Sherry Turkle

To put it bluntly, I disagree with the spirit of Shelly Turkle's argument.

I won't deny that there's merit in looking upon the past and seeing what has been lost to us. Change is inevitable -- it brings many boons with it, but also tends to lose things along the way. That being said, since time immemorial, people have feared change. They view it as cultural devastation, and they blame religious doubt, rock n' roll, or whatever modern media outlets have decided to pin on millennial for all of society's perceived new evils. And yet, when I look around, we all seem to be doing just fine.

Maybe I'm being a little cynical here. Or, just a tad defensive. After all, it'd probably wouldn't be a stretch to say online connections have saved my life. They've given me an outlet to find countless friends -- people I can really connect to, who actually share the same interests and passions as me, and who I feel I can genuinely rely upon.

Somewhere past elementary school, I once lost any ability to find those outlets. And no, it wasn't because of texting robbing my ability to communicate -- I didn't even own a mobile device until I started college, for Christ's sake. Middle school was miserable and I barely had friends for years. These days, I can barely keep up with my social circles, and I'm really grateful for that feeling.

Honestly, I could write on this topic for a while, but I'll just put one more barbed comment out there. "...The illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." The other day I took time out of my day because a friend was feeling depressed and reached out on Twitter of all things. I sat down, wrote an essay's worth of reaffirmations and my personal experiences with the same mental demons, doing my damnedest to be there for them. I'll always take the time out of my day to be there for friends. And oddly enough, this isn't the first time I've had to do something like that, or the first friend I've done it for. If anything, I think it's easier to reach out for that help across the comfortable distance of cyberspace.

But no, it's always about what we're losing, and never about what we're gaining.