The Pros and Cons of Technology...

  

She is a great believer in all the good things the internet has made possible.

"Wondrous" she calls the internet, but that doesn't mean we should accept it unquestioningly.

"Just because we grew up with the internet doesn't mean the internet is all grown up." A 4am insight.

Something is amiss, and there are serious privacy issues, which many people seem unaware of.

When she went to MIT in 1978, she said her students were using computational metaphors to describe thinking about the mind, much as people today talk about the brain as hard wired, yet in fact for at least 20 years neuro science has recognized it as infinitely plastic.

So Sherry decided to study this phenomenon as an ethnographer.

"I had tenure and I had time." A resonant phrase.

She's been studying this stuff for a long time, and speaks with authority.

At least we should pay attention. She says that the device is like a phantom limb; people can't go without it, kids sleep with it in bed.

• Too busy communicating to think;
• Too busy communicating to create;
• Too busy communicating to fully connect with the people who matter.

This has developmental implications especially for young people, except that her study was not as she expected: not young people glued to the blackberry but it was young people who missed their parents.

On the internet, friends and family are contacts, things we use to prop up our fragile ego. "We're lonely but fearful of intimacy,

Illusion of intimacy without the demands of intimacy.

We can't get enough of each other if we can have each other at a distance and in an amount that we can control; Goldilocks effect.

We hide from each other. Contact only so far, and no further, and we are in control. Constantly putting our thoughts and feelings out there."

"I share, therefore I am"

Because we need an instant response to a text or a twitter, we reduce complex thought, a quick response to a quick question: but the questions facing the earth at this time are not quick questions.

If we reduce our language, we reduce our capacity to think, especially to be critical and good citizens; the internet encourages this.

When we multi-task we become increasingly less effective, because we are not giving our full attention. She is not anti- the technology, she calls it wondrous, and has spent most of her life promoting its possibilities, but she strongly feels that something is amiss.

Just one example:

"The American constitution has 350,000 words.  Facebook's terms and conditions are ten to the order of magnitude times that."

Do we really think our children can understand and be aware of what they are signing up to?"

As to the privacy issue: our kids have no idea who reads their emails, who follows their searches. Sherry's grandmother taught her a lesson, perhaps one that only a migrant could recognize:

She took her down to the mailbox room, and told her: "No one can open our mail. It is a federal offence to open our mail. That's why we are in this country."

It is this mail box room which made Sherry: an America citizen, a civil libertarian and a democrat.

Read the full text of her talk at LSE:

http://tinyurl.com/3zgftlc

Or buy the book: Alone Together

http://tinyurl.com/3ok7ykj