Write a full five pages essay. Below are two readings that need to be connect and compare with each other. In the essay, there are a few points should be include:1. A clear, arguable thesis in the introduction paragraph.2. Three Topic sentences that reflect the thesis in three body paragraph.3. Each body paragraph should contain two quotes, one quote from one reading and one from the other. 4. Introducing the quote first and explain it. Then, find out if the connections between two quotes from two authors.( It could be similarities or contradictions).Here is the Prompt QuestionHow can we live “authentic”(in Turkle’s definition) lives in a world increasingly mediated by technology and structured by a “grid of business”? In answering this question, put Adam Gopink’s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli” in conversation with Sherry Turkle’s ” Alone Together”. Who offers the better to this question, and how can their views be used to re -frame the examples given by the other writer?
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Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other
By Sherry Turkle
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. These days, it suggests
substitutions that put the real on the run. The advertising for Second Life, a virtual world where
you get to build an avatar, a house, a family, and a social life, basically says, “Finally, a place to
love your body, love your friends, and love your life.”1 On Second Life, a lot of people, as
represented by their avatars, are richer than they are in first life and a lot younger, thinner, and
better dressed. And we are smitten with the idea of sociable robots, which most people first
meet in the guise of artificial pets. Zhu Zhu pet hamsters, the “it” toy of the 2009–2010 holiday
season, are presented as “better” than any real pet could be. We are told they are lovable and
responsive, don’t require cleanup, and will never die.
Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns
out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections
and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of
friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to
each other. We’d rather text than talk. …
Computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots
meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. They ask us to take care of them; in
response, we imagine that they might care for us in return. Indeed, among the most talked
about robotic designs are in the area of care and companionship. In summer 2010, there are
enthusiastic reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on robotic teachers,
companions, and therapists. And Microsoft demonstrates a virtual human, Milo, that
recognizes the people it interacts with and whose personality is sculpted by them. Tellingly, in
the video that introduces Milo to the public, a young man begins by playing games with Milo in
a virtual garden; by the end of the demonstration, things have heated up—he confides in Milo
after being told off
by his parents.
We are challenged to ask what such things augur. Some people are looking for robots to clean
rugs and help with the laundry. Others hope for a mechanical bride. As sociable robots propose
themselves as substitutes for people, new networked devices offer us machine-mediated
relationships with each other, another kind of substitution. We romance the robot and become
inseparable from our smartphones. As this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships
with each other through our new intimacy with machines. People talk about Web access on
their BlackBerries as “the place for hope” in life, the place where loneliness can be defeated. A
woman in her late sixties describes her new iPhone: “It’s like having a little Times Square in my
pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.” People are lonely. The network is seductive.
But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
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I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. Both by temperament and profession, I place
high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity. Granting that an AI might develop its
own origami of lovemaking positions, I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a
machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of “as if ”
performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from
the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared
store of human experiences: We are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.
A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop.
Connectivity and Its Discontents
As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between
intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so
much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too
much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice.
It is more efficient they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to
technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy.
After an evening of avatar-to-avatar talk in a networked game, we feel at one moment in
possession of a full social life and in the next curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with
strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our
followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies,
homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel
utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people
experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report
feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging
question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all
encounters of any kind?
The blurring of intimacy and solitude may reach its starkest expression when a robot is
proposed as a romantic partner. But for most people it begins when one creates a profile on a
social-networking site or builds a persona or avatar for a game or virtual world. Over time, such
performances of identity may feel like identity itself. And this is where robotics and the
networked life first intersect. For the performance of caring is all that robots, no matter how
sociable, know how to do.
