A timely wake-up call urging us to cherish the intimacy of direct, unscripted communication.
The founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self explores the danger that text messaging is replacing in-depth, face-to-face conversation.
Divided attention has become the new norm as we shift our attention back and forth between our mobile devices and present companions whenever there is a lull in the conversation. “Fully present to each other, we learn to listen…[and] develop the capacity for empathy,” writes Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 2011, etc.), but “these days…we find ways around conversation.” Throughout this eye-opening book, the author cites some amazing statistics: “average American adults check their phones every six and a half minutes”; “Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day.” An even more insidious problem is that “online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation,” than speaking to one another. It affords the opportunity to edit what we want to say. Turkle shares an amusing anecdote of how the etiquette of text messaging requires the use of punctuation marks to indicate emotional tone. Adhering to the new norms, she texted her 21-year-old daughter with a brief message to set up a meeting for morning coffee, but her daughter was alarmed. By omitting punctuation, Turkle had inadvertently signaled distress. A more proper message would have been, “Hey…am swinging by the Square tomorrow :) on my way to a meeting later!!!!!...do you have time for an early breakfast??? Henrietta's Table? Not dorm food???” Online connections with friends and family can also change the tenor of communications, as we edit our posts to encourage positive feedback. More importantly, digital devices encroach on family time, and teenagers are not the only culprits. All too frequently, children complain of the difficulty of gaining their parents’ full attention. Turkle also wisely acknowledges the benefits we receive from our digital devices. “It is not a moment to reject technology,” she writes, “but to find ourselves.”
A timely wake-up call urging us to cherish the intimacy of direct, unscripted communication.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-555-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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