If I had more time it would be fun to cover Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I actually found it to be the most convincing piece that I read which fell on the less optimistic side of the technology/social media spectrum. The structure reminded me a lot of the danah boyd piece that we read in RWS511 where she based her conclusions and analysis about MySpace (and Facebook, by implication) on her interviews and data collected from teenagers. Turkle's data is more up to date and she roots her analysis in these interviews and the themes that she sees in the data. This makes her work far less speculative than Postman, and I think more convincing than Carr. Some of her points seem redundant (not unlike boyd's article, though boyd was writing at the beginning of the social media revolution), but she does offer a lot of interesting insights into how teenagers approach social media and what their expectations are of their community and technology. Absent from a lot from a lot of other discussions are low-tech new media like phone conversations and how teenagers feel about that form of communication - in short, it is too transparent and demands too much effort from the users.
I found the book really interesting and a very fast read; I highly recommend it. She has done an independent TED talk which introduces a lot of the main concepts and will give you some idea as to whether or not you are interested in her work.
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