Do you check your iPhone first thing every morning and right before bed every night? Does your Blackberry eat dinner with you at the table? Do you sometimes email someone at work in an office adjacent to yours rather than walk a few feet to have a conversation?
Our relationship with technology is in a continuing, and often confusing, process of evolution. Technology can be positive or negative, depending on who and what is involved. Its varied implications provide opportunities to examine how we communicate and relate to one another in the present and how that may change in the future.
Among the most popular “pets” in recent years is the Zhu Zhu pet hamster. They are advertised as lovable and good companions. They require no clean up, and they don’t die. The Zhu Zhu, sometimes called the perfect pet, is a robot.
“Technology is seductive when what it offers us meets our human vulnerabilities,” says Sherry Turkle in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. When it comes to technology, she says, we are indeed very vulnerable.
A Massachusett Institute of Technology professor, Turkle explores the complex psychological implications of technology. To do so, she explores two areas of technology that influence most of us today. In the first part of her book, “The Robotic Moment — In Solitude, New Intimacies,” she presents the relationship between people and robots. While many of us may have only passing familiarity of the impact of robots, Turkle’s interviews with children and adolescents zeroes in on the growing relationship between robots and younger generations.
The author expresses her concern about children “getting comfortable with the idea that a robot’s companionship is even close to a replacement for a person.”
The importance of personal relationships is central to the second part of the book, “Networked — In Intimacy, New Solitudes.” Here, the author presents her concerns about the role of the Internet. Is the Internet a new and effective way for people to react, or is it the means for people to only react to one another superficially, avoiding deeper relationships? Turkle suggests that the latter is the case.
This is a thought-provoking, challenging look at technology. It is an insightful guide for us as “we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines.”
Does heavy use of technology actually have the ability to change how we function as humans?
That is the question explored by Larry Rosen in his latest book, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us.
The answer, he says, is a resounding “yes.”
Invasive technology is creating an epidemic of iDisorder, he says. He defines this as changes to the brain’s ability to process information as well as the ability to relate to the larger world. iDisorder is created by daily use of media and technology. Its symptoms include stress, sleeplessness and the compulsive desire to check in with technology on a continual basis.
Rosen is the past chair and professor of psychology at California State University and the author of five books on technology and its psychological implications. He is recognized as an international expert in the “Psychology of Technology.” Rosen and his colleagues examined more than 30,000 children, teens and adults in the United States and in 23 other countries to determine their reactions to technology.
His findings imply that the overuse of technology can be responsible for anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other mood and personality disorders. Our inability to pull away from email, phones and other technology borders on obsessive-compulsive disorder, he writes.
The author is not suggesting that we give up technology. We are “way past the point of no return,” he says. Instead, in each chapter he gives suggestions for effectively managing our interaction with technology geared to provide us with a sense of control.
The world will become increasingly more technological, Rosen says. We must ensure that we stay human.