Can You Hear Me Now? by Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle begins her essay “Can You Hear Me Now?” with gratitude to technology that gave people connections and alienations. The author believes that the power of communication takes control over humans and subverts them by using a psychoanalytic pun “virtuality and its discontents” to engage humans’ minds. According to Turkle, business people today lose touch with their human instincts by working around the clock with technological devices they cannot afford to lose connection with their communication devices. The author also wrote about how new technology in communication tethers people’s souls by creating avatars that could deploy them into virtual lives. Nevertheless, Turkle mentions in her essay that a new communication culture plundered people’s leisure time, even the time to think uninterrupted for themselves because of their communication addiction. Technology influenced people’s minds by making them addicted to electronic devices; laptops, palmtops, cell phones, or Black Berry that navigate their lives as tethered slaves who can lose their minds when the device crashes. Moreover, communication devices damage teenagers’ lives too, by not allowing them to take responsibility when they try to find their own space in the society. Cell phones, with a parent on speed dial, make them think differently about themselves. Also, on top of this, there is the technology that sharing thoughts and feelings instantaneously with others. Communication devices, Sherry Turkle wrote, lead to virtuality and its discontents. According to the author, people’s virtual lives on Face book or My Space had been observed by secret government agencies and this state of mind makes people vulnerable to political abuse. When the high school and college student gives up their privacy to Web sites, according to Turkle, people receive more validation than violation by government agency. Author of “Can You Hear Me Now” used a metaphor to explain the real purpose of creeping government agencies as a panopticon prison where the guard stands at the center of a prison room and disciplines prisoners by watching them all the time. Communication devices have become the main resource for people ignoring human communication in society. Things, the author wrote, are no longer simple, there are links to object like the answering machine, anonymous avatars, or voice-recognition protocols that people have to deal with in a variety of manners when they communicate with each other. It is like a small jump to trust a non player character by putting one’s trust in a robotic companion. To support her opinion, the author uses her daughter’s selective taste, showing that while visiting a museum the new generation admired looking at robotic animals because they performed the same exercises that were expected, but the live animals cannot be seen as dangerous because they are not acting. Turkle used another example about a nursing home in Japan to solidify her opinion. This example was when Aibo, Sony’s household-entertainment robot performed doctors and nurses jobs for the elderly. People were satisfied with Aibo because it was not dangerous, would not betray people and never died. Even that robot can benefit people, but it is bad for people as a moral being. The question is not the ability of that robot but what kind of intimate relationship can people develop with these machines?