When technology becomes the architect of our privacy

"How many times a day do you check your e-mail? Awaken? Before going to bed? A dozen times between the two? If you are like many of us, the red flashing your BlackBerry is the first thing you see every morning - you've got mail! - and the last light disappear when you fall asleep, "recalls Jessica Bennett for Newsweek.

Add Twitter, Facebook and the rest of our social media these obsessions and constant connectivity that was supposed to simplify our life became the millstone dragging it with you from morning to evening. The advantage of these gadgets, of course, is the connectivity that allows us to respond to a message on the road and that we can keep in contact with more people than we are able to meet in a day.

Still, for Sherry Turkle, these technologies make us more isolated than ever. It no longer has the ethnographer and psychologist Sherry Turkle Department Director on Technology and Self at MIT and author of many books including Life on the screen on the identity at the time of the Internet (1995) or simulation and its discontents (2009).

It publishes a new book that analyzes our relationship to technology, entitled Only together (Alone Together), where she dissects the ambivalence of technology when it proposes to be "the architect of our privacy." Alone together is a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology, said Jessica Bennett and how it has redefined our perception of privacy and solitude.

Turkle talks about these high school students who are afraid of having to make a phone call to someone, these elementary school children clueless when their pet toy robots come to die. She wondered how her daughter will remember their relationship, if all long-distance exchange they are mainly text messages.

Turkle denounces the superficial commitment implied by these objects. "We use inanimate objects to convince us that even when we are alone, we feel whole. And then when we are with others, our mobile devices we are constantly in situations where one feels alone. These objects induces a perfect storm of confusion about what is important in human relations.

" Certainly, technology, despite its faults, makes life easier. It allows us to communicate with more people in less time. It makes the conversation easier. It may even have a therapeutic role. But it can also be attractive: it is known to provide more stimulation than real life: "Compared to a hundred retweets and an avalanche of text messages, one conversation at dinner seems terribly boring" With these technologies, "the rise of adrenaline is still "believes Sherry Turkle.

"We have a small outbreak of dopamine every time we make a connection". A high school student told him he felt fine when he began writing a text message. The feelings that make us feel the machines are not the same as those we experience in real time, in the intimacy of face to face. Online, we can ignore the feelings of others.

In a text message, we can avoid eye contact. This does not mean that we run to the disaster, grade Sherry Turkle, but perhaps we need to think about how we want to live with these technologies. For Sherry Turkle denies being a Luddite or express the moral point of view of a schoolteacher, but she fears that the use of technology transforms our social norms, rather than the reverse.

We do not have to sacrifice the company for the key applications of the moment, she believes. With these machines, "There is a real ambiguity as to whether or not we have the attention of others in this culture of constant connectivity," in which we swim, "says psychologist who relates in his book with examples from hundreds of excerpts from conversations she had with patients.

One of the most striking findings of the book says Peter Dizikes the Press of MIT, is based on a reversal of roles around the technologies in families. Young, yet heavy users of mobile devices themselves, are no less unhappy when their parents overuse these devices. Many students complain so those parents who live in the area "BlackBerry", who are unaware of their surroundings, even during family meals.

"But can we really change our habits?" asked Nancy Rosenblum, professor of political ethics at Harvard. Sherry Turkle does not mention any great revolution in the conclusion to his book. On the contrary. She suggests starting with simple things that look rather good ways to talk to colleagues in the hallway, do not use their phone during dinner, when they came to see his children play sports, car, or together.

A "Netiquette" that our practices have long been shattered. "These acts are not necessarily easy," at least not as easy as they seem. "When we try to regain our focus, we often enter into war against ourselves." But we can not sell for as much control of our lives with technology. EXAMPLES OF PATHOLOGY DRAMA DO THEY? Turkle's book explains that technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional life.

But it also raises the question whether it offers us all the life we want to lead? "Said David Weinberger in the Boston Globe. This does not prevent it from being rather critical of this vision. "Turkle read as many symptoms of diseases that many of us would regard as signs of a healthy society.

For Turkle, photos of mobile phones for the presidential inauguration in January 2009 are not the mark of a Sharing a moment with distant friends, but that, pathological, wanting to escape the here and now. Turkle does not read the flood of text messages exchanged by teenagers as a sign that they are more socially connected than ever, but as evidence of a need to be constantly reassured.

When a girl brings him she was happy to learn of the death on May 1 by instant message, because it "was able to compose," to have time to think, "Turkle sees a decline in the Paradise protector of the Internet to avoid strong emotions, rather than the expression of a reasonable solution to address a difficult time.

" David Weinberger, despite all the respect he carries the work of Turkle, his eyes seemed distorted by the psychological model it seeks to press on the subject. His look is very distorted, because the symptoms that often seem more atypical Egraine than anything else. The teenager who sent dozens of text messages a day to his mother or the adolescent who refuses to use the phone as a call to end it gives the impression of being rejected, are dramatic examples, but this does not necessarily evidence of a widespread disease.

Finally, says David Weinberger, Turkle personally prefer the Facebook phones, e-papers for Skype, the dolls to robots. As often in the critical reflections of the Internet, the rejection of rejoined the preference for the old forms, traditional. Modernity that moves us away from "old values" seems pathological in essence.

"The changes induced by the technology challenge to the conceptual frameworks that we manage to understand these changes," says David Weinberger. Even from a psychological point of view.

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