Connected loneliness

As a prelude to her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, psychologist Sherry Turkle is back at TED, where she spoke for the first time in 1996, to elighten us about the impact of technology on our relationships...

This is definitely a welcome piece! For the past few years, I have indeed advocated on the importance of paying closer attention to the 'social' technology we continuously produce and innovate upon. Ensuring the continuous development of our emotional intelligence is as important as feeding our hunger for higher IQ, now more than ever...

Instead of building tools that are supposed to be an extension of our humanity, we have instead become an extension of the technology itself and turned ourselves into APIs, unable to fully function without the cloud.

Crackberry behaviors have long been adopted outside of the professional arena, feeding the fear of having real non-controlled person-to-person conversations (gateway to intimacy, oulala!). We are already contemplating machine-based companionship for our elderly days...

How many people are telling you "I would rather text than talk"?

When Turkle asked people "What's wrong with having a conversation?", the answer was "I'll tell what's wrong with having a conversation! It takes place in real time, and you can't control what you're gonna say"...

"Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be".

"Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology... over time we seem to stop caring...".

I would love to hear your thoughts, especially from my friends building the next Facebook or the ones who cringe when I dare to pick up the phone to call them... ;-)

More seriously, is teaching the next generation how to be occasionally alone and disconnected from the cloud really the best way to deal with this technology-enhanced shift?

My father, hero of benignant mien...

A fascinating story told by Sarah Kaminsky (with a moving surprise at the end of this video)...

P.S.: The title of this post was inspired by the first verse of Victor Hugo's poem After The Battle.

Manhattan NY 400 years ago: back to the future

I recommend you watch it until the end. Fascinating!

Elizabeth Gilbert, humility and genius

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Prey, Love, inspires us about to bring back sanity into the creative process, by redefining the concept of genius. In doing so, she allows us to share the daunting anguish she felt after her enormous success for potentially not being able to live up to it, and how she freed herself from this vertigo. I can certainly relate to that feeling, even outside of creative circumstances, especially after making it successfully to the US. You would think staring at any kind of oneself's achievements would make oneself proud, but in turn it opens that new door to anxiety when it comes to projecting 'what's next?'. Elizabeth helps us looking at it from a humble perpective. We are not solely responsible for our spikes of genius, neither are we for when genius does not show up. Either way, we have to show up for work (and make sure we have enough oil with us - cf. Parable about the Ten Maidens).