Connected but alone? Highlights from our Live Conversation with Sherry Turkle

Yesterday, TED2012 speaker Sherry Turkle held a 1-hour Live Conversation around her new TEDTalk “Connected but alone?” She asked the TED.com community this question: “How has digital technology changed the kind of communications you have with your friends, family and coworkers?”

Here are some highlights of the back-and-forth:

Vanessa Borg : “Changes in digital technology has not only helped us but it has hindered us at the same time. Whereas up to until a couple of years ago you could enjoy a dinner with a person knowing that you have their complete attention, nowadays you know that as soon as their bag/ pocket/ jacket starts to vibrate they have a need to check what has happened. Ultimately I believe that what we are trying to achieve is social acceptance from our own social circle. Nowadays this acceptance is measured either by how many people like your status or by how many people share your image.”

Sherry Turkle: Dear Vanessa . . . I think you point to a really important point! The metric of who one is cannot be measured by how many Facebook friends who have or how many people like your status or follow you on Twitter. Yet now we have these metrics and they can be oppressive. This is such an important point!” Read more >>

Clayton Papillon:  Sherry, this conversation has answered a few questions I had after I watched your talk. However, you mentioned in your talk to take more time for yourself and have more face-to-face conversations/interactions. For the most part technology has allowed us to take more time for ourselves because you can respond to a question/text/email instantly. If we were to always engage face-to-face (like we used too) we would lose a lot of valuble time to complete other tasks and have more face-to-face conversations with those we adore. Also, your talk seemed to pin technology and communication in a negative light while ignoring the brilliance of it. As we have realized in the last few years more people in this world actually have a voice now because of the way technology allows us to communicate. Information through social media has the power to change the world. Through this realization I find that sometimes I have more in common with a person in South America then I do with my own neighbour, among other things.  Historically speaking, communication has limited the way civilizations interact, do business, and develop. Not to mention it has only served those who can communicate or are listened too. We are now living in a world interconnected by social media and although there might be small negative impacts, it surely brings a large positive light to our global civilization.Thank you for your conversation! :) “

Sherry Turkle: Clayton, I think you misunderstand me. I am very positive. But I think when we ignore what hasn’t gone right, we do so at our peril. That is my position. So, I honor what has gone brilliantly! But some things are not going so well. And I don’t want us to lose sight of them. I don’t want it to be an either/or thing.”  Read more >>

Samuel Cook : ” I also find that while digital communication helps us hide from the audible and physical side of the conversation, it reveals a different kind of confrontation. When people can see your words they can judge spelling and ability to express yourself legibly. This has a few impacts. I tend to judge people’s intelligence on how well they can spell now, and while it might be inspiring to converse with somebody who can speak with beautiful flow, that doesn’t always convert in text. It also has brought to the surface a huge problem with spelling that may not have been addressed on such a large scale in the past, but unfortunately when weaknesses are unearthed they are often justified and glamorized to hide them in plain sight. We are allowing these problems to grow on a large scale in the upcoming generation.” Read more >> 

You can access the full conversation here >>

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Are we alone? Join SETI Live to help answer that question …

Are we alone? It’s a question with which we are all familiar. Jill Tarter says she started asking it “as a little girl, walking along the deserted and dark beaches of Manasota Key, Florida, holding on to my father’s hand.” She went on to advanced studies in engineering, physics and astrophysics, to pursue a career searching for intelligent life beyond Earth. But even those of us who haven’t chosen this search as our life’s work may have an urge to be part of the discovery. SETI Live! is a chance to join in.

As Jill Tarter writes, “[SETI Live!] is an experiment to see whether an army of citizen scientists, working with data streaming from the Allen Telescope Array, can recognize, remember and classify patterns, often multiple patterns, well enough to see if there is anything that could be an ET signal requiring immediate follow-up. We don’t know whether it will work. At a minimum, we may learn enough about how humans try to work through the complex mixture of detected signals so that we can teach SonATA (the SETI computer system at the telescope array) how to do the job in the future. Or we may conclude that these bands of data must remain unusable, but — having solved the technical problems of allowing citizen scientists to work in real time — we may have set the stage for yet other, unrelated applications. We may come to understand that, with clever scheduling, we can observe some of these frequency bands when the sources of interfering signals aren’t in the sky. And of course, we may find what we are looking for — we may find a signal from a distant technology that we would otherwise have overlooked.”

To celebrate the launch of SETI Live!, the cable channel Science has organized a month of programming called “Are We Alone? Month.” As part of this ongoing programming, tonight at 10pm EDT, experts including Nick Sagan and Jill Tarter come together to explore how alien life might communicate with Earth in the debut of “Alien Encounters.” SCIENCE concludes this month of all-new programming by presenting firsthand accounts from NASA astronauts who witnessed the mysterious with “NASA’s Unexplained Files” on Tuesday, March 27, at 10pm EDT.

