The End of Solitude Summary

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The End of Solitude William Deresiewicz is a former teacher for English at Yale University. Currently he’s a contributing writer at “The Nation” and published his most famous essay “The End of Solitude” in 2009. In his essay, he claims that through new ways to communicate with each other like Facebook, human beings would lose a certain sense of solitude and the space everyone needs to figure who they are and what they believe in. He opens his argumentation saying that we only live in relation to others without any solitude because technology is taking away privacy and concentration. He proves this point with examples of his students who, according to Deresiewicz, write 3000 texts a month and don’t want to be alone so bad that they sit next to friend, even when they have to write a paper. He continues his argumentation emphasizing the importance of solitude. He tries to make that point by giving examples out of religious traditions and important classical figures such as Hamlet or Don Quixote. He continues to talk about the romantic idea of solitude and how it gets destroyed by the idea of having the most likes, viewers, or readers and proves this with some examples of students who have more than 500 Facebook friends but no time for solitude, privacy or intimacy. He also says that through this idea the value of the word “friends” since nobody could have more than 500 real friends. He basically claims that through new technology the important value of solitude and privacy gets lost and that teens don’t learn the important values. He also claims that the value of the word “friend” gets decreased through new technology. His main audience is teenagers and students who grew up with the new technology and therefore didn’t witness the “old” education that was more about values and the importance of privacy and solitude. He also wants to address teachers and parents

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