My Comments about Alone Together

In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle seems to be biased against the advancement of the technological age. She attacks students from MIT by calling them “cyborgs” because they are linked into the internet almost all of the time, using disapproving rhetoric which causes readers to feel bad because they can see themselves in these “cyborgs”. Turkle makes it apparent to the readers that she frowns upon the use of cell phones and the internet, yet Turkle freely admits to using them to the same extent as her daughter when she writes “with a daughter studying abroad who expects to reach me when she wants to reach me, I am grateful to be tethered to her through the Net. In deference to a generation that sees my phone calls as constraining because they take place in real time and are not suitable for multitasking, I text.” (Alone Together, 153) She enables her daughter to call her, what mother wouldn’t? Yet she could easily tell her daughter not to call as much or just not answer. Turkle seems hypocritical in this book because she say one thing and then describes how she does the exact opposite the next page over. Also, she continuously focuses on the negative aspects of technology, instead of on the positives, like the fact that, without such technology, she wouldn’t be able to instantly talk to her daughter and know what she's up to, like she can with the help of a text.