I was enthusiastic about online worlds as “identity workshops” when they first appeared, and
all of their possibilities remain. Creating an avatar – perhaps of a different age, a different
gender, a different temperament – is a way to explore the self. But if you’re spending three,
four, or five hours a day in an online game or virtual world (a time commitment that is not
unusual), there’s got to be someplace you’re not. And that someplace you’re not is often with
your family and friends – sitting around, playing Scrabble face-to-face, taking a walk, watching a
movie together in the old-fashioned way. And with performance can come disorientation. You
might have begun your online life in a spirit of compensation. If you were lonely and isolated, it
seemed better than nothing. But online, you’re slim, rich, and buffed up, and you feel you have
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more opportunities than in the real world. So here too, better than nothing can become better
than something – or better than anything. Not surprisingly, people report feeling let down
when they move from the virtual to the real world. It is not uncommon to see people fidget
with their smartphones, looking for virtual paces where they might once again be more.
Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want
them. Just as we can program a made-to-measure robot, we can reinvent ourselves as comely
avatars. We can write the Facebook profile that pleases u. We can edit our messages until they
project the self we want to be. And we can keep things short and sweet. Our new media are
well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up,
we reduce our expectations of each other. An impatient high school senior says, “If you really
need to reach me, just shoot me a text.” He sounds just like my colleagues on a consulting job,
who tell me they would prefer to communicate with “real-time” texts.
Online connections were first conceived as a substitute for face-to-face contact, when the latter
was for some reason impractical: Don’t have time to make a phone call? Shoot off a text
message. But very quickly, the text message became the connection of choice. We discovered
the network – the world of connectivity – to be uniquely suited to the overworked and
overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against
loneliness, even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it
easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.
These days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are
closer together or further apart. I remember my own sense of disorientation the first time I
realized that I was “alone together.” I had traveled an exhausting thirty-six hours to attend a
conference on advanced robotic technology held in central Japan. The packed grand ballroom
was Wi-Fi enabled: The speaker was using the web for his presentation, laptops were open
throughout the audience, fingers were flying, and there was a sense of great concentration and
intensity. But not many in the audience were attending to the speaker. Most people seemed to
be doing their e-mail, downloading files, and surfing the net. The man next to me was searching
for a New Yorker cartoon to illustrate his upcoming presentation. Every once in a while,
audience members gave the speaker some attention, lowering their laptop screens in a kind of
curtsy, a gesture of courtesy.
Outside, in the hallways, the people milling around me were looking past me to virtual others.
They were on their laptops and their phones, connecting to colleagues at the conference going
on around them and to others around the globe. There but not there. Of course, clusters of
people chatted with each other, making dinner plans, “networking” in that old sense of the
word, the one that implies having a coffee or sharing a meal. But at this conference, it was clear
that what people mostly want from public space is to be alone with their personal networks. It
is good to come together physically, but it is more important to stay tethered to our devices. I
thought of how Sigmund Freud considered the power of communities both to shape and to
subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun came to mind: “connectivity and its discontents.”
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The phrase comes back to me months later as I interview management consultants who seem
to have lost touch with their best instincts for what makes them competitive. They complain
about the BlackBerry revolution, yet accept it as inevitable while decrying it as corrosive. They
say they used to talk to each other as they waited to give presentations or took taxis to the
airport; now they spend that time doing e-mail. Some tell me they are making better use of
their “downtime,” but they argue without conviction. The time that they once used to talk as
they waited for appointments or drove to the airport was never downtime. It was the time
when far-flung global teams solidified relationships and refined ideas.
In corporations, among friends, and within academic departments, people readily admit that
they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face to face. Some who say “I
live my life on my BlackBerry” are forthright about avoiding the “real-time” commitment of a
phone call. The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature
and extent. I recently overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two women. “No one
answers the phone in our house anymore,” the first woman proclaimed with some
consternation. “It used to be that the kids would race to pick up the phone. Now they are up in
their rooms, knowing no one is going to call them and texting and going on Facebook or
whatever instead.” Parents with teenage children will be nodding at this very familiar story in
recognition and perhaps a sense of wonderment that this has happened, and so quickly. And
teenagers will simply be saying, “Well, what’s your point?”
