Connected but alone Communicate 1.1

As I think about the message from the video above, I think of how communication has changed in the 21st Century. I do realize that I am addicted to social media. I often feel like I have to be plugged in. In fact, I wasted about three hours of my day today trying to trouble shoot the reason why Facebook.com was not working on my PC.  I downloaded extra browsers, erased my cache memory, searched forums, flushed my dins servers, and I even changed my IP address just so I could be connected.  My quest to get Facebook.com working properly worked, but I wasted three hours of my life and procrastinated on other things just so that I could make sure that I could post on Facebook.com.  It is crazy because sometimes, my desire to connect is even stronger than my desire to eat (that is a good thing because I need to drop more than a few pounds) Anyway, I guess that I have replaced being talkative on the phone with being loquacious on the internet.

 Nevertheless, I agree with Sherry Turkle when she says that with mobile communication, "People hide from each other even when they are together." I definitely agree. We need to get back to the art of having real conversations that are synchronous so that they take place in real time, and there is no option to edit and delete what we say. 

 In addition, I also agree with Sherry Turkle when she alludes that advances in communication have hurt classroom communication more than it has helped. Please understand that I hate admitting to this because I consider myself a "techie teacher", but the truth is that many students don't have the attention span to write well or speak well enough to survive in a "real world" job. Many would rather speak with slang or text code. 

 As Sherry Turkle emphasizes in her speech, the use of smart devices like Iphones and Android based phones give people a false sense of gratification by having them to put their attention to where they want it to be, think that they are never alone, and get a feeling that they will always be heard.  That notion could not be farther from reality because the more we connect, the more we isolate ourselves into virtual solitude.  

I hate to be negative, but in the future, I see actual real time communication getting worse. As Sherry Turkle communicated virtual robots like Siri are becoming the best friend of many people.  As a popular MTV show called Catfish demonstrates, now people are "cat fishing" by making up fake lives on the internet because they hate their own.  I truly believe that the only way to stop this downward spiral in human behavior is for people to be aware of what is happening and want to stop it.  If not, the future will be very dystopian because I see the pain that it may lead to.  As a result of Sherry Turkle's TED talk, I vow to make sure that I schedule time to disconnect from the virtual world and get back to the real world at least 12 hours of my day.