Going into these readings I knew that the theme of the class was going to revolve around technology. So when I went into our first reading of Turkle’s, “The Empathy Diaries,” I knew that I needed to look for possible passages that could relate to our usage of technology and how it affects us. While obviously Turkle’s whole essay is about what I aforementioned, I read the reading with a special interest in any passages that could be used for my essays, or comments in class. I would look to underline sections that provided a “so what” to why digital technology is bad for you. As Turkle says, “learning isn’t all about the answers. It’s about what the answers mean” (344). I wanted to underline the passages that seemed unordinary compared to the rest of the text; I wanted it to be so that if I compiled all of my underlined sections, a random reader could just read them to get an idea of Turkle’s most important points. As I was reading Turkle’s paper, I would start to see a theme in how digital technology affects us; then following that, I would begin to subconsciously look for examples that can help further the theme that I discovered. For example, as I read The Empathy Diaries I noticed how Turkle consistently returned to the idea of digital technology being a flight from conversation, almost as though we feared it. From there on, I would subconsciously be attracted to passages that exemplified this. Passages like the following caught my eye, “Even children text each other rather than talk face-to-face with friends – or, for that matter, rather than daydream, where they can take time alone with their thoughts” (344). I always looked at my readings through an essay-centric point of view. I wanted to compile ideas and thoughts through Turkle’s writing where I could return to the text and just look at any of my underlined sections for quotes. I developed a theme, and an idea about what my essay would revolve around as I was reading the essay. For each section that I thought applied to a theme I was gathering, I would underline, and usually write a few words about the gist of that passage.
