Analysis Of The Flight From Conversation By Sherry Turkle

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In the article, The Flight from Conversation featured in The New York Times, author Sherry Turkle pleads to technology user to look up from their phones, iPads and computers. She explains just how harmful technology can be to our social aspects of life. Turkle makes great use of ethos and pathos by showing her credibility and connecting herself to the audience. And although Turkle does make some solid arguments, I feel as if her extreme lack of logos diminishes her entire argument.
Turkle does represent great credibility from the start. First, she is writing for The New York Times, a very well known and well thought of news paper. She always went to Harvard and early on in her article states, “Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies …show more content…

Although, her constant fail to back up her claims continues to hurt her overall credibility and persuasion tactics. Another example of this would be, “A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, ““Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation”” (Turkle pg. 2). This quote is very relevant and could have strongly supported Turkle’s main claim but, she leaves out some very crucial information. For example, my first thoughts were, “who is this 16-year-old boy? Why should we as an audience find this teenager to be a credible source? And why does what this one boy say even need to be taken seriously?” If Turkle would have first stated something along the lines of, “95% of 12-to-17-year-old in Britain have a mobile phone and 87 percent of those have smartphones” (Butler pg. 2). And then later decided to use this quote from this unknown 16-year-old boy the quote would have seemed much more relevant and given some credibility to her and the argument as well. This is true because it would have helped Turkle’s overall argument by showing a statistical number of the children who are being effected by this technology phenomenon and why it is important to try and prevent any further damage to these social …show more content…

She clearly stated that technology users need to stop focusing so much on technology and focus more on face-to-face conversation before it is too late. According to James Butler in How is Technology Destroying Our Society, “76 percent of the world’s email accounts are for personal use, 24 percent are for business use” (Butler pg. 2). To go along with this statistic, “There are 2.5 billion people in the world who use email. And this will rise to 2.8 billion by 2018” (Butler pg. 2). This may seem like just another statistic and it may be thought of as not a big deal or you may even question why does this matter to me, Turkle explains, “Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text”” (Turkle pg. 4). Our thoughts on technology have changed drastically. Technology has gone from being something we have to something we

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