Shelley Turkle - The Cyber Optimist

 Sherry Turkle, the cyber optimist, argues that new technologies gives us the opportunity to move beyond the physical world, That social media and online platforms such as second life allow audiences to move beyond their physical selves and to craft multiple personalities and online personas.

These personas allow their creators to experiment with their identity and to explore who they are in a manner that the user's physical world might not allow. New media allows us to transcend narrow or restrictive cultural boundaries and facilitates identity play and experimentation.

Sherry Turkle - the cyber dystopian

Sherry Turkle has changed her mind, she now argues that new media technologies are detrimental to our identities and that they restrict and inhibit rather. Continual connection, for Turkle, means constant communication – or the need to connect rather than think. As such, we are addicted to our technologies and that new technology gives an illusion of being together but that togetherness experience is void of meaningful contact –we engage in fake connectivity.

She argues the idea social media requires us to present ideal or mediated versions of ourself to the world - that these mediated versions aren't the products of identity play and that our real selves fall short of the selves we present to the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtLVCpZIiNs