The Communications Kid

     Sherry Turkle is the Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She wrote Alone Together in 2012, where she discussed the way technology is changing how we communicate and gave a TED talk on the subject as well. I haven't read her book, but I did watch the TED talk and I thought she raised some interesting points. She stressed the importance of being mindful with our consumption of technology, and its affect on how we communicate and how we see ourselves in the world.      She used the example of people using their phones at funerals to hide from their grief. Too often we forget that in order to process strong emotions, we must sit with them and feel them. Our phones kind of act like a digital pacifier. Personally, I find myself using my phone more often in times of stress. It can feel good to turn off your brain for a bit, and maybe that can be beneficial for the short term, but long te...

    Marshall McLuhan wrote The Medium is the Message in 1967, which was at the time controversial. However, in our growing digital age, his philosophy is more relevant now than ever before. He argued that electronic media wires people differently, even going so far as to say that television and radio lead to illiteracy. Perhaps the source of controversy came from a defensiveness people at the time felt with being accused of illiteracy. Marshall said "one of the effects of living with electronic info is that we will be living in a state of information overload." Have you ever found yourself with a to do list a mile long, but instead of doing the work you needed to do, you ended up scrolling on your phone, looking at nothing? Does this happen because we as humans are inherently procrastinators, or is it because we live in a state of information overload?      McLuhan is credited with coining the term "Global Village", referring to the daily consumption of media, i...