Review of Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, New York 2011, Italian transl. Insieme ma soli. Perché ci aspettiamo sempre più dalla tecnologia e sempre meno dagli altri, Codice Edizioni, Turin 2012.

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“Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies”

Sherry Turkle

“I look at my watch to get a sense of the time,

I look at my BlackBerry to get a sense of my life”

a network user

Our society depends ever more markedly on information and communication technologies, both for its functioning and for its development. A growing number of people spend their entire adult life tethered to tools such as social networks, email, and the World Wide Web, investing not only economic resources (buying phones, tablets, computers, phone credit, etc.) but also, and above all, a resource that matters to everyone: their own time.
Why does an ever larger number of people spend a considerable part of their day broadcasting news about themselves? Why are there “places” on the network that host family blogs where people announce a wedding, the course of an illness, or keepsake photos with the grandparents? Why do some people post live the preparation of what they will eat for lunch today, or photos of intimate moments spent with their families? Why do a husband and wife wish each other a happy wedding anniversary on their Facebook page? The questions on this subject could be endless. Everything is suddenly changing, including the way we meet one another or fall in love. So-called geosocial networking applications (Grindr, Tinder) allow people to make new acquaintances, more or less anonymously, and Luciano Floridi, citing some recent research, reports that in the United Kingdom tweets are the preferred way to begin a romantic bond; technology is also the preferred means of ending a relationship (36% by phone, 27% by text message, 13% through a social network). Even the construction of personal identity now passes through the writing and the stressful publishing of one’s online profile, the new calling card, which often triggers a kind of “presentation anxiety”. Why all this?
Sherry Turkle (Boston, 1948), by now nicknamed by many the “anthropologist of cyberspace”, is an American psychologist who has long studied the relationships between real life and digital life, in the sociological field as well. She has published a series of contributions of considerable international resonance concerning technologies and their impact on the everyday life of humankind. She is the author of successful books such as The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1995), in which she tried to describe the complex relationship between human beings and computers, between human beings and the tools of the virtual world made available by the digital revolution, with a keen eye for the paradoxes of the first-generation virtual environments (MUD, etc.).
It is now said that the “man in the street” is rapidly turning into the “man in the room”. It might seem a paradox: we are in the age of communication and we find ourselves talking about solitude? We have at our disposal tools for communicating that until not long ago it would have been impossible to imagine, and we are even at risk of ending up more alone? It is not at all easy to find one’s way among these questions, but the American psychologist knows the technological world and its paradoxes deeply, if only because she has studied the digital revolution in all its aspects, from the appearance of the first computers to our smartphones and tablets. As she herself stated in a TED talk whose link I include here (https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together), Turkle argues that mobile technologies are taking us exactly where we would not want to go and that, from a psychological point of view, they are changing not only what we do but also, and above all, what we “are”, profoundly conditioning our lives.

