Narcissism in the Age of Technology

The sweeping celebration of social media for their role in the re-creation of community bonds as well as for the political mobilizations in Iran and the Arab nations has generated a series of critical responses. Evgeny Morozov’s (2011) attack on the myth of free information and its liberating potential and Nicholas Carr’s (2010) concerns over the way the net is fostering distraction and ignorance are indicative of a growing critical trend. Surprisingly, the latest installment in this series of critiques comes from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Once an advocate for the decentralization of identity in virtual communities, Turkle appears to be skeptical about our overreliance on technology for care, communication, and self-representation.

Turkle implicitly attempts to recontextualize Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) in a technologically defined society. Whereas Lasch studied American culture through relevant psychological theories for the identification of personal-growth lifestyles as responsible for the culture of narcissism, Turkle turns on the social aspects of technology. Within this context, narcissism is viewed not as a pathological egoism but as a weak self-understanding that requires constant external validation. Structured in two parts, the book combines ethnographic research and interviews with media users and industry insiders and is annotated with the psychological insights of Sigmund Freud, David Riesman, and Erik Erikson and with popular culture references.

The first part of Alone Together tackles the popularity of social robots. Robots are imagined and often expected to perform social roles by substituting human presence. By providing a genealogy of the robotic movement that starts with the first artificial intelligence experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and concludes with commercially available robots such as Furby, AIBO, Paro, and Aiko, Turkle demonstrates how robots act as therapists, companions, caretakers, and sexual partners. The objective of Alone Together is not a detailed analysis of the advancements regarding the robotic movement. Instead, the book focuses on people’s responses and emotional attachment to robots. Such responses are generated not by just another human-made form of artificial life prevalent in cinema and literature but by a technological other that we consider to be useful, friendly, and occasionally equal to us. Referring to AIBO, the robot dog developed by Sony, Turkle points out that children were in the most practical terms trying to figure how a robot can be good for them. “Here, AIBO ...offers an alternative, one that sidesteps the necessity of death.... With robot pets, children can give enough to feel attached, but then they can turn away” (60). Similarly, companionship and caretaking have been transmogrified by the use of robots. Owing to demographic pressures and lack of labor, the introduction of robots for care has been presented as a necessity in technologically advanced countries. Robots are designed to deliver medication, provide domestic assistance, and monitor people’s safety. Quite often these caring machines are assigned to people who suffer from dementia or are mentally and physically challenged. When interviewees ask, “Don’t we have people for these jobs?” Turkle reflects on the essential human capacity to put ourselves in the place of others. As soon as humans lose this ability they seek the help of robots. “As we learn to get the ‘most’ out of robots we may lower our expectations of all relationships, including those with people” (125).

The second part of the book deals with life online. What started as a tool for the organization of complex data environments has developed into a connectivity regime. Under this regime people feel secure and efficient, but there is no distinction between friendship and fandom, work and leisure, virtual and real, attention and distraction. Turkle identifies two kinds of transition here. First, maintaining an online profile and social contacts has ceased to be a leisurely activity, and it is...