Some thinkers and pundits, like Sherry Turkle in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, bemoan our techo-saturation and argue, sometimes simplistically, that our devices do more to keep us apart than to bring us together. You can hear Turkle worry over the slippage between subjectivity and objectivity: “We are tempted, summoned by robots and bots, objects that address us as if they were people. And just as we imagine things as people, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to things” (224). Over and beyond objectification of others, our attachment to our devices can veer into addiction, triggering physiological responses that “hook” us:

 

Our neurochemical response to every ping and ring tone seems to be the one elicited by the “seeking” drive, a deep motivation of the human psyche. Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an e-mail, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself. We learn to require it, even as it depletes us. A new generation already suspects this is the case. I think of a sixteen-year-old girl who tells me, “Technology is bad because people are not as strong as its pull.” (227)

 

We are not sure that our ability to measure the physiological dimensions of our use of technology is as sophisticated as Turkle suggests here, but we take her basic point. Our things seem to overtake us at times, and we sometimes need to create distance from them. We each have phone-free days periodically. Sometimes we go away for the weekend and leave our laptops behind. The creation of such distance speaks to the fundamental power of the relationship, acknowledging the influence of the object on our subjectivities—in producing our subjectivities—in our felt need at times to curtail it, to introduce and make room for other influences and pressures. Perhaps what needs to be taught now is less the danger of devices than better ways of relating to them. What would studying the experience of working with machines as a set of embodied and situated relations (not just extractable acts, but live relations) tell us about our (post)humanity?