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comment by veen
veen  ·  2353 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 18, 2017

Where to start... I jotted this quote down, which might be a good starting point:

    Digital communication gives us the illusion of companionship, without the demands of friendship; it gives us the illusion of progress, without the demands of action.

The focal point of her book, in my opinion, is that she describes our generation's 'flight from conversation'. She doesn't beat around the bush: we've willfully eroded and replaced valuable, face-to-face conversation in favor of easier, more comfortable but less meaningful digital communication.

She uses a bunch of archetypes to hit her point home, for example when she describes the friend group where most people are glued to their phones most of the time. Or when she describes the 'always-connectedness' of highschoolers. Or when she describes teenagers unwilling to call because that conversation might not be perfect, preferring the comfort of a well-crafted email instead. Or the girl demanding that her parents stop using their phones and just talk to her.

I am so guilty of the behaviours she describes. Obviously not to the extent she describes, but to an extent that I'm ashamed of. Because I bought into the aforementioned illusions of digital communications, the book felt like someone pulled the rug out from under me. As an example, I always loathed and avoided phone calls like a lot of my peers. So even though I've been living out of the house for years now, I've never called my family to just talk about how things are going. That was probably the first thing I drastically changed — I now call my parents at least once a week, usually more.





kleinbl00  ·  2353 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If you really wanna feel bad, read Alone Together. I feel that Reclaiming Conversation was her attempt, per her publisher's request, to sketch out a silver lining of the very dark cloud she saw forming over society.

ButterflyEffect  ·  2353 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm going to be reading that immediately following this book. I think.

veen  ·  2353 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have read Alone Together a year or two ago but wasn't as impressed with it as I am with this one. If I remember correctly, she made some interesting points about how we interact with technology, e.g. our ability to do the heavy lifting when humanizing AI and robots. What made you feel so bad when reading it?

kleinbl00  ·  2353 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The inevitable drive towards a technology that, by her own investigation, we are hopeless to humanize and her steady qualification of her studies over the past 30 years indicating that human empathy has declined in lock-step with our adoption of technology.