"Alone Together" Relevant texts

ROMANCING DE MACHINE : TWO STORIES

"Part Two, "Networked," turns to the online life as it reshapes the self I acknowledge the many 

positive things that the network has to offer — enhancing friendship, family connections, education, 

commerce, and recreation. The triunphalist narrative of the Web is the reassuring story that people 

want to hear and that technologists want to tell. But the heroic story is not the whole story. In virtual 

words and conputer games, people are flattened into personae. On social networks, people are 

reduced to their profiles. On our mobile devices, we often talk to each other on the move and with 

little disposable time — so little, in fact, that we communicate in a new language of abbreviation in 

which letters stand for words and emoticons for feelings. We don't ask the open ended "How are 

you?" Instead, we ask the more limited "Where are you?" and "What's up?" These are good questions 

for getting someone's location and making a sinple plan. They are not so good for opening a dialogue 

about conplexity of feeling. We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone: in 

intimacy, new solitudes. "

DEGREES OF SEPARATION 

"Sociologist David Riesman, writing in the mid-1950s, remarked on the American turn from an inner- to an other- directed sense of self.- Without a firm inner sense of purpose, people looked to their neighbors for validation. Today, cell phone in hand, other-directedness is raised to a higher 

power. At the moment of beginning to have a thought or feeling, we can have it validated, almost 

prevalidated.

Technology does not cause but encourages a sensibility in which the validation of a 

feeling becomes part of establishing it, even part of the feeling itself

I have said that in the psychoanalytic tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people 

who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support.- It cannot tolerate the 

complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting 

off what it needs, what it can use. So, the narcissistic self gets on with others by dealing only with 

their made-to-measure representations. These representations (some analytic traditions refer to them 

as "part objects," others as "selfobjects") are all that the fragile self can handle. We can easily 

imagine the utility of inanimate companions to such a self because a robot or a computational agent 

can be sculpted to meet one's needs. But a fragile person can also be supported by selected and 

limited contact with people (say, the people on a cell phone "favorites" list). In a life of texting and 

messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you 

need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else. 

Again, technology, on its own, does not cause this new way of relating to our emotions and other 

people. But it does make it easy. Over time, a new style of being with each other becomes socially 

sanctioned. In every era, certain ways of relating come to feel natural. In our time, if we can be 

continually in touch, needing to be continually in touch does not seem a problem or a pathology but an 

accommodation to what technology affords. It becomes the norm. "

THE AVATAR OF ME 

This kind of identity work can take place wherever you create an avatar. And it can take place on 

social-networking sites as well, where one's profile becomes an avatar of sorts, a statement not only 

about who you are but who you want to be. Teenagers make it clear that games, worlds, and social 

networking (on the surface, rather different) have much in common. They all ask you to conpose and 

project an identity. Audrey, sixteen, a junior at Roosevelt, a suburban public high school near New 

York City, is explicit about the connection between avatars and profiles. She calls her Facebook 

profile "my Internet twin" and "the avatar of me."