With social technology’s advanced development, I believe social technology is evolving the ways in which people communicate. Many years ago, the ways people communicate were limited to face-to-face, letter or telephone. However, emails, text’s and internet (Facebook, chat rooms, etc), which are dominant in the technological medians have changed human lifestyles tremendously. People rather text than talk; use social technology to communicate with the loved ones whenever it is.
In Sherry Turkle’s essay: “‘”‘ she worries about human connection with social technology might have negative impacts to human intimacy. Naomi Klein, author of ”’ talks about both beneficial and destructive “fences” that are existed to keep people isolated from things that they need. I think there are many fences that keep people from stepping forward (to a better life). The biggest fence in 21st century is social technology, which encloses people in a virtual world that limits people’s opportunity to have realtime and face-to-face conversations.
Social technology fences encompass people widely and heavily that reduce people’s ability to have conversations and get along with people. Social technology is created to help people be efficient and contact with other whenever and wherever they are. However, social technology hinders people to connect with the real world. “And yet twelve years after the celebrated collapse of the Berlin Wall, we are surrounded by fences yet again, cut off -from one another, from the earth and from our own ability to imagine that change is possible” (Klein 196). Social echnology is leading people a world that they don’t want to go. Inside the social technology fences, people depend on social technology to communicate too heavily that they are losing their ability to connect with the other people and the earth (real world). Reasons why people are enclosed in the fences are that using social technology can help them avoid embarrassing realtime conversation and fatigue with the difficulties of life with people. “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” (Turkle 273). Social technology keep people feel safe by creating distances with others. People can edit their words till they think their messages and emails are ready to send. People, who are accustomed to social technology, are losing their ability to have conversation. Feeling nerves and panic when having real-time conversations bring people inside the fences. Furthermore, people spend more time in virtual world (creating their online personal page, online game, etc) rather than with their family and friends.
As long as Individuals depend heavily on social technologies to communicate, their abilities to have a face-to-face conversation decrease. People who rely on social technology live inside fences, which cutoff human interaction even though people are more connected to each other. Turkle states that “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies”, and yet social technology works in opposite. As people use social technology to solve problems in their primate lives, their relationships in private lives are being damaged.
However, many people like Nora and her fiance (who are talked in Turkle’s essay) don’t realize the problem that social technology might be the barriers that have bad impacts in their private lives. “Some of these fences are hard to see, but they exist all the same” (Klein 195). Social technology might make human lives miserable since intimacy is so important that it should be treated sincerely. Nora and her fiance didn’t see the fences when they announced their engagement news from email but not face-to-face telling people.
Nora explained that they just wanted to do things simply and efficiently, and announcing the wedding date by email is the best way. However, this might hurt people who believe that they are supposed to be invited by other sincere ways. “When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections” (Turkle 277). When Randy, Nora’s brother, got their engagement news, he felt extremely upset because he think Nora’s heavily dependence on social technology made her lose the consciousness of the importance of their family.
Many years ago, before the widely usage of social technologies, human intimacy such as family companion were treated important and serious. However, now people are lazier to deal with intimacy because social technology can help them deal with it efficiently and simply. Badly, people don’t realize the exist of fences, and if they are more willing to conquer the complexities that they call individually to inform the wedding dates and keep caring in the real relationships, the relationship with their loved one can be more intimate than just sending emails and messages.
Fortunately, we can see the “windows of possibilities” in the world, which social technology has pervasive into global phenomenon. People don’t have to give up technology, what they have to do is to care their real lives then in their devices. Trying to spend more time than ever to listen and have face-toface conversations are good ways to communicate and counteract bad effects: loss of ability in having conversations and decreasing intimacy with the loved one.
