Dalton Conley asks when a creature is deemed alive enough for people to experience an ethical dilemma if it is distressed.
Taken together, the Web, social media, cell phones, peer-based production models, and ubiquitous computing have created a new social landscape. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found, for example, that on average, children ages 8 to 18 now spend 7 hours and 38 minutes a day using electronic media. As technology advances, more of our gadgets talk to us, and kids learn to navigate among those gadgets from an increasingly tender age.
In Alone Together, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sociologist Sherry Turkle argues — as she has in her earlier books The Second Self and Life on the Screen — that these new technologies rescript social relations between people (and between people and things). She tries to walk the fine line between technosocial ludditism and evangelicalism, arguing that sometimes social networking and mobile and robotics technologies serve to bring us together while at other times they drive us apart. Ultimately, she concludes — as does the media — technology theorist Clay Shirky — that this is an unfinished process that future generations will have to work out.
