Twitter And Facebook Make Us Less Human

Subject: Twitter And Facebook Make Us Less Human Sun Jan 23, 2011 1:19 pm

Quote :: Facebook, Twitter and other staples of the social networking era can be seen as a modern form of madness, according to a leading sociologist.
American professor Sherry Turkle points to individuals' frantic online activity in her assessment of social networking 'madness', claiming sites like Twitter give people the illusion that they are able to communicate better.
In actual fact, she proposes, they are becoming increasingly isolated from real human interactions as technology dominates their lives and makes them 'less human'.

'We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,' she writes in new book Alone Together.
'A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological.'
Chatting on Stephen Colbert's TV comedy show, The Colbert Report, the academic revealed her shock at attending a funeral where mourners checked their iPhones for messages.
Turkle's observations come on the heels of the death of Simone Back, who posted a suicide note on her Facebook profile.
Despite being seen by more than 1,000 of her 'friends' on the site, none called for help, choosing instead to trade insults with each other on the 42-year-old's wall.

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