Summary Of Eliminating The Human By Sherry Turkle

Esther Akerewusi

Ms. Asselin

ENG4U

23 April 2018

Thesis: Advancement in technology has made it easier for people to discard their various relationships just as they discard replaceable objects.

Annotated Bibliographies:

Byrne, David. "Eliminating the Human." MIT Technology Review, vol. 120, no. 5, Sep/

Oct2017, pp. 8-10. EBSCOhost, library.brontestudents.ca/databases. In the article, Eliminating the Human, the author takes up the impact of technology on social interaction especially that of the isolation of us humans. The author gives thirteen examples showing evidence of technology with an initiative to remove as much human interaction as possible just for the sake of simplicity and efficiency. For instance, the author’s local CVS

Turkle speaks about how the use of social technology can cause us to ignore the people around us. She states that the use of social technology has caused a great lack of tolerance for being alone especially for children who need solitude and makes it harder to form relationships. She also claims that people start to objectify others and the use of social technology could even disrupt families too. She makes reference to how dinner used to be an utopian deal in the past but presently, Facebook is the new utopia. Turkle claims that it has devalued empathy as people are now okay with robot companions and these interactions are dead ends. The problems she identifies include the development of an autonomous self, crowdsourcing decisions and also difficulties in getting into any relationships. The resolution she came up with covered having sacred spaces strictly for conversation, asserting our dominant culture and she also has hopes that the children would lead us out of

The President of a major technology company interviewed in this article gave two reasons as to why she was worried about the people who sat right next to each other communicating through emails rather than personally confronting each other. Firstly, e-mails do not portray a person’s tone or feeling although they pass across messages quite rapidly in an efficient manner. Also, the use of emails to communicate rather than have a personal confrontation gives room for people to avoid any interpersonal relationships at the workplace. The article further discusses the misuse of teleconferencing and how occasionally, one-on-one meetings are actually the most fitting options to settle issues that would not result in any later misunderstandings. This misuse of technology causes the author to envision a generation where social skills are