Well, my friends, the future is becoming more and more interesting by the day. Today, I watched Sherry Turkle’s uber popular Ted Talk Alone Together, and sheesh, her research produced some startling results about our shared need to cultivate alone time with our phones. Now, you can look at this as another piece blasting social media or you can read on and see where I am headed.
Sherry’s talk is profound but familiar because deep down inside we all know that we should not form such close attachments to a device that needs a charge every night and is the size of a pop tart. We should never have become used to texting over calling, face timing over in-person conversations, and stalking our friends on social media to see what they are up to over scheduling coffee or dinner. We have habits that need addressing.
We don’t have to throw it all away we just need to reconsider what we believe is worth our time and what is not.
Or, we should get ready for the coming of social robots, like Sophia? Turkle goes on to say that, “social robots will be companions to the elderly, children, and lonely humans.” My husband will champion this idea as a big step in human evolution, Turkle mentions the obvious to this consideration: “a robot cannot conceive the arch of human life or will ever have contemplated death.”
A reevaluation of our priorities is desperately needed to rediscover each other and ourselves.
My favorite part of Sherry’s talk was a tweet-worthy phrase, “We use conversations with others to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.”
I took this to mean that we understand ourselves better in relation to each other, not distant from one another.
In the new “edit world” where we all can be whoever we want to be; who will you decide to be? Will you be someone that leans in and engages the people around them or the type of person who develops a worldview behind the screen of a phone or computer?
Your choice.
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