Only a decade ago, I would have been mystified that fifteen-year-olds in my urban
neighborhood, a neighborhood of parks and shopping malls, of front stoops and coffee shops,
would feel the need to send and receive close to six thousand messages a month via portable
digital devices or that best friends would assume that when they visited, it would usually be on
the virtual real estate of Facebook. It might have seemed intrusive, if not illegal, that my mobile
phone would tell me the location of all my acquaintances within a ten-mile radius. But these
days we are accustomed to all this. Life in a media bubble has come to seem natural. So has the
end of a certain public etiquette: On the street, we speak into the invisible microphones on our
mobile phones and appear to be talking to ourselves. We share intimacies with the air as
though unconcerned about who can hear us or the details of our physical surroundings.
The New Real?
I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of mind. Now the metaphor no longer
goes far enough. Our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self,
itself split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology.
Teenagers tell me they sleep with their cell phone, and even when it isn’t on their person, when
it has been banished to the school locker, for instance, they know when their phone is
vibrating. The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These
young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection:
always on and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily
thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a
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set of new insecurities. They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if
they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have
communicated. They become confused about companionship. Can they find it in their lives on
the screen? Could they find it with a robot? Their digitized friendships – played out with
emoticon emotions, so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection – may
prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that
could bring superficiality to a higher power – that is, for relationships with the inanimate. They
come to accept lower expectations for connection and, finally, the idea that robot friendships
could be sufficient unto the day.
Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find
time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually,
we come to see our online life as life itself. We come to see what robots offer as relationship.
The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want.
These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm.
Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want
to lead? Many roboticists are enthusiastic about having robots tend to our children and our
aging parents, for instance. Are these psychologically, socially, and ethically acceptable
propositions? What are our responsibilities here? And are we comfortable with virtual
environments that propose themselves not as places for recreation but as new worlds to live
in? What do we have, now that we have what we say we want – now that we have what
technology makes easy? This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to
leave the future to the futurists.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other, © 2011 Sherry Turkle. Published by Basic Books, a
division of Perseus Books. All rights reserved.
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The New Yorker
Sept 30, 2002 pNA
Page 1
BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a
child’s imagination)
by Adam Gopnik
© COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
We thought, at first, that her older brother Luke might be
the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also
seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age
My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an
was merely Olivia’s marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He
imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is
is too busy to play with her much anymore. He has
growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot
become a true New York child, with the schedule of a
of local traits: he lives in an apartment “on Madison and
Cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on
Lexington,” he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water,
Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and
and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. But Olivia,
or is thought, “old.” But the most peculiarly local thing
though she counts days, does not yet really have days.
about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too She has a day, and into this day she has introduced the
busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to
figure of Charlie Ravioli–in order, it dawned on us, to insist
her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It’s Olivia . . . that she does have days, because she is too harried to
It’s Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye.” Then she
share them, that she does have an independent social life,
snaps it shut, and shakes her head. “I always get his
by virtue of being too busy to have one.
machine,” she says. Or she will say, “I spoke to Ravioli
today.” “Did you have fun?” my wife and I ask. “No. He
Yet Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly
was busy working. On a television” (leaving it up in the air discouraging a companion–“He cancelled lunch. Again,”
if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).
Olivia would say–that we thought we ought to look into it.
One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who
On a good day, she “bumps into” her invisible friend and
specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on
they go to a coffee shop. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli,”
inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year-olds.
she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in
stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to California now, where she grows basil in her garden and
the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). “We had jars her own organic marmalades. I e-mailed this sister for
coffee, but then he had to run.” She sighs, sometimes, at
help with the Ravioli issue–how concerned should we
her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she
be?–and she sent me back an e-mail, along with an
accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. “I bumped into attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone
Charlie Ravioli today,” she says. “He was working.” Then
connections, we at last spoke on a land line.
she adds brightly, “But we hopped into a taxi.” What
happened then? we ask. “We grabbed lunch,” she says.
It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject
by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called “Imaginary
It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the Companions and the Children Who Create Them,” and my
big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of
sister had just written a review of it. She insisted that
parks and playgrounds–drawn, in particular, from a nearly Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was
perfect, mynah-bird-like imitation of the words she hears
right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (sixty-three per
her mother use when she talks about her day with her
cent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children
friends. (“How was your day?” Sighing: “Oh, you know. I
create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out
tried to make a d …
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