This is class A stuff from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together:

If you send fond feelings or appreciation digitally, you protect yourself from a cool reception.  One of the emotional affordances of digital communications is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.
p. 198 , from Chapter 10: “No Need to Call”   in   Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other

This is one of those qualities of insight and writing that drew me to Sherry Turkle in the first place.  Reminds me  of the kind of reaction I had to Erving Goffman,  a noted social psychologist who wrote about the intricacies of public relationships,  such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Relations in Public.

Sending expressions of affection and/or appreciation IS DEFINITELY easier  in just about every instance.  And that tells me that in digital communications have come to serve us , just as she says,  as “emotional affordances” that we are “relieved” to have so that we can avoid/decrease/make “convenient” the pre-digital requirements.  So I wonder about all the other similar instances where we do this. 

I have felt the sting of a long time friend telling me,  after multiple attempts to try to contact him by phone,  tell me that “email is usually the best way to get a hold of him”.  And  I,  a bona fide digital geek/early adopter of all things technological, was taken aback.  My friend no longer shared, it seems,  the enjoyment of an occasional catch up call.  And that’s me,  a self-professed junkie of technology,  especially digital communication technology. 

It is stuff like this that will pull me in,  because I recognize it,  and this study of Turkle’s ,  which I admit has frequent “laundry lists” of complaints about the digital culture’s many habits,  bears fruit when she hones in on some of these recognizable, complexities  of digital relationships.  And I suppose that I am more forgiving of the seemingly curmudgeon-like passages because I am keenly aware of some lacking in that big swirly world of Social Networking;  and that I sense all t00 often a posturing going on in so many virtual places,  and am feeling a bit of that “loneliness” which sets in when there is a seeming lack of  being heard.  In the crowded spaces that increasingly constitute the norm online,  it’s easy to feel lost in the crowd.