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Learning to Sit Alone, in a Quiet Empty Room

‘All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’ ~Blaise Pascal

Think about some of the problems of our daily lives, and how many of them would be eased if we could learn to sit alone, in a quiet empty room, with contentment.

If you’re content to sit alone quietly, you don’t need to eat junk food, to shop on impulse, to buy the latest gadget, to be on social media to see what everyone else is talking about or doing, to compare yourself to others, to make more money to keep up with the Joneses, to achieve glory or power, to conquer other lands or wage war, to be rude or violent to others, to be selfish or greedy, to be constantly busy or productive.

You are content, and need nothing else. It solves a lot of problems.

Can you sit alone in an empty room? Can you enjoy the joy of quiet?

Most of us have trouble sitting alone, quietly, doing nothing. We have the need to do something, to check our inboxes and social media, to be productive. Sitting still can be difficult if you haven’t cultivated the habit.

I’ve been learning. In the morning, as my coffee is brewing, I sit. Even for a few minutes, at first, it is instructive. You learn to listen to your thoughts, to be aware of your urges to do something else, to plan and set goals. You learn to watch yourself, but to just sit still and not act on those urges. You learn to be content with stillness.

You learn to savor the quiet. It’s something most of us don’t have, quiet, and it takes some getting used to. When we’re driving our cars or out exercising or eating or working, we have music playing or we talk with people or we have the television on. Quiet can be amazing, though, because it helps us calm down, contemplate, slow down to savor the emptiness.

An empty room, too, is a luxury. I try to empty my room of clutter, so that it’s fairly bare. That leaves only me, and the room is a blank slate ready to be filled with me, my creativity, my silence. I love a spartan room.

Being alone is another pleasure we too often neglect. When we are alone, we go on the Internet or TV to see what else is going on, what others are doing or saying, instead of just being alone. This isolation is a necessary thing, that allows us to find ourselves, to learn to be content with little instead of always wanting more.

Can you practice being alone, being still, being quiet? Just a little at first, then perhaps a bit more. Listen, watch, learn about yourself. Find contentment. Need nothing more.

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The Delights of Delegation: Why Going it Alone Doesn’t Work

Photo credit: Stephen Wilson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Whether you’re a high-flying manager tasked with leading your team into battle in the latest big company mission, or looking to get a passion project off the ground, falling into that most counterproductive of traps and trying to do everything yourself can be all too easy.

After all, these projects are your babies; their success — or failure — ultimately lies with you. People, be it your employers, colleagues, friends or family are counting on you to take this on and emerge triumphant.

When the pressure is on like this, most of us have fallen victim at one time or another to the belief that doing everything ourselves is the best option.

Yet by enlisting the help of others and putting your absolute faith in them, you’ll achieve much more than you ever could on your own.

The Oxford English Dictionary, describes the process of micromanagement as

“control[ing] every part , however small, of (an enterprise or activity):”

And there are certainly arguments for this oft-maligned style of management.

It could be that we trust ourselves not to screw up more than we trust our team or that we selfishly hope most of the praise and rewards will come our way once a project is successful. We might not even be consciously aware that we are micromanaging; we’re simply so stressed out about a big project that it consumes our every waking thought and manifests in a need to control every little detail.

Though the process of micromanaging others is problematic, even worse is instead going solo and undertaking every single task by ourselves. Simply knuckling down and getting the work done can sometimes seem easier than getting a team involved and sharing both the hard work and rewards, but it rarely is.

The negatives of both micromanaging others and trying to take on everything ourselves far outweigh any benefits of doing so. Wielding complete control over any project can be stressful. We worry about every task, lose sleep over the most trivial of details and become agitated and angry to the point where we snap at those around us. Even worse, trying to complete everything on our own can have a detrimental impact on our health and relationships as we work round the clock, skip meals and forgo time spent with loved ones to meet deadlines.

Eliminate a lot of that stress by delegating tasks to others and having complete faith that they’ll do a good job for you. It’s that faith which will ultimately ensure a successful project.

When you let go of the reins and let others know you trust them, they’re likely to feel empowered. Empowered people feel like a valuable member of a team and any number of surveys will tell you that employees who feel valued produce better work.

At work, it’s important to remember that your employees have been hired for their skills and expertise. Use them! Let people focus on what they’re good at and they’ll deliver better results than you could if you were simultaneously trying to juggle an infinite number of other tasks at the same time. Even if you’re only working on a personal project, put your ego aside and look around you; you’ll probably find people you know who can complete certain tasks better than you. Get in touch and ask for help!

What’s more, when you empower people to make decisions and deliver the goods on the smaller tasks, you free yourself up to concentrate on the proverbial bigger picture and isn’t that what we’d all really like to be doing?

Chris Skoyles holds various roles in journalism, marketing, digital media and events management. Throughout all these, his one constant obsession is using technology and creative ideas not simply to get things done, but to get them done well. Chris can be found on Twitter and he also blogs about his work, projects and passions at www.chrisskoyles.co.uk

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