Answer Questions According to Two Readings

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Write a full five pages essay. Below are two readings that need to be connect and compare with each other. In the essay, there are a few points should be include:

1. A clear, arguable thesis in the introduction paragraph.

2. Three Topic sentences that reflect the thesis in three body paragraph.

3. Each body paragraph should contain two quotes, one quote from one reading and one from the other.

4. Introducing the quote first and explain it. Then, find out if the connections between two quotes from two authors.( It could be similarities or contradictions).

Here is the Prompt Question

How can we live "authentic"(in Turkle's definition) lives in a world increasingly mediated by technology and structured by a "grid of business"? In answering this question, put Adam Gopink's "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli" in conversation with Sherry Turkle's " Alone Together". Who offers the better to this question, and how can their views be used to re -frame the examples given by the other writer?

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Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other By Sherry Turkle Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. These days, it suggests substitutions that put the real on the run. The advertising for Second Life, a virtual world where you get to build an avatar, a house, a family, and a social life, basically says, “Finally, a place to love your body, love your friends, and love your life.”1 On Second Life, a lot of people, as represented by their avatars, are richer than they are in first life and a lot younger, thinner, and better dressed. And we are smitten with the idea of sociable robots, which most people first meet in the guise of artificial pets. Zhu Zhu pet hamsters, the “it” toy of the 2009–2010 holiday season, are presented as “better” than any real pet could be. We are told they are lovable and responsive, don’t require cleanup, and will never die. Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk. … Computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. They ask us to take care of them; in response, we imagine that they might care for us in return. Indeed, among the most talked about robotic designs are in the area of care and companionship. In summer 2010, there are enthusiastic reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on robotic teachers, companions, and therapists. And Microsoft demonstrates a virtual human, Milo, that recognizes the people it interacts with and whose personality is sculpted by them. Tellingly, in the video that introduces Milo to the public, a young man begins by playing games with Milo in a virtual garden; by the end of the demonstration, things have heated up—he confides in Milo after being told off by his parents. We are challenged to ask what such things augur. Some people are looking for robots to clean rugs and help with the laundry. Others hope for a mechanical bride. As sociable robots propose themselves as substitutes for people, new networked devices offer us machine-mediated relationships with each other, another kind of substitution. We romance the robot and become inseparable from our smartphones. As this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines. People talk about Web access on their BlackBerries as “the place for hope” in life, the place where loneliness can be defeated. A woman in her late sixties describes her new iPhone: “It’s like having a little Times Square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.” People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. 1 I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. Both by temperament and profession, I place high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity. Granting that an AI might develop its own origami of lovemaking positions, I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of “as if ” performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: We are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death. A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop. Connectivity and Its Discontents As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to-avatar talk in a networked game, we feel at one moment in possession of a full social life and in the next curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters of any kind? The blurring of intimacy and solitude may reach its starkest expression when a robot is proposed as a romantic partner. But for most people it begins when one creates a profile on a social-networking site or builds a persona or avatar for a game or virtual world. Over time, such performances of identity may feel like identity itself. And this is where robotics and the networked life first intersect. For the performance of caring is all that robots, no matter how sociable, know how to do. I was enthusiastic about online worlds as “identity workshops” when they first appeared, and all of their possibilities remain. Creating an avatar – perhaps of a different age, a different gender, a different temperament – is a way to explore the self. But if you’re spending three, four, or five hours a day in an online game or virtual world (a time commitment that is not unusual), there’s got to be someplace you’re not. And that someplace you’re not is often with your family and friends – sitting around, playing Scrabble face-to-face, taking a walk, watching a movie together in the old-fashioned way. And with performance can come disorientation. You might have begun your online life in a spirit of compensation. If you were lonely and isolated, it seemed better than nothing. But online, you’re slim, rich, and buffed up, and you feel you have 2 more opportunities than in the real world. So here too, better than nothing can become better than something – or better than anything. Not surprisingly, people report feeling let down when they move from the virtual to the real world. It is not uncommon to see people fidget with their smartphones, looking for virtual paces where they might once again be more. Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want them. Just as we can program a made-to-measure robot, we can reinvent ourselves as comely avatars. We can write the Facebook profile that pleases u. We can edit our messages until they project the self we want to be. And we can keep things short and sweet. Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other. An impatient high school senior says, “If you really need to reach me, just shoot me a text.” He sounds just like my colleagues on a consulting job, who tell me they would prefer to communicate with “real-time” texts. Online connections were first conceived as a substitute for face-to-face contact, when the latter was for some reason impractical: Don’t have time to make a phone call? Shoot off a text message. But very quickly, the text message became the connection of choice. We discovered the network – the world of connectivity – to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness, even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will. These days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart. I remember my own sense of disorientation the first time I realized that I was “alone together.” I had traveled an exhausting thirty-six hours to attend a conference on advanced robotic technology held in central Japan. The packed grand ballroom was Wi-Fi enabled: The speaker was using the web for his presentation, laptops were open throughout the audience, fingers were flying, and there was a sense of great concentration and intensity. But not many in the audience were attending to the speaker. Most people seemed to be doing their e-mail, downloading files, and surfing the net. The man next to me was searching for a New Yorker cartoon to illustrate his upcoming presentation. Every once in a while, audience members gave the speaker some attention, lowering their laptop screens in a kind of curtsy, a gesture of courtesy. Outside, in the hallways, the people milling around me were looking past me to virtual others. They were on their laptops and their phones, connecting to colleagues at the conference going on around them and to others around the globe. There but not there. Of course, clusters of people chatted with each other, making dinner plans, “networking” in that old sense of the word, the one that implies having a coffee or sharing a meal. But at this conference, it was clear that what people mostly want from public space is to be alone with their personal networks. It is good to come together physically, but it is more important to stay tethered to our devices. I thought of how Sigmund Freud considered the power of communities both to shape and to subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun came to mind: “connectivity and its discontents.” 3 The phrase comes back to me months later as I interview management consultants who seem to have lost touch with their best instincts for what makes them competitive. They complain about the BlackBerry revolution, yet accept it as inevitable while decrying it as corrosive. They say they used to talk to each other as they waited to give presentations or took taxis to the airport; now they spend that time doing e-mail. Some tell me they are making better use of their “downtime,” but they argue without conviction. The time that they once used to talk as they waited for appointments or drove to the airport was never downtime. It was the time when far-flung global teams solidified relationships and refined ideas. In corporations, among friends, and within academic departments, people readily admit that they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face to face. Some who say “I live my life on my BlackBerry” are forthright about avoiding the “real-time” commitment of a phone call. The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. I recently overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two women. “No one answers the phone in our house anymore,” the first woman proclaimed with some consternation. “It used to be that the kids would race to pick up the phone. Now they are up in their rooms, knowing no one is going to call them and texting and going on Facebook or whatever instead.” Parents with teenage children will be nodding at this very familiar story in recognition and perhaps a sense of wonderment that this has happened, and so quickly. And teenagers will simply be saying, “Well, what’s your point?” Only a decade ago, I would have been mystified that fifteen-year-olds in my urban neighborhood, a neighborhood of parks and shopping malls, of front stoops and coffee shops, would feel the need to send and receive close to six thousand messages a month via portable digital devices or that best friends would assume that when they visited, it would usually be on the virtual real estate of Facebook. It might have seemed intrusive, if not illegal, that my mobile phone would tell me the location of all my acquaintances within a ten-mile radius. But these days we are accustomed to all this. Life in a media bubble has come to seem natural. So has the end of a certain public etiquette: On the street, we speak into the invisible microphones on our mobile phones and appear to be talking to ourselves. We share intimacies with the air as though unconcerned about who can hear us or the details of our physical surroundings. The New Real? I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of mind. Now the metaphor no longer goes far enough. Our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self, itself split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology. Teenagers tell me they sleep with their cell phone, and even when it isn’t on their person, when it has been banished to the school locker, for instance, they know when their phone is vibrating. The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a 4 set of new insecurities. They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated. They become confused about companionship. Can they find it in their lives on the screen? Could they find it with a robot? Their digitized friendships – played out with emoticon emotions, so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection – may prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that could bring superficiality to a higher power – that is, for relationships with the inanimate. They come to accept lower expectations for connection and, finally, the idea that robot friendships could be sufficient unto the day. Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself. We come to see what robots offer as relationship. The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm. Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? Many roboticists are enthusiastic about having robots tend to our children and our aging parents, for instance. Are these psychologically, socially, and ethically acceptable propositions? What are our responsibilities here? And are we comfortable with virtual environments that propose themselves not as places for recreation but as new worlds to live in? What do we have, now that we have what we say we want – now that we have what technology makes easy? This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists. Reprinted with permission of the publisher from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, © 2011 Sherry Turkle. Published by Basic Books, a division of Perseus Books. All rights reserved. 5 The New Yorker Sept 30, 2002 pNA Page 1 BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a child’s imagination) by Adam Gopnik © COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc. We thought, at first, that her older brother Luke might be the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an was merely Olivia’s marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is is too busy to play with her much anymore. He has growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot become a true New York child, with the schedule of a of local traits: he lives in an apartment "on Madison and Cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on Lexington," he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. But Olivia, or is thought, "old." But the most peculiarly local thing though she counts days, does not yet really have days. about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too She has a day, and into this day she has introduced the busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to figure of Charlie Ravioli--in order, it dawned on us, to insist her ear, and we hear her talk into it: "Ravioli? It’s Olivia . . . that she does have days, because she is too harried to It’s Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye." Then she share them, that she does have an independent social life, snaps it shut, and shakes her head. "I always get his by virtue of being too busy to have one. machine," she says. Or she will say, "I spoke to Ravioli today." "Did you have fun?" my wife and I ask. "No. He Yet Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly was busy working. On a television" (leaving it up in the air discouraging a companion--"He cancelled lunch. Again," if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show). Olivia would say--that we thought we ought to look into it. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who On a good day, she "bumps into" her invisible friend and specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on they go to a coffee shop. "I bumped into Charlie Ravioli," inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year-olds. she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to California now, where she grows basil in her garden and the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). "We had jars her own organic marmalades. I e-mailed this sister for coffee, but then he had to run." She sighs, sometimes, at help with the Ravioli issue--how concerned should we her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she be?--and she sent me back an e-mail, along with an accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. "I bumped into attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone Charlie Ravioli today," she says. "He was working." Then connections, we at last spoke on a land line. she adds brightly, "But we hopped into a taxi." What happened then? we ask. "We grabbed lunch," she says. It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called "Imaginary It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the Companions and the Children Who Create Them," and my big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of sister had just written a review of it. She insisted that parks and playgrounds--drawn, in particular, from a nearly Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was perfect, mynah-bird-like imitation of the words she hears right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (sixty-three per her mother use when she talks about her day with her cent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children friends. ("How was your day?" Sighing: "Oh, you know. I create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out tried to make a date with Meg, but I couldn’t find her, so I of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction--sometimes left a message on her machine. Then I bumped into Emily as figures of pure fantasy, sometimes, as Olivia had done, after that meeting I had in SoHo, and we had coffee and as observations of grownup manners assembled in then she had to run, but by then Meg had reached me on tranquillity and given a name. I learned about the invisible my cell and we arranged . . .") I was concerned, though, companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible that Charlie Ravioli might also be the sign of some because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea "trauma," some loneliness in Olivia’s life reflected in anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed imaginary form. "It seems odd to have an imaginary pavement-bound by comparison. playmate who’s always too busy to play with you," Martha, my wife, said to me. "Shouldn’t your imaginary playmate "An imaginary playmate isn’t any kind of trauma-marker," be someone you tell secrets to and, I don’t know, sing my sister said. "It’s just the opposite: it’s a sign that the songs with? It shouldn’t be someone who’s always child is now confident enough to begin to understand how hopping into taxis." to organize her experience into stories." The significant - Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. - GALE GROUP Information Integrity The New Yorker Sept 30, 2002 pNA Page 2 BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a child’s imagination) thing about imaginary friends, she went on, is that the kids know they’re fictional. In an instant message on AOL, she summed it up: "The children with invisible friends often interrupted the interviewer to remind her, with a certain note of concern for her sanity, that these characters were, after all, just pretend." I also learned that some children, as they get older, turn out to possess what child psychologists call a "paracosm." A paracosm is a society thought up by a child--an invented universe with a distinctive language, geography, and history. (The Brontes invented a couple of paracosms when they were children.) Not all children who have an imaginary friend invent a paracosm, but the two might, I think, be related. Like a lonely ambassador from Alpha Centauri in a fifties sci-fi movie who, misunderstood by paranoid earth scientists, cannot bring the life-saving news from his planet, perhaps the invisible friend also gets an indifferent or hostile response, and then we never find out about the beautiful paracosm he comes from. "Don’t worry about it," my sister said in a late-night phone call. "Knowing something’s made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on. She’s putting a name on a series of manners." "But he seems so real to her," I objected. "Of course he is. I mean, who’s more real to you, Becky Sharp or Gandalf or the guy down the hall? Giving a manner a name makes it real." I paused. "I grasp that it’s normal for her to have an imaginary friend," I said, "but have you ever heard of an imaginary friend who’s too busy to play with you?" She thought about it. "No," she said. "I’m sure that doesn’t occur anywhere in the research literature. That sounds completely New York." And then she hung up. The real question, I saw, was not "Why this friend?" but "Why this fiction?" Why, as Olivia had seen so clearly, are grownups in New York so busy, and so obsessed with the language of busyness that it dominates their conversation? Why are New Yorkers always bumping into Charlie Ravioli and grabbing lunch, instead of sitting down with him and exchanging intimacies, as friends should, as people do in Paris and Rome? Why is busyness the stuff our children make their invisible friends from, as country children make theirs from light and sand? This seems like an odd question. New Yorkers are busy for obvious reasons: they have husbands and wives and careers and children, they have the Gauguin show to see and their personal trainers and accountants to visit. But the more I think about this the more I think it is--well, a lot of Ravioli. We are instructed to believe that we are busier because we have to work harder to be more productive, but everybody knows that busyness and productivity have a dubious, arm’s-length relationship. Most of our struggle in New York, in fact, is to be less busy in order to do more work. Constant, exhausting, no-time-to-meet-your-friends Charlie Ravioli-style busyness arrived as an affliction in modern life long after the other parts of bourgeois city manners did. Business long predates busyness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy--or, if they did, they left no record of it. Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word "busy" but never complains of busyness. For him, the word "busy" is a synonym for "happy," not for "stressed." Not once in his diary does Pepys cancel lunch or struggle to fit someone in for coffee at four-thirty. Pepys works, makes love, and goes to bed, but he does not bump and he does not have to run. Ben Franklin, a half century later, boasts of his industriousness, but he, too, never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper or come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lightning rod. Until sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the normal affliction of the bourgeois was not busyness at all but its apparent opposite: boredom. It has even been argued that the grid of streets and cafes and small engagements in the nineteenth-century city--the whole of social life--was designed self-consciously as an escape from that numbing boredom. (Working people weren’t bored, of course, but they were engaged in labor, not work. They were too busy to be busy.) Baudelaire, basically, was so bored that he had to get drunk and run out onto the boulevard in the hope of bumping into somebody. Turn to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, and suddenly everybody is busy, and everybody is complaining about it. Pepys, master of His Majesty’s Navy, may never have complained of busyness, but Virginia Woolf, mistress of motionless lull, is continually complaining about how she spends her days racing across London from square to square, just like--well, like Charlie Ravioli. Ronald Firbank is wrung out by his social obligations; Proust is constantly rescheduling rendezvous and apologizing for being overstretched. Henry James, with nothing particular to do save live, complains of being too busy all the time. He - Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. - GALE GROUP Information Integrity The