Wesley Chandler

ENG 110

Prof. Miller 

March 16, 2024

In a new age of fast technology, the attraction of mobile devices and online availability has given us different ways we interact with the world around us. While these new gadgets have undoubtedly brought many benefits to our society, they have also given us many new challenges to face as well. Specifically in our ability to maintain focus and have a meaningful human connection or conversation with one another. Sherry Turkle’s “Empathy Diaries” and Kevin Kelly’s “Technophilia” give us a strong insight into these problems we face. Turkle’s memoir takes a look into the idea between technology and empathy. Highlighting how digital distractions and virtual interactions can cause us to lose our capacity for genuine human connection. From another perspective, Kelly’s concept of technophilia shows us how society embraces technology and its extreme impact on various aspects of our lives. Both authors shed light on the ways in which technology has contributed to a loss of focus, changing our attention from the present moment, and hindering our ability to engage deeply with others and the world around us. Technology has affected our society in a negative way and will for the foreseeable future due to the many social problems it causes us.

One of the ways technology has changed our society is the anxiety and responses that people have if they were to lose their devices. In Kevin Kelley’s passage he gives us an example of how our younger generation reacts without technology. “Like all teens, my friend’s daughter tested the limits of her parents’ restrictions. For some infraction or another, they grounded her. And to reinforce the seriousness of her misconduct, they took away her mobile phone. Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn’t get out of bed. It was as if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had. Our creations are now inseparable from us.” It’s crazy to think how a child or someone who is truly addicted to technology can react if the device they cherish so much is taken away from them. From my point of view I have witnessed many situations in public when a child has had a fit over these devices as well. They will argue, cry or even try to hit their parents until they get what they want. Turkle also shows us examples of the social struggles people face in her passage “The Empathy Diaries”. She reflects on how the presence of smartphones and social media platforms has put a dent in our attention spans, making it challenging to stay fully engaged on the task at hand. Turkle shows this in her passage when she reflects back on moments where the people in her own life, including herself, struggle to maintain focus while communicating with others face-to-face interactions due to the temptations of checking notifications that they had or scrolling through their favorite app on social media. Turkle’s experiences underline how the easy access of technology has caused us to prioritize the immediate satisfaction of digital access over a very long and uninterrupted period of time to the people and experiences in front of us. This example shows us how technology’s intriguing  presence can erode our ability to focus on meaningful interactions, ultimately  decreasing our capacity for genuine empathy and connection.

Another way in which technology has started to cause us to lose our focus, as Kevin Kelly brings up in his passage “Technophilia”, is through the constant occurrence of information overload. Kelly brings up how the continuous search result of digital information and the nonstop overflow of new content can overwhelm an individual. Making a person be difficult to