Annotations: From Sherry Turkle: “The Empathy Diaries”

Making annotations within the article helped provide points to start the outline. This allowed my to make my own inferences about the article and how I interpreted it. Allowing to make notes and comments better helped layout how I was going to write paper two.

Critical Thinking Questions:

Questions (answered from Turkle)

  1. Conversation is important to understand what a person is feeling to develop empathy towards people. We don’t really understand certain cues of where a person is coming from when we just text online. We tend to detach our emotions when texting, but being face to face we are more sincere.
  2. Turkle talks about how we have strayed away from making meaningful conversations we rather just talk about over the phone through a email so we don’t know what they are feeling and how their body language is, we can skip the uncomfortable. I catch myself sometimes having some difficult conversations over the phone because I didn’t have to deal with the person in person and just could disconnect their feelings and mine from the conversations.
  3. I don’t think people should use technology to create something meaningful when they are “down the road from someone” taking the shortcut of just telling them ad getting it out of the way. But she does list a point of where yes sometimes having technology can be useful in some case to keep up some of the meaningful conversations as well create more. This is useful for people in long distance relationships because that is really all they have to communicate with their person as well as family you are far apart from and ever see.

Questions (answered from Van Houtryve’s article)

Critical Thinking

2. Lack of personal privacy, surveillance. Military drones are used for airstikes. He is worried that more and more departments will lean toward military drones and used for more than just surveillance. I think that his concerns are justified. The drones made for the military for missions were made for spescfics reasons, to be used in a war. Not to be used in the public. They could say that other aparments are just used for surveillance but how much of that is true. 

3. Weaponized means to take something away from its intended use and alter it to be used as something to harm another group/individual. Van Houtryve also agrees that these drones are being modified to target individuals 

Assignments for Writing

  1. I do not think that we should get rid of technology in combat. Technology can play a vital role when used properly and for its intended purpose. The question of whether technology takes more lives then saves is up for debate. But I think when used correctly drones can save more lives. During combat drones are able to scan buildings and help soldiers get a layout of what they are about to go into and how many people will be in there, instead of going in blind. This can help them better prepare for situations they may encounter. 

Answering critical thinking questions helps get ideas flowing to start helping me think about the points I want to make in my paper and which argument I want to make. Answering these questions as well as making annotations opens the door to writing a good paper.