The illusion of companionship?

14May12

A friend came across this TED presentation given by Sherry Turkle, a cultural anthropologist who has made a fair bit of name out of being quite a perpetrator that technology has now come to function as as “illusion of companionship”. I find this problematic as she seems to suggest a strict and inflexible binary view that technology either separates or binds us together.

In the second chapter of my thesis, I also wrote about and  acknowledges that ICTs are channels through which intimacies take on new meanings, and the practices required to sustain them are changing as well; and this is true because all these ICTs have material properties that govern the ways they can be used. While I agree with some of the changing patterns of communication brought by technologies, I don’t think they are necessarily taking “us places that we don’t want to go” (this is cited from the presentation). I think the interaction between human intimacies and technologies are more complex – I don’t pretend to know what exactly  is going on, but I believe the entanglements between technology and society are more contingent and temporary, if you like, fleeting but not necessarily non-enduring.

So in my chapter, I also find young people (student migrants in my case) increasingly forging close, and dependent, relationships with ICTs. But instead of making a similar claim as Sherry over what technologies do to intimacies, I am saying something about the nature of the production of intimacies in and through ICTs. So here I am trying (quite hard) to avoid the view that technology and society are clashing entities which are stable in and of themselves, but rather like ‘symbians’ (kind of like Donna Haraway’s idea) that co-constitute each other.

Technologies and humans interact on a contingent and temporary rhythm. My own findings include, for example, how one switches from calling home frequently to text messaging for its swiftness; or use Skype instead because it allows you to see moving images instead of just text and pictures; or even when the labour of maintaining these communications become ‘troublesome’ then there is the Facebook as a storehouse of personal information that can be accessed by families or friends to at least enable a sense of connectivity.

I ended off the chapter with the conclusion, if it makes sense in the context of what I have written here:

“Instead of viewing these social relationships as stable entities rubbing against each other in order to become ‘intimate’, they are relational and mutually constitutive in their production. I suggest that transnational intimacies are sustained in and through the coordination and management of different social relationships, within their specific modes of spatio-temporal (re)production. Student migrants are reflexive individuals who respond to the demands of space, time and other contingencies to ensure continuity and coherence in social reproduction – whether in the form of subjective well-being, personal identities, or people and relationships that matter to them.”

 

For a video of the TED presentation given by Sherry Turkle:

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