9th Grade Honors
Name: ______
451 Prereading questionnaire
Prior to reading Fahrenheit 451, we will be discussing one of the themes of the novel. In spite of the novel being about a future society where books are illegal, the author, Ray Bradbury, insists it is NOT about censorship. Instead, his purpose was to explore the effects of technology on how we communicate with others. The novel was written decades ago, yet Bradbury was exploring ideas that we are dealing with today.
This questionnaire is a way to start thinking about these ideas.
1 = Very often
2 = Often
3 = Not very often
4= Never
_____1. I text others while I am in the physical presence of my friends.
_____2. I text while having dinner with my family.
_____3. My parents use their phones at dinner time.
_____4. I check my phone during academic classes.
_____5. I sleep with my phone next to my bed.
_____6. I sleep with my phone in my hand.
_____7. I stress a bit about the pictures and posts I make because I worry about what others will think.
____8. I communicate with my parents by text.
____9. I feel pressure to answer my parents’ calls and texts.
____10. I would prefer to communicate bad news (can’t meet a friend on the weekend etc) by text instead of calling or telling them in person.
Jot down how many times a day you check/use your phone. Use tally marks to record when you check your phone during a 24 hour period.
Meal timeWork time (school, homework)
Practice time (music, sports)
Friend time (time when you are physically with friends, not during classes)
Transition time (on bus, in car, waiting somewhere)
Sleep Time
Has the oversaturation of technology impacted how we communicate with one another?
As you read, talk to the text writing out questions, opinions, predictions, connections or other reactions you may have in the margins.
Heard on Fresh Air from WHYY
October 18, 2012 - TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. As much as most of us are annoyed when a conversation we're having is interrupted while the person we're speaking with reads a text or checks email, let's be honest: Most of us have done the same thing to someone else.
Our digital devices are changing how we communicate and who we communicate with. My guest, Sherry Turkle, has been researching computer culture for 30 years. Her latest book, "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other," has just come out in paperback. It's about developments in digital culture over the past 15 years with a focus on the young, those from five through their early 20s who are digital natives, having grown up with cell phones and digital toys.
Turkle is the founder of MIT's initiative on technology and self and is a clinical psychologist. Her latest book forms a trilogy with her earlier books, "The Second Self" and "Life on the Screen." Sherry Turkle, welcome to FRESH AIR. One of the things you write about in "Alone Together" is how children have grown up in a culture of distraction.
SHERRY TURKLE: Yes.
GROSS: I assumed there that you would be talking about how children and teens are so distracted by texting their friends all the time, but you're talking about children's parents, too...
TURKLE: Yes.
GROSS: ...that children's parents are distracted. I want you to describe some of the complaints that children have expressed to you about their parents being distracted by their personal devices.
TURKLE: Yeah, well, what my fieldwork has shown is that, from the minute these children met this technology, it was the competition. I do my fieldwork in playgrounds, and parents are texting and on cell phones as their kids play on the jungle gyms and swings, and parents text during breakfast and dinner as their children beg them for attention.
Parents text at games when the kids are on the playing field, often missing the big score. Parents are on the phone in cars, and the kids are left to text in the backseat on their devices instead of having those precious moments, you know, to find out what - to eavesdrop on your kids or talk to your kids in the car on the way to school.
So children grow up learning that they're not the center of their parents' attention. One of the most poignant interviews I did was with a young man who talked about how his father used to watch the Sunday games with him and maybe have the Sunday newspaper between them and share the sports section or the news section.
And now his father does his email and texts. And it's just not the same. He misses his dad.
GROSS: So let's turn the tables. What are some of the complaints that parents shared with you about their children being distracted by their cell phones and other devices?
TURKLE: Well, parents then suffer the slings and arrows of not having their children's attention, and I think that what's the big change I see now is that parents are starting to accept, really over the past two years, a little bit of the responsibility for that. It's hard to get your child's attention because your child doesn't want, for example, to answer your calls. Your child will only respond to a text message.
This is a very common complaint of parents. Children during dinner will want to text. It's very hard to get them to come to dinner and eat, and so what I suggest to parents is that they use dinners as really sacred spaces where they say look, dinner is a time when we come together as a family, and if I haven't followed these rules since you were young, I'm sorry. I've made mistakes, too, but now we're starting to put a basket, you know, in the kitchen and in the dining room, and we all put our phones in that basket, and we...
GROSS: Are they turned off?
(LAUGHTER)
TURKLE: And the phones are turned off just as a lot of professors are starting to say, you know, look, we've taken things too far, and we put a basket in the classroom, and this seminar really is for us having a conversation together. Because we know that our...
GROSS: Do you do that?
TURKLE: I'm starting to, because I taught a course last semester, and halfway through the course - it was a course on memoir, a course in which the students in the course were sharing very really intimate details of their life. It's a course where students talk about their lives.
We read memoirs, and then the students write memoirs, and members of the class admitted that they were texting, kind of, under the desks. And we talked about it in class, and it was not OK that there was texting during class, and we just decided that...
GROSS: And your objection to that was that people were sharing intimate moments, and other people weren't paying attention? Or were you afraid somebody was, like, live tweeting somebody's personal confessions?
