Jared's Journey in Designing for Community Participation

Mobile devices certainly offer the modern-day person a wide range of affordances.   Starting out with the brick phones (Zach Morris style) of the 80s and early-90s, to the unbreakable Nokia where you could really only play snake, to flip phones with the grainy cameras, and finally to the smart phones which we rely on for everything these days.   But are phones changing the way humans communicate?   What about in the classroom, are phones becoming major distractions in the academia setting?   Sherry Turkle would say yes. But she does mention some benefits of mobile devices in social settings.   Turkle would completely agree that phones are changing the way we communicate. Living in a world where “nearly 95% of Americans have at least one cell phone” (NBC Learn), mobile devices have certainly impacted us, and our daily routines, such as conversations, in a plethora of ways.    Turkle says “Eighty-nine percent of Americans say that during ...

As the reader continues into "Reclaiming Conversation," Turkle creates a metaphor where she compares humans of the 21st century becoming more and more entrenched in their phones with Thoreau's three chairs.  Thoreau says, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”  Turkle continues with this metaphor through the duration of the book until the end where she gives ways that we can reclaim conversation. With the first chair, solitude, Turkle describes the need for taking time for yourself and doing self-reflection.  The issue is, this self-reflection does not occur when we are constantly glued to our devices.  As the dopamine kicks in and we get the urge to check and see who is making our phone vibrate, we interrupt our time needed to give ourselves times to think.  Turkle describes solitude as being so vital because it "develops empathy and identity."  She then furthers her case of empathy with a middle school...

Take a minute, step back, and think about how much conversations have changed over the past two decades.  In the 90's we passed notes folded into perfect little triangles, we talked on walkie talkies, phones with cords, and we knew how to talk face-to-face with each other.  In the 2000's things began to change.  Millenials, like myself, were spending hours on instant messaging platforms (we would spend hours trying to get the perfect away message,) social media was starting to take off, and texting became our preferred method of conversation over talking on the phone or face-to-face.  Things changed even more in 2007 with the invention of the iPhone.  This gave us connectivity with everything with the swipe of your finger. As with a lot of things, with every pro of the smart phones comes cons.  While the technological affordances with smart phones are vast, Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT and author of "Reclaiming Conversation" would argue that we ar...