In Alone Together, in truth already somewhat dated when set against the rapid succession of technological changes and of novelties in the field of uninterrupted communication, Turkle confronts the complex enigma of the psychological effects that computing and the new virtual environments born with the new technologies have on the individual and on society. With her reflection on solitude and on the new solitudes in the age of social networks and social media, on individual psychological implications and on social behaviors, the American scholar tries to understand how technology also has a fair impact on illnesses and addictions: the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual of mental disorders, has for some time now contained several pathologies linked to the use of digital devices and applications, foremost among them Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), as a result of the effects that the new communication technologies have on people’s individual, social, and professional lives, and which shows itself through an intensive and obsessive use of the Net and its applications.
Regarding the themes dealt with in this volume, one clarification is called for: solitude and isolation (think of the phenomenon of the hikikomori[1] and its relation to Internet addiction) are two radically different ways of living, even if they are often confused. Being alone can mean not feeling lonely, but separating oneself temporarily from the world of people and things, from everyday occupations, in order to return into one’s own inner life and imagination, without losing the desire and the longing for a relationship with others, with loved ones, and with the tasks that life has entrusted to us; we are isolated, instead, when we shut ourselves within ourselves, because others reject us or, more often, in the wake of our own indifference or of a deliberate social exclusion.
The theme of solitude at the center of Turkle’s reflections is that of the solitude produced by our online life. According to Bauman, the success of social networks depends on the fact that the founders of the various platforms have intercepted and exploited the growing existential unease represented by the desire to avoid solitude. Sometimes sought and more often feared, solitude has always populated world literature, at every level, and it has always been a theme very dear to philosophers too. Computers, which forced their way into our lives, at first to make calculations easier, to be used in work and school settings, opened the way to an ever greater personalization of study and work, but it was the appearance of smartphones and tablets, their portability, and the development of dedicated applications that completely changed our day and our habits[2]. Everything revolves around the mobile device we always keep within reach: for example, bringing the phone to one’s ear, or even a glance at it once it has been taken out of a pocket or a bag, serves to take leave of the people we are talking with or to break off a discussion. We now find ourselves in the infosphere (Floridi, 2017), that global space dominated and managed by computer applications, as well as by the traditional mass media.
As is well known, solitude can be considered under various aspects (Mazzucchelli, 2014): it can be distinguished, as Eugenio Borgna has said, into inner/creative solitude and painful/isolating solitude; or it can be forced, as in the case of prison or illness; it can be sought, as in the case of one who launches into an exploration of one’s own inner life and self; or it can be induced, and it is precisely this kind of solitude that has, according to Turkle, a close relation with the world of social networks and social media. We have discovered that the world of connectivity fits perfectly with a life full of commitments and work, and now we want the Net to defend us from solitude. The crucial question, which the American scholar tries to answer, is the following: “are we increasingly alone and does technology bring out the problem of solitude, or is technology, in some way, also responsible for all this?”. It is not at all easy to answer, but let us start from the beginning.

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In the first part of the volume, titled “The robotic moment. In solitude, new intimacies”, Turkle analyzes the history of “companion” robotics, with a list of the various robotic devices that have accompanied us over the past few decades. According to Turkle, in a world where we prefer to communicate by text message rather than talk in person, social robots offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. The long lineup of mechanisms she reviews, and the reflections the American scholar draws from them, begins with ELIZA[3], the celebrated computer program that was the first to engage its users in simulated conversations.
The recipients of robotic devices have almost always been children, but recently they have been the elderly as well. Unlike traditional toys, if robots are neglected they give off certain signals, creating expectations.
On one side, the children of the 1990s were captivated by small pocket robots such as the Tamagotchi, a virtual creature contained in a kind of plastic egg, or the Furby, the first social robot to be influenced by the way one interacts with it. Tamagotchi and Furby are no longer regarded by children as mere toys, but as genuine “emotional machines”.
On the other side, the elderly find themselves accompanied by robots (increasingly with humanoid features) whose task is to assist them (for example by recalling the timing and frequency of medications), but which increasingly play the role of companion robots, with expressive faces and a voice, and which give the impression of caring for the person they interact with. Robotic animals are generally presented as better than any real animal, “adorable, responsive, requiring no cleaning, and destined never to die”: it is precisely in assistance and companionship that robotics projects are most in the spotlight.

