Connections – We Are More Connected, Yet More Distant

Psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle, in her February 2012 TED talk, Connected but Alone, explains a modern paradox: we are more connected than ever, but we have lost the ability to truly communicate.

‘A conversation takes place in real time.  And you can’t control what you’re going to say,’ explains Turkle.  ‘With technology, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connections. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.’

We help you build connections 

The founders of PurpleSlate agree with Dr. Turkle and believe in the importance of connections. However, at the same time, we love our smartphones.  We love the convenience of messaging apps and also the joy in editing photos.  But convenience and joy come at a price.

We observed that we were spending less time going out of our way to make plans to meet friends, family, and loved ones. One must work to establish, nurture, and develop relationships with other people, and we wanted to create a way to foster these offline, face-to-face interactions and human connections. We wanted to make it simple for people to make plans with people who matter.

As a solution, the founders of PurpleSlate wanted an app, an invitation maker that would both encourage and facilitate the making of plans – casual or otherwise – and from these moments, capture the most meaningful interactions and experiences. The app has core features like the ability to send and receive invitations, set calendar reminders, edit photos with a photo editor, group messaging and private messaging. Check us out at http://www.mypurpleslate.com/ .

Dr. Turkle’s TED talk was over two years ago. Connectivity, smartphone, and mobile app penetration have only increased since then.

But the value of human relationships and connections continues to increase.

‘We use conversations with each other,’ continues Dr. Turkle, ‘to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.’

Posted by Jake Wengroff on June 4, 2015.

I have served as the Founding Chairman of the Social Media Strategies Summit, and have written for publications such as CMO.com and InformationWeek. I have been quoted in Time, Reuters, Bloomberg, and other publications on the topics of social media and marketing. If you enjoyed reading this post, join our email list to get free email updates.