Alone Together 3-4-11
	As I was driving home from the annual National Association of Independent Schools conference last Friday, I was thinking about some of the fascinating talks I had heard when a segment on NPR’s Science Friday came on that was every bit as engaging. It was an interview with MIT professor Sherry Turkle who recently wrote Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology Than We Do From Each Other. Turkle’s comments focused on the impact that technologies such as texting, social media, and email are having on today’s children and teenagers. But her perspective was different. Instead of limiting her view to the impact of young people’s use of these technologies on themselves, she also focused on the way that parents’ use of such tools is impacting their children. In her view, texting, emailing, tweeting and the like have proven so seductive to parents that many kids are not getting the kind of undivided attention they need.          Turkle’s research suggests that scenes such as this are all too common: family dinners when most of the members are “somewhere” else as they text, email, or tweet away; kids trying to show off their moves at a playground yet parents only watching out of the corner of their eyes as they focus instead on their mobile devices; kids complaining about parents reading bedtime stories or pushing a swing with one hand as they email with another; mothers texting while breastfeeding. Turkle found that many children today are complaining that they don’t have enough of their parents’ attention and that many see mobile devices as competition. She wonders what impact this will have on children as they develop and as they seek the full attention they never had while they were young.          Turkle notes that today’s ubiquitous technologies allow users to bail out of conversations or contact with people at will -- as she says, “to text at funerals, during meals, while at meetings, and while conversing with others.” She worries that “too much communicating” draws adults away from connecting with the people who are most important to them and that responding to or composing hundreds of emails, texts, or tweets a day makes people too busy to think, be creative, deal with complex issues, or truly even do their work.          Turkle believes that recapturing “the sacred spaces” that exist in family life will be the first way that people can begin to reverse these trends. She suggests that adults should lead the way in putting all technology aside at least during these key times: at dinner, at kids’ bedtimes, at the playground, and when meeting children at the end of their school day. She said family members should also fight the urge, once the meal is complete, “to immediately return to their individual rooms to be with their devices.” She also found that many kids complained that while watching Sunday sports with their dads, they no longer have conversations between plays or commercials because the dads are so quick to pick up their smartphones.          Turkle also had much to say about the unique pressures that today’s technologies exert on adolescents and their place in the peer group. But what made her perspective unique is her view that the omnipresence of parental texting, emailing, tweeting, and Facebooking has much greater and broader impact on children than we have likely considered.