Similarities Between Fight Club And The Flight From Conversation

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Similarities between Fight Club and The Flight from Conversation
The Flight from conversation by Sherry Turkle is an essay on how technology has negatively impacted human conversations and relationships. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a story of a narrator who due to his loneliness ends up in bad company and trouble. The two authors introduce the issue of isolation, emasculation, consumer culture, identity and the lack of a fatherly figure among others.
The authors found it important to put these issues on the discussion table because 1) they exist and they can be accessed due to their availability 2) they affect the lives of individuals and 3) they call for a positive counteraction. The illusion the technology for the case of Turkle’s essay and other circumstances (for the case of Palahniuk’s text) makes people think that they are happy and satisfied yet they feel empty, unsatisfied and unhappy deep inside. Thus, lack of human connection leads to unsatisfied lives.
The issue of isolation is apparent from both the essay and the book. In the Fight Club, the narrator’s unsatisfactory nature in life and insomnia is due to isolation. From the voice, there is no mention of friends anywhere. Also, he has no cancer, but he attends the meetings of support groups. He just wants to have the feel of human connection, a place where he can express his feelings whether dark or good. This human connection is lacking in his job or daily life where the audience fails to meet any of his friends. Marla Singer as well expresses this isolation. It does not only pertain to men, but to everyone in the society. She comes from a poor background and she accepts her reality, unlike the narrator; something that makes the narrator uncomfortable.
Turkle writes about technology that is, making people isolate themselves. Unlike the narrator in the Fight club, Turkle talks about the people who always isolate themselves with an illusion that they get a companion when they keep connected through the media. She says, “We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.” She talks of an old lady who started to express her feelings to a robot she had brought to the elderly care. The old woman talked about the loss of her child to the robot which kept an eye contact to show that it was actually listening. This also showed the level of isolation this old lady was experiencing. She had deep hurting feelings, but she had no one to express them to.
Emasculation has been argued out broadly in both texts. In the modern society, masculinity has been reduced to a generation that fails to do something of substance but watch others do it instead. Both texts argue that masculinity is now a brand to sell the product of ‘being a man’ rather than desiring to know what it is to be masculine and the values associated with it. The narrator, Tyler, and the other Fight Club members refuse this notion and seek a different path to finding themselves. They decided to put themselves in certain experiences and fights to strip away this unnecessary notion to allow them naviga...