The title of Sherry Turkles book, Alone Together, is chilling.
People are totally into email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you're alone, you get into this situation where you're continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation.
You're alone but looking for approval as though you were together--the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody's validation. Texting is the same thing. (My husband became text obsessed recently and it was part of his disconnection with us his family. He called it a distraction I think it became an addiction.)
Sherry makes a statement in her book, that if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it's your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook...we're losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.
Twitter
Sherry thinks it's an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's, "I share therefore I am." Sharing as you're thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you're thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you're thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don't have an anti-Twitter position. It's just not everything.
So find time to be disconnected, talk to people and keep things real, it is so important we are humans not machines.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1716844/alone-together-an-mit-professors-new-book-urges-us-to-unplug