The most worrying element of the robotic moment, Turkle says, lies in the fact that we are now willing to converse with something inanimate not because we are the object of a deception but because we need to fill empty spaces: children know that behind the robot there is not something or someone that feels emotions, they know that the robot is not mature from a biological point of view, but that it is from a relational one. On the other hand, robotics experts, when they defend their machines, ask bluntly: “Do you want your parents and grandparents to be cared for by robots, or would you rather they not be cared for at all?”. “Do you want elderly people who are lonely and bored, or would you rather they be entertained by companion robots?”. Robots still fail to “understand” human experience, they do not know what a feeling is, they know nothing of what we can feel: envy, jealousy, gratitude, nostalgia, etc., yet they are exceptional at “showing understanding”, and we are content to play our part, exactly as we behave when we are online: we curate the presentation of ourselves.
Our encounters with social robots provoke reactions that have nothing to do with the capabilities of these machines, but with our vulnerabilities: when we take care of an object, we perceive it as “intelligent” and we feel in relationship with it, but the attachment does not come from the fact that certain computational objects feel emotions or intelligence, because that is not the case; the attachment comes from what they evoke in us. Robots tend no longer to be regarded as machines, but as creatures, and curiosity gives way to the desire to take care of them, and even when they are alone, the people who deal with them feel connected and intimately in relationship with them. This is because a simple interaction has turned into what we now call “interactivity”, that is, the imitation of human interaction by a mechanical or electronic system whose aim is to communicate in a dialogical manner and which, as Longo put it, displays a kind of will to collaborate on the part of the speakers. Now, the mechanism of interaction with a device, or a toy, has always had its own fascination, and humankind has not escaped the attraction of the so-called “thinking machines”: it is enough to recall video games, the challenges most of them have thrown down to teenagers (but to adults as well) to test the human’s skill against a machine (a video game always cited as an example is the game of chess), or precisely to test how far a machine could be “intelligent” (a prime example being the Turing test). Interaction and communication with humans on the part of a social robot presuppose a certain autonomy, one that also allows it to make autonomous decisions, even though it should be noted that being social is a characteristic of human societies.
The distinction between “weak” artificial intelligence (or light, as Floridi calls it) and “strong” artificial intelligence is important here: the first holds that the main help of the computer, or of an automatic mechanism such as a robot, in the study of the mind is to give us a very powerful and precise tool in the formulation and testing of hypotheses. The second maintains that the brain is nothing but a digital calculator and the mind nothing but a computer program, with the consequence that the brain is considered one among an indefinite number of types of hardware capable of supporting the programs that constitute intelligence.
The defense that humankind has attempted against machines, especially when these, and the computer in particular, have given the impression of taking over from human capacities, has always been to consider a machine a stupid tool at the disposal of humankind, without which the machine would not even exist, and yet the picture Turkle takes gives us back a society almost entirely conditioned (and often controlled) by machines, by smartphones and tablets, and by technological progress.
It would seem, however, that strong artificial intelligence, always held to be unachievable, has given way to the weak kind, made of more easily attainable goals: it should be noted, though, that there are some aspects of the human mind that can be reproduced by a machine, such as the manipulation of symbols (Searle’s Chinese room).
And so Turkle tries to give robots back their place in the world around us: “What do we think about when we think about robots? About the meaning of being alive, about the nature of attachment, about what makes someone a person. And so, more generally, let us think again: what is a relationship? Let us reconsider intimacy and authenticity. What are we willing to give up when we turn to robots instead of human beings? Asking these questions does not mean belittling robots or denying that they are marvels of engineering; it only means keeping them in their place”.

