Social Connections: Fantasy vs. Reality Writing Assignment

Social Connections: Fantasy vs. Reality
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I. Introduction
Humans strive to advance current inventions to serve greater purposes in the world. Alone together, composed by Sherry Turkle, expands this notion as she examines the correlation between technology like robots and mortal beings. Turkle demonstrates that technology has significant uses in life that are impacted by the way individuals act. The reading highlights how children master to create impractical personal connections with technology.
II. Discussion
When taking Turkle’s question as my own, “what are the purposes of living things?” For a living creature, its impetus is to live, survive and reproduce offspring to its coming generation. But apart from that, there is not a much grand purpose. It is only humans who attempt to find purpose through other means. What is at risk for Turkle in the difference between real and robotic turtles is: For a new generation, simulation is not connoted as second best. “For these children, in this context, aliveness appears, to hold no intrinsic value”. Preferably, it is advantageous only if needed for a definite purpose. Turkle’s fourteen-year-old didn’t seem to be denying the power of authenticity. She made a nuanced distinction regarding the authentic and the representational. Her ‘concern’ for the turtle and its role of ‘just sitting there’ question the investment we make in things since they are real, and questions why we would place a living animal in a museum condition. It challenges museums to think about the perceptions of the ‘real.’
The animals in the context of the exhibition about Darwin were real. Was alive necessary to provide context to Darwin’s voyages and his contributions to our knowledge about the world? I believe the robot was the equivalence of botanical illustrations and topographical watercolors that initially documented the voyage. In the museum, a live turtle would have ...