TURKLE: No, the objection of the class was that this was really a conversation and that we were losing - that we were losing the sense of this class as a conversation, and that that is the value of what we're there to do together is to have a conversation together and that that is what we should be about.
And what the students taught - we had a great conversation about what was so seductive about texting, and essentially I heard from the students what I hear from so many adults. I think we've over-hyped the difference between students - between young people and older people on this issue.
And they all say to me that what's so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.
GROSS: You had said before a lot of parents complain that their children will accept the parents' text message and respond to that, but they won't pick up the phone, they won't answer the cell phone.
TURKLE: Yes.
GROSS: I'm sure you've spoken to children and teenagers about that. What's the explanation?
TURKLE: Well, I'm working now on sort of this flight from conversation project because really what I'm hearing is people saying to me, I mean this kind of phone-phobia, and also conversation-phobia. And people basically say - I mean, one 18-year-old says to me: someday soon, but certainly not now - I mean as though I was going to do something to him - certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.
And when I say to people, what's wrong with conversation, they say, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation: You can't control what you're going to say, and you don't know how long it's going to take or where it could go. And that's exactly what's wrong with conversation, but that's exactly what's right with conversation.
And this is the kind of thing that people feel they don't have time for in the incredibly busy lives and stressed lives that they have, and it's what people are getting used to not wanting to make space for, emotionally.
GROSS: Now you're talking about adults and children?
TURKLE: I'm talking about adults and children, and children - I mean, I'm thinking of, now, a college sophomore who talks to me about wanting to text a friend. And I say, well, you know, he lives in the dorm next door. Why not go to see him? And this young man actually - basically says, well, I really don't see why a Gchat won't do the job.
I mean, there's almost a falling away of what you would lose by not having the face-to-face. So my concerns are sort of double. It's both that we are not making the time because we feel we don't have the time, and it's also losing the skills that we get from talking to each other face-to-face, which are skills of negotiation, of reading each other's emotion, of having to face the complexity of confrontation, of dealing with complex emotion, of dealing with confrontation.
You know, it's the difference between apologizing and typing "I'm sorry" and hitting send. So I think we're substituting connection for conversation. And developmentally, adolescents would kind of rather do that, but developmentally they're also missing out when they do that. So we're shortchanging ourselves, and I fear that we're forgetting the difference.
GROSS: You write about how parents, nowadays, give their children a cell phone somewhere around the age of nine or by 13, and the parents tell them this is going to help keep you safe because if you get in trouble, if anything goes wrong, you are a phone call away from your parent. What are the pros and cons, as far as you're concerned, of what you describe as the tethered child, the child who always has that connection?
TURKLE: You know, first of all children, when I wrote the book, even in the brief time since I penned the book, the ages have kind of gone down to eight, to seven, to six. Children are getting these phones earlier and earlier. These are years when children need to develop this capacity for solitude, this capacity to feel complete playing alone because, you know, if you don't have a capacity for solitude, you will always be lonely.
And my concern is that the tethered child never really feels that sense of - that they are sort of OK unto themselves. And I talk to college students who've grown up, you know, with the habit of being in touch with their parents, you know, five, 10, 15 times a day. And, you know, it's no longer Huckleberry Finn as a model of adolescence, kind of, you know, sailing down the Mississippi alone. We've developed a model of adolescence and childhood where, you know, we sail down the Mississippi together with, you know, with our families in tow. And...
GROSS: But that's very reassuring to parents, isn't it, I mean getting all those texts?
TURKLE: Parental reassurance is not the goal. The goal is a child who has a healthy separation and a sense of healthy, separated identity, and we have to balance parental reassurance with a child who feels competent, independent and able to be alone.
GROSS: So when you say that a lot of children text their parents five, 10, 15 times a day...
TURKLE: Yes.
GROSS: Is that in part pressure from parents, like I want you to keep in touch with me, tell me where you are? Or do you think it's more generated from the children wanting to always tell their parents what they're doing?
TURKLE: I think it's both. The parents are pushing for it. The children are compliant. And constantly sharing where you are, what you're doing starts to be kind of a way of life. And when the children start to pull back, the parents get very upset, and many children just feel oh my God, you know, it's just so easy to hit, you know, to just kind of text something that, you know, I'm just not going to make a big deal of it.
But in a way, that keeps kids in a kind of soup of connection that is really changing what we mean by the separation of adolescence, which I still think is a very important part of what adolescence should be about.
GROSS: Some of the teenagers you were interviewing said to you that shouldn't they have a privacy zone, a right to a time when they don't have to take their parents' phone call, or a right to just, like, not respond, just like be on their own and not respond. Would you describe the kind of concerns teenagers were expressing to you about that?
TURKLE: Yes, I mean, they basically felt that the technology was getting in their way of having what they - some of them would call it sort of, teenagers had in yesteryear. They looked at their older brother sisters, and they had two concerns, that first of all their older brothers and sisters were allowed to not be in touch with parents in a way that they felt was not available to them, but also, and this was very moving, they felt that on Facebook their life story followed them through their lives in a way that their older brothers and sisters were allowed to start fresh when they moved from elementary school to junior high, from junior high to high school, and then crucially from high school to college.