New Yorker Sept 30, 2002 pNA Page 3 BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a child’s imagination) could not shake the world of obligation, he said, and he wrote a strange and beautiful story, "The Great Good Place," which begins with an exhausting flood of correspondence, telegrams, and manuscripts that drive the protagonist nearly mad. What changed? That James story helps supply the key. It was trains and telegrams. The railroads ended isolation, and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations. Pepys’s network in 1669 London was, despite his official position, relatively small compared even with that of a minor aesthete like Firbank, two centuries later. Pepys had more time to make love because he had fewer friends to answer. If the train crowded our streets, the telegram crowded our minds. It introduced something into the world which remains with us today: a whole new class of communications that are defined as incomplete in advance of their delivery. A letter, though it may enjoin a response, is meant to be complete in itself. Neither the Apostle Paul nor Horace Walpole ever ends an epistle with "Give me a call and let’s discuss." By contrast, it is in the nature of the telegram to be a skeletal version of another thing--a communication that opens more than it closes. The nineteenth-century telegram came with those busy-threatening words "Letter follows." Every device that has evolved from the telegram shares the same character. E-mails end with a suggestion for a phone call ("Anyway, let’s meet and/ or talk soon"), faxes with a request for an e-mail, answering-machine messages with a request for a fax. All are devices of perpetually suspended communication. My wife recalls a moment last fall when she got a telephone message from a friend asking her to check her e-mail apropos a phone call she needed to make vis-a-vis a fax they had both received asking for more information about a bed they were thinking of buying from Ireland online and having sent to America by Federal Express--a grand slam of incomplete communication. In most of the Western world outside New York, the press of trains and of telegraphic communication was alleviated by those other two great transformers: the car and the television. While the train and the telegram (and their love children, subways and commuter trains and e-mail) pushed people together, the car and the television pulled people apart--taking them out to the suburbs and sitting them down in front of a solo spectacle. New York, though, almost uniquely, got hit by a double dose of the first two technologies, and a very limited dose of the second two. Car life--car obsessions, car-defined habits--is more absent here than almost anywhere else in the country, while television, though obviously present, is less fatally prevalent here. New York is still a subject of television, and we compare "Sex and the City" to sex and the city; they are not yet quite the same. Here two grids of busyness remain dominant: the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century grid of bump and run, and the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century postmodern grid of virtual call and echo. Busyness is felt so intently here because we are both crowded and overloaded. We exit the apartment into a still dense nineteenth-century grid of street corners and restaurants full of people, and come home to the late-twentieth-century grid of faxes and e-mails and overwhelming incompleteness. We walk across the Park on a Sunday morning and bump into our friend the baker and our old acquaintance from graduate school (what the hell is she doing now?) and someone we have been avoiding for three weeks. They all invite us for brunch, and we would love to, but we are too . . . busy. We bump into Charlie Ravioli, and grab a coffee with him--and come home to find three e-mails and a message on our cell phone from him, wondering where we are. The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to protect ourselves is to build structures of perpetual deferral: I’ll see you next week, let’s talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in. Like Charlie Ravioli, we hop into taxis and leave messages on answering machines to avoid our acquaintances, and find that we keep missing our friends. I have one intimate who lives just across the Park from me, whom I e-mail often, and whom I am fortunate to see two or three times a year. We are always . . . busy. He has become my Charlie Ravioli, my invisible friend. I am sure that he misses me--just as Charlie Ravioli, I realized, must tell his other friends that he is sorry he does not see Olivia more often. Once I sensed the nature of his predicament, I began to feel more sympathetic toward Charlie Ravioli. I got to know him better, too. We learned more about what Ravioli did in the brief breathing spaces in his busy life when he could sit down with Olivia and dish. "Ravioli read your book," Olivia announced, for instance, one night at dinner. "He didn’t like it much." We also found out that Ravioli had joined a gym, that he was going to the beach in the summer, but he was too busy, and that he was working on a "show." ("It isn’t a very good show," she added candidly.) Charlie Ravioli, in other words, was just another New Yorker: fit, opinionated, and trying to break into show business. I think we would have learned to live happily with Charlie - Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. - GALE GROUP Information Integrity The New Yorker Sept 30, 2002 pNA Page 4 BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI.