Authenticity includes: faithfulness, genuineness, reliability, and trust. Turkle compares relationships on social media to “robotic love”. This generation considered an authentic relationship to be one where you communicate everyday, or you have the person friended on all social media. The younger generation seems to ignore the fact that friending on social media is not the same as friending in person. Like Turkle, Gladwell agrees on the fact that conversation through social media lacks “authenticity” because “It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices.”(Gladwell 138) For example, body language is an aspect that social media lacks. Conversations tend to be fake because a person cannot tell the true intentions of the person they are speaking to.They cannot see their expressions, feel their emotions, interact with them physically. This is how bullying is created. People can cowardly cause malice to others and be able to get away with it. Without face-to-face interaction, it is easy to simply hurt those around you, even strangers. Meeting someone in person, creates a better relationship rather than a …show more content…
Gladwell and Turkle sees how technology is deteriorating the average person because they know what it is like to live without it. Although technology is a very useful resource, it is also very harmful. The current generation has been purged of their ability to form “authentic relationships.” People may argue that having a conversation through the internet is the same thing as having a conversation in person. But the truth is that having a conversation through texting or social media does not have that realness that is apparent in person-to-person conversations. People say that they would rather “text than talk” (Turkle 272) the reason for that is that people are becoming way too comfortable with technology. Soon face-to-face communication will cease and technological means of communication will flourish. Although technology is great because it offers us many resources that would normally not be available, technology is taking a toll on our lives. Everyone is so succumbed by social media that they do not know how to operate without it. We are starting to depend on technology to communicate to others and we are forgetting what it is like to have an real friendship without technology. Even though the invention of social media was brilliant, the excessive use of it has changed this generation. Turkle speaks of the fact that we do not even know what it is like not to have our phones on