On being 'Alone Together'

I recently finished reading the book by Sherry Turkle, 'Alone Together' which analyzes the growing relationship between humans and technology.As someone whose occupation is dependent on using the internet and social media, I'm moderately skeptical of the benefits of 24/7 connection. Could having the internet everywhere, all the time, be analogous to having holidays every day of the year ? Could the internet become redundant? I think it's important for people to find 'offline' time.Turkle is an MIT professor whose research in human/computer relationships inspired her to write the book, and give the corresponding TED talk. Throughout 'Alone Together' she gives several examples of what scares her about the dependency people have on using machines to communicate; she also looks deeply into the interactions that people have with robots.I wasn't expecting so much of the book to detail human/robot relationships. She is mostly concerned with how children who interact with robots define their 'aliveness'. At a macro scale, she wonders whether we are capable of building machines that are 'alive' in the same way people are. She cites examples in which people (mostly children and seniors) assign the same level of interest and care to a robot as they would a living person.Interesting in itself, this research was difficult for me to connect to what I thought the primary topic of the book would be - social media. The lack of adoption of robotic devices in the mass market also lessened my interest in this section, but perhaps it's better to pay attention to these kinds of things before they become problems that are too 'locked in' to solve.I was an early Facebook user, joining the site not long after its launch in 2004. For years I chronicled my life on it, connected with old and new friends, uploaded photos, and did all the things users are supposed to do.Eventually, the authority-questioning side of my personality (a dominant force) realized that doing what I was 'supposed' to do for a website wasn't really doing anything beneficial for myself. I started to feel like Turkle does, when she writes:

"when we Tweet or write to hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends as a group, we treat individuals as a unit. Friends become fans."

On average I have an 'interaction circle' of 7-10 people on a consistent day-to-day basis. By interaction circle, I mean people I meet with face to face, who I expect to see in certain places, that share stories with me and vice versa. It would be extremely difficult to maintain an interaction circle of greater than this amount.The average Facebook user has 245 friends. With this number of people, they share the same kinds of things that I share with my real life interaction circle.When I was a Facebook user, I found that when I shared things on the website, or interacted with people, my actions were closely tied to my real-life 'interaction circle.' I would post what I thought 'offline' friends would find interesting, or share media that I could later talk to them about.The paradox was that I was using a medium in which my communications were visible to many in order to only reach only a few. This created an awkward context in which every interaction became a performance, and most performances bring with them some degree of performance anxiety. The posts to my 'circle' could have been judged by outsiders without background knowledge necessary to understand my intentions.With these 'performance anxieties', communication that I directed at my interaction circle was cloudier than it would have been were it taking place over a quieter channel, or in person. The tendency to direct Facebook posts to an interaction circle also potentially makes them question the poster's directness - is expecting a Facebook post to be read by someone I see in person a socially passive action?  Is neglecting to mention an online post in an offline conversation a passive-agressive action?In addition to the one-to-one vs. one-to-many aspect of online communication, one of Turkle's most lucid points is this:

"Loneliness is failed solitude."

For me, solitude is necessary. Introverted personalities require periods of quiet reflection, in order to gather thoughts, work through ideas, and make careful plans. In the 'always-on' environment, finding time to be solitary is increasingly difficult. The failure to reach a point of solitude because of technological intrusions leads to a certain kind of loneliness - a loneliness created by the absence of your offline, non-performing self.