(busyness of life in New York City; effects on a child’s imagination) Ravioli had it not been for the appearance of Laurie. She threw us badly. At dinner, Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often as she mentioned Ravioli. "I talked to Laurie today," she would begin. "She says Ravioli is busy." Or she would be closeted with her play phone. "Who are you talking to, darling?" I would ask. "Laurie," she would say. "We’re talking about Ravioli." We surmised that Laurie was, so to speak, the Linda Tripp of the Ravioli operation--the person you spoke to for consolation when the big creep was ignoring you. But a little while later a more ominous side of Laurie’s role began to appear. "Laurie, tell Ravioli I’m calling," I heard Olivia say. I pressed her about who, exactly, Laurie was. Olivia shook her head. "She works for Ravioli," she said. And then it came to us, with sickening clarity: Laurie was not the patient friend who consoled you for Charlie’s absence. Laurie was the bright-toned person who answered Ravioli’s phone and told you that unfortunately Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting. "Laurie says Ravioli is too busy to play," Olivia announced sadly one morning. Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy even to say he was too busy. I got back on the phone with my sister. "Have you ever heard of an imaginary friend with an assistant?" I asked. She paused. "Imaginary friends don’t have assistants," she said. "That’s not only not in the literature. That’s just . . . I mean--in California they don’t have assistants." "You think we should look into it?" "I think you should move," she said flatly. Martha was of the same mind. "An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have an assistant," she said miserably. "An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have an agent. An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have a publicist or a personal trainer or a caterer--an imaginary playmate shouldn’t have . . . people. An imaginary playmate should just play. With the child who imagined it." She started leaving on my pillow real-estate brochures picturing quaint houses in New Jersey and Connecticut, unhaunted by busy invisible friends and their entourages. gone to a circus and told jokes. Searching for Charlie Ravioli, she had "saved all the animals in the zoo"; heading home in a taxi after a quick coffee with Ravioli, she took over the steering wheel and "got all the moneys." From the stalemate of daily life emerged the fantasy of victory. She had dreamed of a normal life with a few close friends, and had to settle for worldwide fame and the front page of the tabloids. The existence of an imaginary friend had liberated her into a paracosm, but it was a curiously New York paracosm--it was the unobtainable world outside her window. Charlie Ravioli, prince of busyness, was not an end but a means: a way out onto the street in her head, a declaration of potential independence. Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I’ve noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them--the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides. "How did you spend the day?" Martha and I now ask each other, and then, instead of listing her incidents, she says merely, "Oh, you know . . . just . . . bumping into Charlie Ravioli," meaning, just bouncing from obligation to electronic entreaty, just spotting a friend and snatching a sandwich, just being busy, just living in New York. If everything we’ve learned in the past year could be summed up in a phrase, it’s that we want to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long as we can. Olivia still hopes to have him to herself someday. As I work late at night in the "study" (an old hallway, an Aalto screen) I keep near the "nursery" (an ancient pantry, a glass-brick wall), I can hear her shift into pre-sleep, still muttering to herself. She is still trying to reach her closest friend. "Ravioli? Ravioli?" she moans as she turns over into her pillow and clutches her blanket, and then she whispers, almost to herself, "Tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home." Not long after the appearance of Laurie, though, something remarkable happened. Olivia would begin to tell us tales of her frustrations with Charlie Ravioli, and, after telling us, again, that he was too busy to play, she would tell us what she had done instead. Astounding and paracosmic tall tales poured out of her: she had been to a chess tournament and brought home a trophy; she had - Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. - GALE GROUP Information Integrity Essay 4: Sherry Turkle's “Alone Together" and Adam Gopnik's “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli” Sherry Turkle describes contemporary life as having a "culture of simulation" in which "the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians-- threat and obsession, taboo and fascination." Adam Gopnik, meanwhile, tells us that we float from one obligation to another, satisfied to only "bump into" the people we know because we are too "busy" to do more. How can we live "authentic" Turkle's definition) lives in a world increasingly mediated by technology and structured by a "grid of business"? In answering this question, put Adam Gopnik's "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli" in conversation with Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together." Who offers the better answer to this question, and how can their views be used to re-frame the examples given by the other writer? Before you begin Turkle provides us with a very specific definition of authenticity, saying that "it follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences." How does this specific definition of authenticity give us new ways of understanding the concepts from Gopnik's piece? Does he give us insight into how to achieve this authenticity? How does Gopnik's own stance change throughout his essay? How might Turkle ucky critique Caprikas ceas de definition kould be cofeiert definition of authenticity? How do you know? How would he critique Turkle's ideas or definitions? Would he consider her examples in a different way than she does? For example, do they have different opinions of the “perpetually suspended communication" Gopnik writes about?
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