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In the second part of the volume, titled “All connected. In intimacy, new solitudes”, attention shifts to social networking environments, a subject of crucial interest, one we now deal with all day, every day.
The scholar highlights the stories of newfound cyborgs[4], young people who are always online, free of desks and cables because they are equipped with wireless devices and digital displays fitted onto their eyeglass frames, convinced that through continuous connection they are enhancing their productivity and their memory, digital natives who, before starting to talk with someone, look that person up online to check mutual friends or their previous encounters, so as to feel more prepared, more sociable and, all in all as they say, “better people”, because the multiplicity of worlds available to them makes them different, more sure of themselves: “while they are with us, they are also in many other places”. Today we are all cyborgs, because all the devices of the past have been assembled into a single one, the smartphone which, let us remember, performs tasks that a few years ago we thought unachievable (just think of that celebrated app, available to everyone, that “listens” to a song, recognizes it, and tells us title and author), or rather we are inforgs, as Floridi would say.
Today the dominant symptoms of our hyperconnected society are, particularly for teenagers and young adults, the fear of isolation and abandonment, dependence on virtual relationships (think of FoMO[5]), while it is clear that our online profiles exist as a function of the number of contacts and of their interchangeability. Without stopping to think that in this way we are continually monitored or, as the jargon has it, “profiled”: behind the technological revolution there is always the suspicion that, beyond a revolution, we are also facing an immense commercial operation (a “creative” social network like Pinterest is exploited by the great hobby multinationals; a tool like Facebook shows us commercial ads based on our desires, or is even used to try to work out what our ideas are when it comes to political choices, etc.).
On Facebook we can connect whenever and wherever we want, and we can, Turkle says, break off that connection easily: sharing music, thoughts, and images allows us to expand our influence within a community of acquaintances (though Facebook calls them friends) potentially anywhere in the world. At work, for example, success is often measured by the calls made, the emails received, and the replies to text messages; as Turkle says, we are allowed to be always somewhere else, to be elsewhere, for instance to be in a meeting and write emails until it is our turn to speak, even if this leads us to the difficulty of establishing a relationship between what is true and what is true in a simulated world.
In the school field, the American scholar offers an example of how important the technological domain was believed to be in the age of education and training, namely multitasking: our children have changed. Once, while doing their homework, they listened at most to a bit of music and watched TV, but today they believe they are more productive and more efficient, and so they devote themselves at the same time to social networks, send text or instant messages, listen to music, upload photos to the network, etc. In recent times it was thought that we were dealing with gifted children, in that they were able to carry on several activities simultaneously, and educators mistook these abilities for fundamental skills. In reality multitaskers do not do well at any of the tasks they take on. The illusion produced by an instantaneous sharing of several environments produces a new conception of time, which seems dilated by the possibility of doing several things at the same moment. Moreover, for young people mobile devices offer the support of a community when the family is absent (almost always because of work, but increasingly because parents are absorbed in online activity): social customs change, twenty years ago sending thirty text messages a day to one’s parents might have seemed problematic, today it is the norm. Many teenagers say they are afraid of losing their Facebook profile, with all its memories, its photos, the photos posted by others in which they have been “tagged”, which reflects the claim many of them make when they state that it is “part of their life, a second self”, while some say they want to leave a trace of their feelings “on the system” (Floridi maintains that rather than the term online, today it would make more sense to use the term onlife).
For adults things are no better: it is often the children who tell their parents to put away the phone during dinner, asking to talk about problems that the parents themselves have stopped attending to, so busy with the “administration” of their online life. On social networks, as Turkle states, we think we are presenting ourselves, while we often end up being someone else, often the fantasy of who we would like to be. And then, today we want satisfactions not only in real life, but in virtual life too (think of the gratification at a like received on a post on a social network, or at the number of likes one of our photos gets), that life which Turkle now calls an “existential jumble”.
The book goes on to recount an endless, if chaotic, series of anecdotes about the habits of adult and adolescent Internet users. But where does this drive toward an uninterrupted use of new technologies and social media come from?

