Filling the Void

In Alone Together Sherry Turkle seems particularly concerned with certain stages of affective exchange amongst the web-savvy millennial generation. While, as we have voiced in class, her conceptualizations of how exactly the youthful population choose to engage new media at times read as a bit one-dimensional, I think that the larger issue that she lays on the table is complex enough to warrant some reflection here.

I wonder if he sees his reflection in the screen?

As presented in Turkle's book, adolescent use of new media outlets are greatly contingent upon their nascent in/securities with identity, managing personal and public life, familial responsibilities, and connection to a world that can be overwhelming in its expansiveness. According to an article on CNN.com, parents are seeing both the costs and benefits to having a child participate in the online arena. While violent video-gaming can be seen as a problem (this argument seems to be one of the archetypal indictments of such technology, doesn't it?), teen participation in various new media outlets can be lauded as providing a new tool in developing social practices by a generation in tune with such a contemporary communicative landscape.

In keeping with the tack of Turkle's book, I think it is important to keep raising that question as to what our relation to new technology is (this is perhaps different perspective from just opinions on new technology itself), and what that can help illuminate about humanity in the twenty-first century. The precarious question then arises: when we speak of a cyber world, robotic entities, etc., do we employ rhetoric that paints these advances as malevolent alien entities (a la SkyNet in The Terminator films), or as an extension of our human existence in time and space? While one can find passionate supporters on both sides of that particular fence, I am interested in how this new medium follows in the footsteps of old inventions/technologies to assuage greater psychological trepidations we experience as humans.

As creative beings, we seek solace in the notion that we can make things happen. We chart the universe, ground ourselves in an ethics to which our actions are symptomatic (for better or worse in some cases), find ways to make some "sense" of the world around us. With regards to this thesis, one might be able to see the formative years of the adolescent experience as one of the most visibly crucial times in trying to articulate some identity.

In chapter nine of Alone Together, Turkle addresses a turn to "hyper-other-directedness" that seems to stem from a narcissism hinging on "personalities so fragile as to need constant support" (177). As the teen revels in an outwardness of their own making, often feeling conflicted about negotiating boundaries between who-I-am and who-I-want-to-be, I am curious (as Turkle also posits) what happens to the degree of inwardness that might be eschewed, even if temporarily? The distinction here placing a sense of inwardness in the unspoken, unuttered, private recesses of an entity certain only of its own origin in uncertainty.

In those pivotal years of someones life, we might see movements toward computerized in/dependence as a reflection of the greater human project, trying in earnest to fill our lives, the void, with meaning, pleasure, and contradiction. Facebook, Twitter, jobs, money, books, vacations, soccer games, relationships, movies, education, language, all filling that void. Is this a "bad thing"? Of course not. How can it be? It is what we call life.

My point here is that in recognizing and questioning how we relate to ourselves and each other in an online community, with robots, etc., speaks to how we view our lives. They are spaces of productivity and not nothingness. We can play at identity online, in romantic relationships, and in professional avenues we explore. We see (particularly in the adolescent period of life) how as humans we construct ourselves and certainly are constructed by others. Our need for outwardness, our constant striving to make ourselves tangible beings with titles and positions in the world, these are the difficulties that (as I can personally recall) make me particularly curious about how the youth engage such questions both on and offline.

Perhaps it is this outwardness that shelters us, provides a haven from the restless dreams of inwardness. Do we live our lives in fear or faith of this inwardness? To what extent is "hyper-other-directedness" a deferral, a comfort zone where we might turn our attention from the incommunicability of individual shadow play? Don't get me wrong here, I still have a bunch of products to review on amazon.com, but when the day is done, I wonder about the infinite mysteries that perhaps can only be borne of some reserved, quiet individual troubled sleep.