A Critical Analysis of “quality time, redefined” by Alex Williams
In his New York Times article, “Quality Time Redefined” Alex Williams explores the effects of technology on our vision of quality family time. Williams builds a cogent case that both explore the alienating aspects of the “cyber-cocoon” and the ways in which brings the fortunate families together. He does so by exploring the impact of technology and its effects on the family life of few fortunate people, citing academic studies and the opinions of various subject matter experts but does not define what quality time means and tries to keep the argument with the examples of very few families. Williams manages to use his critical thinking skills, language, tone and structure in a good way.
Williams shows one of his critical thinking skills by citing Dr Koepnick “if you go back 200 years, there were similar complaints about technological devices, but it was books at that time” (98). Williams compares what the books did to the family’s centuries ago and what the current technology is doing to the modern families.
Williams tries to strengthen his argument by talking about a handful of families such as Vavara, Wolkstein, James Gleick, Rosenthal and the Gotlib who believe these technological devices are a powerful tool to unite the families and support the idea of quality time, even though family members are connected to “parallel worlds” through the electronic devices. These few examples do not provide enough evidence and confuse the reader about quality time and the impact of technology .This is the central question which he examines in this article and shows us the alienating aspects while also building a case for how our emerging technology brings us together.
Williams supports his argument of families being alienated by citing authors like Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts institute of Technology, and the author of “Alone Together;...