Alone Together By Sherry Turrkle Analysis

Everyone in the modern society is busy with their jobs and activities. Technology is supposed to help people reduce pressure, but it has a negative effect on them. In the essay “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli ”, Adam Gopnik’s daughter has an imaginary friend who is too busy to play with her. He realizes Ravioli, the imaginary friend, is a typical New Yorker who is busy all the time. Ravioli makes Gopnik reflect on how people live in New York. Technology makes peoples’ lives even busier. In the essay “Alone Together”, Sherry Turkle witnesses how technology changes connections and relationships between people, and influences the authentic lives in the end. Thus, although technology makes people busier, they are accustomed to busyness and technology

Olivia also wants to become independent and experience the outside busy life rather than the parks and playgrounds that she usually plays in, but she is too young to make it come true. Thus, she creates Ravioli with the special characteristic as busyness. Ravioli indicates people are very busy in the real world, while social robots indicate people are longing for companionship. When people feel alone, they always imagine robots are lonely as well. They try to comfort robots so they also get the sense of companionship in return. As Turkle says, “we can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need”(270). Sometimes we are not guaranteed to get what we desire most and this is when imagination comes into place. We think of our needs and satisfy them in their imaginary place. Thus, the discontentment in real life is easily healed due to the fact that pretty much everything is possible when people are simply imagining. In Turkle’s essay, as people’s imagination of craving for companionship appear more and more desperate, it inspires technology to advance to meet these needs. Humans say that they grant those unlively objects friendship, yet they are the ones craving for comfort. Likely to Turkle’s