This is a text from my writing course. I’m trying to understand the text so that I can get some idea to write my essay.
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.A few years ago at a dinner party in Paris, I met Ellen, an ambitious, elegant
young woman in her early thirties, thrilled to be working at her dream job in
advertiSing. Once a week, she would call her grandmother in Philadelphia using
Skype, an Internet service that functions as a telephone with a Web camera. Before
Skype, Ellen’s calls to her grandmother were costly and brief. With Skype,
the calls are free and give the compelling sense that the other person is present-
Skype is an almost real-time video link. Ellen could now call more frequently:
“Twice a week and I stay on the call for an hour:’ she told me. It should
have been rewarding; instead, when I met her, Ellen was unhappy. She knew
that her grandmother was unaware that Skype allows surreptitious multitasking.
Her grandmother could see Ellen’s face on the screen but not her hands. Ellen
admitted to me, “I do my e-mail during the calls. I’m not really paying attention
to our conversation.”
Ellen’s multitasking removed her to another place. She felt her grandmother
was talking to someone who was not really there. During their Skype conversations,
Ellen and her grandmother were more connected than they had ever been
before, but at the same time, each was alone. Ellen felt guilty and confused: she
knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen,
another task among multitasks.I think that in the first paragraph, if I get it right, the author argues that we can control the intensity because going from email, cell phone to video chat, the intimacy is felt more and more intense. In the next paragraph, I have a question to ask. Why is Ellen unhappy? Is it because that she didn’t pay attetion to her grandmother? If that’s the case, then why did she not listen to her grandmother? Is it because that the connection had become too easy, so that she did not feel lucky to have this chance to chat with her grandmother? By the way, what does this have to do with the first paragraph?
Answer
The key part of the first paragraph for me is the last sentence.
That will give you a big clue on the point of the second paragraph.
One way to interpret is if busy people a chance to multitask (and disengage) they will take it.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : pxc3110 , Answer Author : JohnR