Bauman maintains that the great appeal of the web is comfort, the possibility of doing more things with less effort and more quickly. The advantage of the network is the possibility of instantaneous communication, even if this possibility has consequences, uncalculated disadvantages. For Bauman, social media are often an escape route from the problems of our offline world, a dimension into which we take refuge so as not to face the difficulties of our real life, with the consequence of a growing fragility of human relationships. The conditions created by the Net and by the digital age make attention fragile and inconstant, unable to go deep. That is why online messages have to be short and simple. Thanks to the Internet it is much easier to connect with the public sphere. Only a few years ago, it was not possible to reach public figures: they conversed only with major newspapers, television, radio. Today many barriers have fallen”. In short, on one hand information is more within everyone’s reach. “But there is another side of the coin”, Bauman adds: “blogs and online news sites pay close attention to the number of readers, to the number of fans on the Facebook page. And yet all this conceals a paradox: we often say that the world has become complex, but we have created a culture of communication that has reduced the time needed for reflection. Having more time to think means switching off our phones, but this is not simple because they provide what Turkle calls a “social and psychological GPS for the tethered self”.
Technology, in the service of communication, has changed the rules of living; indeed, uninterrupted communication, telegraphic speed, the brevity and terseness of exchanges mean that “the world of rapid replies does not make introspection impossible, but does very little to encourage it”. Moreover, our face-to-face conversations are continually interrupted by sounds (different from one another) that let us know a message has arrived, an email, some notification from a different environment, sounds that many of us often make out to be a nuisance but that deep down gratify us, showing whoever is beside us at that moment the plurality of people or environments that are in some way interested in us: physical connection is replaced by an online connection. The use of SNA (Social Network Analysis) tools also makes it possible to detect the degree of popularity of each member of the social network: behaviors and habits can be investigated, lesser or greater sociability, relational processes and individual and social effects deriving from participation in the online social environment (Mazzucchelli, 2014).
Email is hardly used by adolescents anymore, and in the same way they hate phone calls because, being in real time, they demand greater attention; one has the feeling of greater control over one’s time if one is not disturbed by phone calls. One girl interviewed explains: “When you have the time to think about what you will say, you can talk even with those you would find it hard to talk to”; in deferred communication, the screen offers protection and one feels less oppressed by the expectations of the immediacy of a face-to-face relationship; when one resorts to a phone call, parents’ concern for their children rises, and it is as if a higher level of alarm were triggered, because the thought that comes to mind is: “if they are calling me on the phone it must be urgent, otherwise they would have sent me a message”. Children receive a phone, on average, between the ages of 9 and 13, on condition that they are quick to answer their parents’ calls; in this way, children do not experience being on their own and being able to count only on themselves (as happened before smartphones), with the responsibility of facing situations in the first person and without being able to count on the help of mom and dad. Deep down, our dream is, yes, never to be alone, but without giving up control, which is impossible in a face-to-face relationship.
The (American) society described by Sherry Turkle, enslaved to a “continuous partial attention”, is made up of people who want to control everything; deep down, even when we communicate by message rather than by phone, we try to keep a distance that lets us “not say too much” or not go “out of control”, and then multitasking is slowly turning into multi-lifing, that is, not only mixing real life and virtual life, but real life and a plurality of virtual lives, as happens when a person has a plurality of social profiles, which often reflect different ages so as to experiment with identities different from one another.
According to the American psychologist, our online selves develop distinct personalities that sometimes seem better to us, while many people never miss a chance to appear on a larger virtual stage. “It is what I call ‘the poor substitute for celebrity’”, the Polish sociologist once said. According to Bauman, success today is being seen by as many people as possible, while the worst nightmare of our society is being excluded, abandoned, finding oneself in a position where no one needs us.
In the case of social robots we are alone, but we receive signals that tell us we are in company; connected to the Internet we are together, but our expectations of others are so low that we can feel utterly alone, at the risk that the self turns into an itself, that is, that all of us and our interlocutors turn into objects, more or less animate, almost equivalent to social or companion robots. As Floridi states, when he says that looking at shop windows becomes shopping on the Internet and no longer walking down the street but surfing the Net, our sense of personal identity undergoes a downward shift, with the risk of beginning to behave and to present ourselves as anonymous mass products, exposed and compared online with billions of other individuals: as users, we rely on online indicators rather than on real experiences, encouraging a culture that tends to typify and de-individualize.
Bauman, for example, in his analysis of present-day society, maintains that in recent years our very way of understanding the time of our lives has profoundly changed. “In today’s society our perception and our use of time have changed. We are less able to make plans, because we are ever more aware that the events of our life are unforeseen and unpredictable. Before, our time was structured in a certain way: there was the time of the office and the time of the home, the time of work and that of rest, and we struggled to plan it in the most solid way possible. Today these divisions are fading. There are only instantaneous events, which happen unexpectedly. Our perception of time is summed up in the expression ‘time is now’”. In this transformation the new technologies and social media, which have ushered in the era of instantaneous communication, have a great deal to do. “With smartphones, tablets, and PCs, we are always present, always connected”, and the time of our private life certainly does not benefit from it. Public places are places where people have stopped talking, and along with this constant presence imposed on us online, we are often absent from our offline world. “I think, for example, of the increasingly frequent image of a group of friends, each with their phone in hand: they are together only physically, but each is ‘spiritually’ carried off into other worlds”.

