Sherry Turkle's Essay 'Can You Hear Me Now?'

Can You Hear Me Now?” Technology has worsened our world by being a springboard for many people today in the corporate world all the way to the schools. It has made us all become dependent and use computers and the internet for almost everything. Technology is contrary to nature because of the steel that is being mined from the earth and the metals that are dug from the ground. Technology should not be taken completely but limited to the ones who abuse it. People who are in the corporate world should be the ones with legal access to the technology due to their nature of work. Our world has become dependent on technology to an unnatural level; therefore we should limit access to technology and use what we have. Sherry Turkle begins her essay “Can You Hear Me Now?” with appreciation to technology that gave people connections and isolations. The author believes that the power of communication takes control over humans and challenge them by using a psychoanalytic pun “virtuality and its restlessness” to engage in our minds. According to Turkle, business people today lose touch with their human nature by working around the clock with technical devices they cannot afford to lose connection with their communication devices. The author also wrote about how new technology in communication leads people’s souls by creating avatars
that could deploy them into virtual lives. Nevertheless, Turkle mentions in her essay that a new communication culture stole people’s leisure time, even the time to think uninterrupted for themselves because of their communication addiction. Technology influenced people’s minds by making them addicted to electronic devices; laptops, cell phones, or Black Berry that navigate their lives as chained slaves who can lose their minds when the device crashes.
Moreover, communication devices damage teenagers’ lives too, by not allowing them to take responsibility when they try to find their own space in the society. Cell phones, with a parent on speed dial, make them think differently about themselves. Also, on top of this, there is the technology that sharing thoughts and feelings instantly with others. Communication devices, Sherry Turkle wrote, lead to virtuality and its
discontents.
Websites such as Facebook and Twitter had been detected by secret government agencies and this mental state of mind makes people exposed to political abuse according to the author. When students decide to give up their privacy to websites, people receive more validation than abuse by government agencies. Turkle used a metaphor to explain the real tenacity of sneaking government agencies as a panopticon prison where the guard stands at the center of a prison room and restrain prisoners by watching them all the time. Communication devices such as cell phones, beepers, etc. have become the main resource for people ignoring communication in our society. Things are no longer simple. There are relations to objects like the answering machine or voice-recognition procedures that people have to deal with when they are communicating with each other.