Essential Question: What should we think about Turkle’s claim that social technologies are changing the conversations we have and thereby changing how we relate to one another as adults in ways that reduce empathy for one another and foster depression and social anxiety?
Write a paper about how social technologies like social media and internet-connected mobile phones both connect and disconnect us with consequences for the conversations we have in social, work, and educational settings. You’ll synthesize the work of Turkle, Konnikova, Henig, and your classmates, as well as your own ideas and experiences, to respond to Turkle’s argument that social technologies are changing the conversations we have and thereby changing how we relate to one another as adults in ways that reduce empathy for one another and foster depression and social anxiety.
In making your argument, draw on and develop your pre-writing and entering-the-conversation work done over the last several classes.
Your audience is a general reader who has NOT read Turkle, Henig, Konnikova or your classmate’s work.
Your purpose is to advance your own perspective (view or argument) in response to Turkle’s claim that social technologies are changing how we relate to one another as adults in ways that reduce empathy and foster depression and social anxiety. Synthesizing and responding to the ideas presented by Turkle, Henig, Konnikova and at least one classmate. Be sure to analyze relevant examples from their texts and your own experiences.
Expectations:
- Use this Google Docs template to set up your manuscript in MLA style.
- Write a paper of 1,000 words or more in which you develop your perspective on how social technologies, conversation, and adulthood.
- Briefly introduce Turkle’s diagnosis of the impact of social technologies on human relationships and the questions and issues she raises that you want to address in your essay.
- Introduce Henig and Konnikova when you first put their ideas in conversation with Turkle’s.
- Incorporate quotes from Turkle, Henig and Konnikova and at least 1 from one of your classmate’s pre-writing.
- Engage Turkle’s idea that embracing authentic face-to-face conversations is a cure for depression and social anxiety.
- Incorporate a least one moment in your essay in which you “play the believing game,” write about the merits of someone’s idea you find difficult to accept, and respond to those merits with complicating points of your own (or from one of your classmates). PRO TIP: Use Barclay’s Formula and Okay, But templates to help structure this.
- Plant a naysayer in your essay.
- Use voice markers and signal verbs to mark shifts from one voice to another.
- Use pivot words (transitions), pointing words, and repeated key words and phrases to connect the parts of your paragraphs and paper together.
- Make the Who Cares? and So What? moves.
- Document your sources using MLA style, with signal phrases, in-text parenthetical references, and a Works Cited page to signal your use of other writers’ words.
Information needed to write a MLA-style citation for “The Flight From Conversation”
Author: Sherry Turkle Chapter title: “The Flight from Conversation” Book title: Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age Publisher: Penguin Press Date Published: 2015
