Faith explains how platforms like YouTube and online articles have helped her think critically and learn more deeply.
Turkle also acknowledges that technology can be used for learning and connection but warns that we must be intentional about how we use it.
Faith argues that social media has weakened her attention span and made deep focus feel “unappealing.”
Turkle discusses how digital distractions rob people of the ability to reflect, be alone with their thoughts, or engage in deep work. She calls this the loss of solitude.
Faith describes how apps like TikTok are engineered for addiction and keep users hooked with short, dopamine-releasing content.
Turkle similarly warns that these platforms are designed to keep us engaged, not enriched. She explores the ethical consequences of tech companies monetizing attention.
Faith reflects on how the internet can cause people to follow the herd, and how opinions can feel swayed by popular consensus rather than logic
Turkle believes technology has created a culture of performance over authenticity. People seek validation and avoid disagreement, reducing genuine dialogue and self-reflection.
Faith touches on the idea that people no longer think independently or deeply, which weakens their ability to engage in meaningful discourse
Turkle’s The Empathy Diaries focuses heavily on how tech is reducing face-to-face interaction, making us less empathetic. She argues that we’re losing the art of conversation, which is essential for understanding others.

800 Word

Katie McGuire
Professor Miller
English Composition 110
22 April 2025
In The Empathy Diaries, Sherry Turkle shares her own experience from researching trying to make sense of the emotional and social cost of how much we rely on technology for our daily life and communication. Her research challenges us readers to think about the ways technology has affected us. She shows us the ways of how it is making us unable to have real human connection and think for ourselves. This topic also shows throughout first year students Faith Santiago’s and Tyler’s Pelletier cases. They both discuss the impact modern technology has had on their behavior, their attitudes, and how they connect with other human beings. Faith brings up technology’s two-way street in which technology makes information accessible to us, but in doing so it harms our intellectual engagement at the same time. Whereas Tyler explains how constantly using technology has made it harder to deal with real life relationships and experiences. Through Turkle, Faith and Tyler we see a constant worry about losing ourselves through technology and the features that keep advancing. They all show that technology is giving us more connectivity but quietly damaging the very human connection that it is supposed to be growing as we mature. Not only is our reliance on technology changing what we do, it’s changing who we are, and not necessarily for the better.
Turkle, Faith, and Tyler all discuss the fact that possibly one of the greatest impacts of technology is how it has progressively harmed our capacity to think by ourselves and in detail. Turkle writes in The Empathy Diaries about how the research she did uncovered signs like us students who were once able to concentrate for hours, are now constantly distracted and emotionally unavailable. This is through something she says happens as a result from our excessive use of screens. She states, “We find ways of getting around talk. We camouflage ourselves from one another even while we are continually linked to one another” (Turkle). Turkle is not just discussing our tendency to text more than speak. She is talking about our loss in human connection and the way we interact with others. Faith also reflects this problem when she states, “These apps have conditioned me into preferring the way that they release information, because the more I rely on them for entertainment or as a time filler, the more they profit.” Both Turkle and Faith speak of the cycle we are experiencing. The more easily content can be accessed with less effort, the less we think critically or reflectively. Turkle calls it an empathy crisis, and Faith calls it an intellectual independence breakdown. Devices meant for ourselves are now conditioning us to need speed and ease instead of reflection and depth. As technology reduces our patience for effort, we begin to lose something essential. It is harming our ability to learn, connect, and belong in the world.
A common theme through the three pieces is how technology makes things more accessible, taking away authenticity in our work and interactions too. Tyler’s essay is stating this point of how he describes how AI writing programs and autocorrect has harmed his level of confidence in his own skills: “This tool has been a virus of the human brain, eliminating the need to think for themselves.” His point regarding his mother utilizing AI to produce report cards for students is showing how even the most people-oriented profession can lose touch with reality by using the work of feeling and thinking to machines. Turkle would likely agree. She warns that “what computers deliver is not intimacy but the illusion of intimacy” (Turkle). Each time, one feels that something valuable is being lost. She says, “Technology that is of no intellectual interest to its consumers tends to have a purpose of making people dependent upon it in return for maximum return.” We are losing our significance which is much greater than losing our ability. The moment technology comes in to do something with our thinking or feeling, the more efficient, but less human, we will be.
Though Turkle discusses in detail the emotional loneliness brought about by technology, Tyler offers an intimate approach through his narrative of how behavior on the Internet has affected his social anxiety. He states, “In real, non-technological interaction, it’s very difficult to be vulnerable because there’s so much uncertainty.” His discomfort with situations, like delivering a speech or attending a party alone, is typical of a trend among our generation that Turkle also observes among her students. They have a preference for the edited and controlled world of online life. Turkle informs us, “We use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right” (Turkle).