Good response Dave – Turkle is more thoughtful than most, but it still harkens back to some Camelot past. I moaned about this in response to an article about the death of friendship (http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2009/12/real-friendship.html). In Turkle’s TED talk she says kids now will be damaged because when they come running out of school, the first thing they see is their parent with their head buried in their phone. But compared to what in the past? the parent not being there maybe and the child having to go home alone. Maybe they can do the school run now because they’ve been liberated from the office. It is a very privileged view of how everyone used to live.
There’s also an inherently dim and techo-deterministic view of people in this. All this stuff is new, we all get a bit carried away with new stuff, but we adapt and it settles into a normal role in our lives. Think about how much you used to use twitter when it was all new, compared to now. We should trust people a bit more to find sensible accommodation in their lives.