I'm not surprised to see some of the discussion points from last Wednesday's seminar making its way into your post. We do seem to have quite a number of common interests, in spite of my more pessimistic outlook.

Moving on to your post, I'm not entirely convinced that the separation between "digital dualists" and the position that you consider yourself as championing really exists or, at least, is more of a difference in values rather than theory. I have not read the more recent arguments made by Turkle, Carr and a number of other modern critics of digital communication technology as advocating two separate selves nor presenting a view that lets less advanced technologies off the hook. You quote Turkle herself as stating that the kinds of social interactions, which she finds problematic, are "learned" through the use of devices. Carr's view is similarly developmental. One of the notable quotes in The Shallows is from Neitzsche describing how he finds the affordances of the new fangled communication technology of his era - the typewriter - as subtly nudging him into approaching the practice of writing in a very different way. The fact that they consider the effects as a developmental result of learning is something that complicates the notion of them as merely digital dualists since one's learned behavior can rarely be circumscribed to only one facet of one's life.

The reason they advocate taking a break from technology is to do something very similar to what you advocate. It is to get to the root cause, something that comes neither singularly from the person or the technology but emerges from the confluence of the two. Turkle's issue, in Alone Together, is not technology per se but rather its seductive pull when its affordances meet up too well with our human vulnerabilities. I doubt she would deny that these vulnerabilities existed before cell phones and Facebook but that their characteristics pose special challenges when compared with a newspaper or an Aquafina bottle (perhaps only in degree but I think also in kind). Just like I never realized what effects highly processed and unhealthy had on the way my body functioned until I made efforts to avoid them when possible, I think the point of the practices of refusal proposed by authors like Turkle is to help cultivate a similar awareness of how technologies do augment our reality, enabling the right amount of reflective distance upon which to make our own value judgements. I think this message probably gets lost on many readers because many of these authors own value position on that augmentation is perhaps too distracting and bleeds into their analysis.

I do agree with the sentiments of your post. The political gains that some have made because of network technologies is non-negligible. As well, the effects of technological mediations on human practice, in the short term at least, are unlikely to be mitigated by trying to rid devices from our lives but trying to work out a productive relationship with them (channeling Verbeek here). Nevertheless, I think dismissing Turkle's concerns as only a problem for the rich risks cultivating an active ignorance about an important facet of technology because it is inconvenient to consider it in conjunction with your other political aims. I think there is intellectual room for imagining technologies that do help disadvantaged groups coordinate AND are less enabling of the kinds of social pathologies that Turkle is talking about. Our approach to technology need not be zero-sum either.

What an engaging post. It's certainly making me reevaluate Turkle's argument. Still, I find what Taylor Dotson says above pretty compelling. And to segue from his last paragraph I'd hope that there's a way to echo Turkle’s laments while at the same time acknowledging that digital technology has wrought many good things as well. Many of the criticisms that Turkle has made are anticipated by technology critics in the past. But just because they aren't new, doesn't mean they're moot. Nor can we dismiss them simply as the nostalgic sentiments of an Arnoldian elite or of cyberasocials. The aggregate effect of our inventions may have been progressive up until now. But unless one ascribes to a simple form of technological determinism it's a bit foolhardy to think that the human-machine relationship will necessarily proceed on a similar path going forward. Each generation needs to fret through this relationship anew: if we don't we *will* fall prey to what technology wants. That's why there's still room for Turkle and the rest of us fretters in this conversation. We fret not because we're blind to technology's boons, we fret because it's an indispensable part of working out a virtuous relationship between ourselves and our machines.

"....The separation of physical and virtual selves and the privileging of one over the other is not only theoretically contradictory, but also empirically unsubstantiated. "

The virtual self doesn't exist without a physical self. Or more to the point, the body IS by definition a privileged entity in the mashup of a physical and virtual self. Bodies are inescapable locations of oppression and privilege. Men's bodies rape women's bodies. Fat people bodies are socially inferior to skinny people bodies. Young bodies are revered; black bodies are incarcerated. These are empirically substantiated phenomena, as is the role of embodiment in the development of one's psychology and sense of self.

Turkle is one of the few voices to have actually conducted real research, and over time a period of time. True her lens is limited and limiting like any researcher's.

I can't help but feel that Turkle, and some of the commenters here, are missing an important point of D A Banks' argument.

It is a point I have read in the work of Nathan Jurgenson et al too. That is, that in the 21st century wired up world, our 'bodies' and our 'selves' have been and continue to be transformed by technology, and our interaction with it.

This theory of 'embodiment' is left over from the pre-internet age. Judith Butler wasn't on twitter when she wrote Gender Trouble. Everything is changing and how we define ourselves and even exist physically in the world is transforming. I thought that is what 'cyborgology' meant.

When you say : "Sherry Turkle published an op-ed in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times’ Sunday Review that decries our collective move from “conversation” to “connection.” ", I have a little bit of an argument with that. In her book, at least, she highlights that the problem is not CONNECTION per-se, but HYPER-connection. And on this score, I have seen, even as a "hyper-connected" person myself, that many. many people have indeed allowed the convenient affordances of online communication affect their way of relating to people. And this is not always a good thing. Even Howard Rheingold stresses in his introduction to his book Net Smart, that it is very easy to let this digital age adversely affect our relationships (and I realize that I venture close to "dualism", and almost said "affect our day to day lives" (as if digital is not already a key component of day to day, or the deeper implication being: "Normal life")

I simply can't help but think that the "ferocity" of her cautionary warnings are taken too singularly, apart from her insights of earlier works. Because of having read "Life on the Screen" and many articles about "The Second Self", and the insight I gained from those, coupled with a decade of hyper-connectivity in society since the rapid adoption of smart phones, and the unmistakable shift in social habits because of it, I feel resonant with her feeling that this has been such a good thing. I continue to enjoy what I consider good, and be hopeful for increased affordances, but neither can I join the choruses of people attacking what seems to them to be "curmudgeony" resistance. I am anything but, yet I cannot help but notice when people use technology and texting/email as a filter for people to wish they don't wish to speak. Not that this never becomes neccessary, but it has become a much too easy way of eliminating pesky conversations. Maybe the people dong these critiques are less often at the recipient end of "digital put off" as I perceive myself to be, but it does tend to make one shake their head at how much easier it is to be a dick (in a "nice way") -- and that last comment is not directed at this article or post, but at the ones who use digital communications as a way of filtering out people to the extent that they basically just ignore/exclude people who they would not be so quick to be so dismissive face to face.

"Similarly, we are capable of presenting ourselves in a very particular way that hides our faults and exaggerates our better qualities."

Frankly, I don't see how you can have much of an argument with this. Best example: Facebook.

"A symmetrical approach, one that looks for antisocial tendencies in digital as well as nondigital technologies,"

Yes, but Turkle does not locate the anti-social in the technologies, but in our appropriations of them (at least in these works which are now under fire)

"I will gladly live in a world where Cape Cod tourists are distracted by Facebook updates if it means disadvantaged groups have tools to reach out and organize across geographic boundaries. Let the rich be alone together, the rest of us will find something to talk about."

Ahh... there we have it. The old "elitist" card again. Well, you know what? I've never made over 60k a year , and I still share her concerns. So that is a useless assessment that devalues the rest of your argument (in which I have much more interest and hold in higher regard)

I read this article on my phone.