Watch Sherry’s “Connected, but alone?” TEDTalk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html
Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships – our relationships with others, ourselves, and with technology itself. In this talk, “Connected, but alone?”, she states that “technology is so psychologically powerful, it not only changes what we do but also what we are”. She says, “I think we are setting ourselves up for trouble, trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves, and our capacity for self-reflection”.
“We are getting used to a new way of being alone together”, she mentions in another part of her speech. She raises a concern that modern technology and, more specifically social networks, helped us have connections but unfortunately not having conversations. “We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we are not comfortable. We are not so much in control.”
At the end of her talk she pointed out the need of reconsideration toward using social networks and “how we build it” and ended with a suggestion. “… [I suggest,] we develop a more self-aware relationship with technology, with each other and with ourselves”.
The reason that we shared this talk, which raises an important perspective of social networks, is that we are aware of this critical issue and we care about it. The core feature of our social network, Hive, is giving users the opportunity of expressing their interests and to initiating or join conversations about the things they like. The possibility of making events and adding people who would like to participate in that event helps people use technology to enjoy their real-world life. We would like to bring a platform for our users to find and express the things they love, together.