Sherry Turkle, a world-renowned researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote her book, The Empathy Diaries, a work about how our relationship with technology has begun to affect our communication with each other and ourselves. Through her experience and conversations with teachers and parents she brings to us the topic of how the internet has begun to stunt children’s growth of empathy and has disconnected us from society. While I believe that the internet has negatively affected us and children in how we interact in society I also believe that the internet has also handed us the ability to connect with a diverse group of people all over the world. Access to the internet can be a great tool for being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and learn of other’s experiences that you may not be able to with solely conversing with people in your local community.  

As Turkle has pointed out in her book there are numerous negatives that come from the internet mainly relating to children. While interviewing teachers from Holbrooke middle school she came to find out that many of the kids are struggling with empathy. One teacher noted an encounter she had with a middle schooler, “She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt. These kids aren’t cruel. But they aren’t emotionally developed.” (345). The teacher is genuinely worried about their students based off of this comment. The little girl had excluded another child from playing with her and she was unable to recognize that the girl she excluded was upset; not because she enjoyed hurting the little girl but because she genuinely did not understand what she was doing was wrong. Turkle later goes on to relate this behavior to the fact that with the introduction of technology children have begun to understand each other less and less. They aren’t listening and relating as deeply as kids have in the past. The lack of empathy comes from a lack of personal interactions. With this I can agree, kids 12 and younger having access to the internet the way they do mainly in the form of a Phone is negatively affecting them in various ways. You can see the path that leads to children being emotionally stunted starting with being introduced to the internet. This lack of connection that children developed in middle school from the overuse and early access to phones will end up carrying over to their teenage and adult lives. 

The alternate side to this conversation is that when online you are able to find like-minded people much easier. Turkle touches on this slightly in her book, “Political debates are sparked, and social movements mobilize on websites.” (349). Here Turkle is explaining some of the communities you can find on the internet. Throughout her book Turkle fails to point out how people are able to find more stimulating conversation on the internet than in real life. Sometimes it can be hard to find and meet people who share similar views or interests as you but with one search on social media you can easily find an entire community of people who share your exact interests. And in these spaces’ conversations flow more easily because you all collectively have something to talk about, in which these conversations may branch out to other topics. While reading Turkle’s book I felt as though she only focused on kids playing online games and texting at the dinner table. And while I understand how she mentioned, “We like to hear these positive stories because they do not discourage us in our pursuit of the new.” (349). Essentially telling us that we only like to see the positive side of things to ignore the bad and real problems. But I feel like she missed a critical part in trying to solve the problem she is presenting to our faces.  

What Turkle should have also included in this book was how we can effectively use technology and the internet to have better conversations. Not everyone has someone they can just turn to daily and have a real meaningful conversation. While I agree that if you have someone who you are around regularly you should do your best to have uninterrupted and offline conversations within order to improve our empathy and understanding of ourselves and others. Turkle brings up the, “talking cure” multiple times in her book. And what she fails to mention is that the talking does not have to be solely in person, face-to-face. I think that trying to strike up significant conversations online is not only beneficial for Turkle’s “talking cure” but to also help your future self when online conversations become a skill you may need. I don’t think.  that we should see the internet as a barrier in front of worthwhile conversations and empathy but more of a bridge connecting us to a wider scope of conversations to be had.