Can You Hear Me Now?

-->In the short story, “Can You Hear Me Now,” written by Sherry Turkle is about the struggle between humans and how technology is determining the lives of where humans are headed. She says there are 5 troubles that are affecting humans making our lives more virtual than realistic. The first trouble is that “the virtual” is becoming reality and that with all these games where we can live a second realistic virtual life, where it is so much easier on people because there is no failure or disappointment because we can simply create it. The second failure is that our society is growing up in a world where there is constantly responding to technology such as e-mail, instant messaging, texting, and much more, but with all this kids growing up never learn the value of taking the time for the things that matter in real life. The third trouble is also about kids growing up, learning to be independent and to navigate your way around life used to be a rite of passage but with technology always at your side kids can look up how to get around or call their parents when they don’t know how to deal with something. Our generation has became dependent on technology and would not how to deal with a problem or navigate their way around if we don’t have any sort of technology with us. The fourth trouble is always living our life in the public, such as logging into Facebook or Myspace when in reality it could hurt us because no matter what, when we are on any of the social websites someone is always watching us. The fifth trouble is Split attention, we’ve been raised in a society where we have the opportunity to simply choose whom to give our attention to with the accessibility of talking to someone online then to the person in real life.

            Sherry Turkle was a little less optimistic in her short story about how technology is affecting us but I feel she gets the point across more than Clay Shirky because she states multiple valid reasons behind her reasons and does a very good job on supporting them.