Power of talk in a digital age summary

Consequently, losing your phone might feel like the end of the world with respect to the amount of tasks we do with them. Interestingly, Dr. Sherry Turkle asserts that our current relationship with technology is affecting how we communicate, connect, and interact with other people. In this paper, I argue that technology has adversely affected our interactions as humans. Also, I will summarize and respond to Sherry Turkle’s book on the power of talk in a digital age. It later came to be that more students admitted to texting while lectures were on. Dr. Turkle (211) describes this as the need for a constant connection. She says that such students do not feel the significance of being present unless they are also absent in some sense.

They always want to perform a social check and discover who is in touch with them. As such, it is straightforward to visualize how concentration will be disrupted in this mix of emotions. Furthermore, even those who think they are not affected by this phenomenon are victims in one way or another. The moment one sees a colleague checking his or her mail or logging in to Facebook, and then attention quickly shifts to two possibilities. Either the class is boring, or he or she should also devote some time to the online business. This is despite research showing that multitasking adversely affects learning. Turkle (214), the solution lies in learning more about our susceptibilities and then designing technology and the surroundings in which we can be able to use them carefully.

Also, she notes that it is often children who realize their vulnerabilities to technology and consequently device methods of dealing with them which I totally agree. Still, there are those who have embraced the new mode of hyper attention. They argue that we don’t have a choice. Resultantly, education must embrace the tradition of hyperfocus. However, it is no mean fete achieving attention pluralism. This is because hyper attention feels good and without practice, the ability to sermon deep concentration can be lost in a split second. Attention is not a skill we acquire from a single domain. Dr. Turkle (219) postulates that when we train our brains to multitask as the necessary approach and embrace hyper attention, we will not be able to focus even in the moments when we want to.

Turkle (222) describes a new trend among teenagers called grazing. It is a unique style where learners pick up different things from various sources and do not want to engage deeply in search of information or knowledge. This has left a majority of them not knowing how to identify essential concepts. As Dr. Turkle (224) points out, the issue is not web surfing. Prof Steiker admits that at the beginning, it was all fun allowing students in her law class to take notes on their laptops. However, her position changed after seeing students who took notes with computers struggle from lack of attention. She notes that they were losing the ability to make notes. According to Steiker, students had assumed the role of court stenographers (Turkle 226).