Shuheng Wang
Jason Kjolsing
Assignment 1G
10/29/14
Is it possible for anyone to make a hundred new friends in a few minutes? Is it possible for a middle-class man or woman to own a mansion or even an airplane? The answers to these incredible and contradictory scenarios, however, are actually true nowadays. Sherry Turkle claims in her essay, Always On, that technology allows people to escape from themselves and gives them a second life. Meanwhile, she believes that multi-tasking life, made by technology, sets high expectations for human beings. Can technology eventually create a totally different world, which reshapes our values? Turkle strongly argues that technology has been changing human’s relationship and our ways of life, which eventually…show more content… Turkle calls the new state of the self: “the life mix” (157). She gives an example of her friend Pete who plays Second Life, an online platform, in which anyone can create another “self”. Turkle finds out that Pete’s avatar even has a relationship with another player online. He seems to be more satisfied with his another self. Turkle uses this example to illustrate the fact that with the help of technology, people can escape from their lives and live different multi-life. People get so disconnected from reality that they start caring more about their online life than their real life. Moreover, as Turkle points out, “it is not uncommon for people who spend a lot of time on Second Life and role-playing games to at that they their online identities make them feel more like themselves than they do in the physical real” (159). It reinforces that people wish to live another “life”, because they are more satisfied with it, and the virtual world makes them feel like that their wishful thinking has been