While reading Turkle's Alone Together, there was this one passage that really caught my attention that may surprise you as you read it.
"As we saw with simpler robots, the children's attachments speak not simply to what the robots offer but to what children are missing. Many children in this study seem to lack what they need most: parents who attend to them and a sense of being important. Children imagine sociable machines as substitutes for the people missing in their lives. When the machines fail, it is sometimes a moment to revisit past losses. What we ask of robots shows us what we need" (87).
In this book, Turkle does many studies of different toys and robots on kids and adults, mostly kids though, who really start to care more about them than anything else in the world. They don't want to ever restart their system and believe they're "alive enough" to be human because these machines express many emotions to their owner. So then these children say that they're going to love them forever and never abandon them, which really opens up to what kind of life they're going through.
When I came across this passage in the book, it really made me feel heartbroken because these kids are confining in robots to replace the love that their parents didn't give to them. They feel like they're not important in their lives, so they suffer from loneliness and seek a friendship with these machines. They are already imagining robots replacing their friends and family who are missing from their lives, as Turkle stated above. That really saddens me because they're just kids, who need to feel loved and important like how we all feel whenever we're with the people in our lives, but thinking about this replacement is just terrible. If these parents aren't showing their kids attention because of their busy lives, what about our technology these days? Are they taking us away from something important too? Is technology really taking over our lives that we start to not focus on the people we care about?
- Chelsy Rodriguez
Unfortunately technology is taking away one very important skill, the lack of communication. If kids are continuing to be glued to their phone, they'll still continue to depend on it during the years of adolescents. I see people nowadays supposedly hanging out but all they do focus on is the phone and not conversing with each other.
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