What is our world coming to?

What is our world coming to? It is really hard to keep up to pace with the ever speeding rate the technology has taken. I would say that this change is the beginning of a new era where it is affecting our interactions and the technology that we use today is an extension of ourselves but is this a good thing or a bad thing? Turkle points out that what matters now is the ability to adapt and change whether it be new jobs, directions, or technology. I’d say that Turkle is saying that there is no real control over the change whether it be bad or good and brings out several points.
This technology is allowing us to recreate ourselves in a virtual world and several examples in the article describe how it allows people a chance to wear a “mask” that they can’t wear in society so it’s a form of escape and self expression. There is a positive side to this notion but Turkle also throws out a red flag saying that through virtual communities you can become saturated in isolation. This is where I see the problem with these communities. Although many people will be shy and more of an indoor hobbit, it really makes me question if this technology and these virtual communities would increase this community of people indoors.
There is a notion that people who use this technology is related in a sense to having multiple personality disorder. I would say this was a bad use of this disorder when related to how we seem to change persona when we are in the virtual communities. The different personalities usually occur spontaneously and involuntarily, and function more or less independently of each other which is not the same as to a person in front of a screen but I can see how that can be debatable. So we are all flexible and permeable and this is supposedly allowing us to have a greater capacity for acknowledging diversity through this new technology. Is that really true? The article points out that the Hindu culture,” is rooted in the “many” as the root of spiritual experience.” I think in many ways this technology if anything isolates and tries to find people who are more like us. In this country we stay pretty monotone as far as our education of other cultures and other languages, when, if you go to Europe it is not rare to find someone who knows more than two languages and know political figures in our country and we can’t say that we would know the same about theirs. We could just be making our social and patriotic bubble stronger. This is not a technology that gives us a simple escape or serves as a meaningless diversion.
Clark would say that we are a type of cyborg already and uses the extension of the cell phone as an extension of ourselves and text messaging. Text messaging takes away from the interaction that you are having with the people around you. He does make a valid point though saying that, “ It is our natural proclivity for tool-based extensions, and profound and repeated self-transformation, that explains how we humans can be so very special .” I completely agree with him and since our human existence the extremes will always exist and especially with technology and the only thing that we can do is to keep educating and informing ourselves to the best of our ability and getting it out to the general public.
Stelarc I would say is on the extreme and I’m not sure if he would be on the positive or negative side. I think a lot of the things he is doing is really genius yet ridiculous like growing an ear on your forearm. He sees the body as obsolete and takes this cyborg notion that Clark has into a new direction saying,” If the body can be redesigned in a modular fashion to facilitate the replacement of malfunctioning parts, then TECHNICALLY THERE WOULD BE NO REASON FOR DEATH - given the accessibility of replacements.” I’m not sure if I’m completely at his level yet and it might be a little too extreme for me but thinking about all the genetic manipulation and being able to clone now-a-days doesn’t make it too out of the ordinary. We really are going to need a new practical philosophy of the self knowledge we are obtaining and what morals we will hold as we are struggling to keep pace with today’s world.