Recently, my friends and I have started a new game whenever we go out to dinner: we all take out our phones and stack them in the middle of the table. If anyone reaches for their phone during the entire dinner, then they have to pay for everyone’s meal. Now, we were definitely not the first people to come up with this idea, but ever since we started doing it, everyone has noticed what a positive impact it has made on our conversations. Putting our phones away forces us to maintain more real, more human face-to-face interactions, which my friends and I all appreciate the importance of. It gives us a chance to have longer, uninterrupted conversations without the constant interruptions of texts and notifications. Technology obviously has given us countless benefits, but there is definitely a point to be made about lifting our heads up from our screens and taking in the “real world,” like Turkle writes.

Another part of Turkle’s article that I found interesting was her statement that “We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely.” I strongly agree with this – the way we use current technology, we constantly feel some attachment to our online messages, texts, and social media. Through my own experimentation, I’ve found that cutting off some of these (such as deactivating Facebook for a while) can feel suffocating/deprived at first, but after a slightly longer period, it feels extremely liberating to not have to depend on or even think about that other online, digital world.