"Can You Hear Me Now" Analysis of Sherry Trukle's Essay

ur Today it is very easy to get tethered to electronics and communications that give you instant results. A quick check on networking site is becoming the norm verses actually picking up the phone and calling the person you are catching up with. Sherry Turkle, in her essay “Can You Hear Me Now?,” discusses points and personal experiences that persuade the reader that today’s society is becoming “more connected- or more alienated”, than ever before. Turkle utilizes the pathos appeal by using the rhetorical appeals of anecdotes, assertion, and reasoning. She relies heavily on the use of pathos throughout the entire article. This is important because it gets the reader involved in the story and sets the stage for the entire article. By the use of common sense and stories of experience she overall persuades the reader of her conclusion.

Turkle starts out her essay by using an anecdote about a personal experience at a conference in central Japan. She describes how the conference hall is set up for WI-FI and how the audience is more interested in using their personal electronics instead of paying attention to the speaker. In the beginning set of paragraphs she is creating a setting into which the reader will feel alone yet dependent on electronics for their lively hood. This is a good use of pathos because it sets the tone for the rest of the essay and Turkle states, “five troubles that try my tethered soul”. Turkle also states that, “I think of how Freud believed in the power of communities to control and subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun comes to mind: “virtuality and its discontents”. In that statement she uses a little bit of humor to lighten the tone up however, I am not convinced that all of the readers would see it as humor. At the end of the opening set of paragraphs Turkle makes an assertion by saying, “But tethered life is complex it I is hepful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people”. Here