ok,  is Harkin different from Turkle?:

While Harkin was no pure cyber-sceptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well as pleased about the new technological era.

so far,  haven’t seen the same “disclaimer” forwarded on Turkle’s behalf,  probably because the writer of this piece has actually read some of Harkin’s other  works

Turkle’s book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter.

Is it?

I believe the context of where Turkle says “put it down”,  is in situations like the mother who was glued to her phone when she picked up her daughter.  So yeah,  to that Mom and all of us who “glue ourselves” to some remote location/person/news and effectively remove  ourselves from those around us (and remember or realize,  this daughter was none too happy about her mother being glued to her phone.  It stuck in her memory. Is this really a matter we want to dismiss as “Luddite?”   The daughter to whom Turkle was getting this account had a phone herself,  and was heavily involved in Social Media. No,  attention matters.  When it wanes,  and technology helps us divert it,  it is deserving of our questioning and asking if something isn’t being lost.  It’s not that it’s all technology’s fault.  It is our relationship to technology,  and what role we give it permission to have,  that is in question here. 

and

"We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes.

There seems to me to be a difference between admitting that we have misused,  or been diminished,  and eschewing the technology.  If technology EVER diminishes us,  does this also mean that to admit this is tantamount to saying it can never do any good?  There seems to me to be a techno-utopian insistence here that “we’ve got it under control”.  (The environment comes to mind here,  and the reluctance  of people to ponder the scientific evidence;  if Turkle has psychoanalytic evidence,  why can’t we think about “techno-reform” (in tech terms,  this would be “tweak” or “rewrite/recode/revise”

I am an evangelist for the possibilities of technology.  Always have been.  Is anybody going to try to level that accusation at me?  Nobody who knows me can do that convincingly.  Maybe that would make me a more effective voice for stipulating to the fact that technology CAN and DOES go awry,  and bring forth unintended consequences. 

Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled in silence. "We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers. They were just keeping to themselves," Kist said.

Yeah,  USUALLY.  But there were plenty of examples of things that are rarer still because of our being “elsewhere”. I have noticed and felt loss re: the increasing reticence of friends to talk on the phone,  or to meet in person.  I can’t imagine that I am the only one to feel the sense of exclusion from the lives of others when it is made abundantly clear that “we should use email or text” to handle the bulk of our contact  with each other.  Nobody says that overtly,  but there is a ramping up of that kind of “understanding between us”;  the “etiquette” has been exported to the “netiquette”.  If I,  an early adopter,  can feel this loss,  how much stronger is this sense of depersonalization and loneliness affect those who are not as comfortable with technology?