Essay-1 (Rough Draft)
Comparative Analysis
Does technology change not only what we do, but also who we are? Do people end up hiding from one another, even when they are constantly connected to one another? Is connection a substitute of conversation? Have we lost confidence on our fellow humans? We’ll find the answers to these thought provoking questions in the essays, “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, and “The Myth of Multitasking” by Christine Rosen, which talk about the effect of technology on human life and its consequence. Both essays discuss about different topics, but on a common ground.
The essay by Christine Rosen, “The Myth of Multitasking”, talks about the misconception of multitasking- Multitasking helps to accomplish multiple tasks efficiently and effectively. It also provides various studies that challenge this myth. Moreover, it analyses the impact of multitasking on a country’s economy, human’s health,…show more content… For instance, Turkle states that people have lost confidence on one another and, instead rely on machines for communicating their emotions of “love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life” (337). Furthermore, Rosen mentions the discussion between Jonathan B. Spira (analyst at the business research firm Basex) with the New York Times in 2007 of multitasking, that he estimated extreme multitasking – information overload – costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity (272).
Also, these essays point out that, with technologies, people have become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together” (334). They haven’t realized that communication, “no matter how valuable, [they] does not substitute for conversation” (335). They even mention that technology “diminishes chances to learn the skills of self-reflection” (336), reduces efficiency and, “the art of paying attention”