Journal 5 - Forbes

Can You Hear Me Now? by Sherry Turkle

The dehumanization of people by our wonderful new technologies has been a worry to me for a while now. When I had design meetings, I would have my engineers leave their computers out of the meeting room and the sales people would have to turn off their Blackberrys. If I didn’t enforce this, the meetings were about half as productive. I also found I got better input because everyone had to focus on the problem at hand rather than having split attention or actually having a few people attending another meeting in the middle of the current meeting.

One of my least favorite things about shopping, other than it is shopping, is when you get to the register and in the middle of ringing your order up they stop to take an order on the phone.

1. Does the use of robots instead of live animals cause confused learning in students? I remember going to the Wild Animal Park and seeing the robot dinosaurs. Quite a few of the small children seemed to think they were alive and real. It left me wondering how many other mistakes in learning come about because of the intermix of real and fantasy using robot images.
2. I guess I always wondered why the person coming in on the cell or other device had to be answered immediately? Do text messages have a short expiration date so that if they are not answered immediately they become stale? I really don’t now the final answer to this, but I think young folk aren’t raised with the same set of manners as in previous generations. Then again maybe the answer is why should the person there in rl have priority or the person in cyberland.