Solitude was not born with social media, nor will it disappear by using Facebook or Instagram, but the Net gives back to us, in a greatly amplified way, all the uncertainty, disorientation, and doubts of contemporary society. The social network is not the cause of solitude, but it is the instrument that makes it visible and manifest. As Turkle concludes, people are lonely and the Net is seductive, but if we are always “on”, we might deny ourselves the benefits of solitude. We all know what Henry David Thoreau did in 1854, when he went to live for two years in solitude at Walden Pond, in communion with nature and the simplicity of small things. Thoreau wanted to “pull the plug”, to recover a human dimension and to “live wisely” an authentic life, because he found that in solitude he would recover his own life without the mediation of others. Turkle sees in those who try to give up continuous connection some ideas of the American writer, and she asks what the values are by which we judge our own life. When Thoreau asked himself ‘where I live and what I live for’, he tied together place and values. Where we live not only changes the way we live, but also pervades what we are. Lately technology promises us a life on the screen. “What values, Thoreau would ask, derive from this new place? Immersed in simulation, where do we live and what do we live for?”.
If there is an addiction, for Turkle, it is not to technology, but to the mental habits that technology allows us to have. The machines, which we invented to save us time with their applications, are taking it all back, and perhaps even more.

Bibliography

Bauman Z., Consuming Life, Polity Press, Cambridge 2007, Italian transl. Consumo, dunque sono, Laterza, Bari 2010

Bauman Z., Danni collaterali, Laterza, Bari 2013

Borgna E., La solitudine dell’anima, Feltrinelli, Milan 2011

Deloitte, Global Mobile Consumer Survey (2016), https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/it/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/GMCS_2016.pdf

Floridi L., La quarta rivoluzione. Come l’infosfera sta trasformando il mondo, Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2017 (original ed. 2014)

Longo G.O., Il nuovo Golem. Come il computer cambia la nostra cultura, Laterza, Bari 1998.

Mazzucchelli C., La solitudine del social networker, Delos Digital, 2014 (ebook)

Notes

[1] A hikikomori (also called a postmodern hermit), a term linked to Japanese culture, is a young person who lives voluntarily and totally isolated from every social context, without any contact with family members or friends.

[2] An interesting 2016 Deloitte survey (Global Mobile Consumer Survey), conducted on more than 51,000 people in 32 countries, states that 89% of respondents check their phone within an hour of waking, while 81% check it before going to sleep and 52% check it during the night. 37% of the Italian population checks the phone in the middle of the night to see what time it is (20%), read WhatsApp messages (15%), and check email (9%). On average, smartphone owners check their devices 47 times a day, while the youngest (aged 18 to 24) check their phone 86 times a day. 27% of children reproach their parents for being always glued to the phone.

[3] ELIZA is a chatterbot (software for simulating a conversation) written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that pretends to carry on a dialogue between a psychotherapist and a patient, answering the latter with questions obtained by reformulating the patient’s own statements.

[4] A cyborg, as is well known, is an organism made up of artificial elements (mechanical and/or electronic prostheses) grafted onto a human body.

[5] FoMO (an acronym for the English expression Fear of missing out; literally: “fear of being cut off”) is a form of social anxiety, characterized by a desire to stay continually in touch with what others are doing and by the fear of being excluded from an event or a social context. FoMO can lead to a compulsive worry that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction. Source: Wikipedia.

Massimo Capponi is a tenured university researcher at the University of Perugia; he teaches Computer Science Applied to Education in the degree program in Educational Sciences.