Sherry Turkle Alone Together Quotes

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

We... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.

Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay.

In solitude we don't reject the world but have the space to think our thoughts.

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.

Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.

When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?

this distinctive confusion: these days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart.

This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now.

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes. And with constant connection comes new anxieties of disconnection,

The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities.

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

When you depend on the computer to remember your past, you focused on whatever past is kept on the computer.

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

But this is not a book about robots. Rather, it is about how we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face.

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.

Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.

We are shaped by our tools.

AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility.

The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.

As infants, we see the world in parts. There is the good—the things that feed and nourish us. There is the bad—the things that frustrate or deny us. As children mature, they come to see the world in more complex ways, realizing, for example, that beyond black and white, there are shades of gray. The same mother who feeds us may sometimes have no milk. Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.4 With this integration, we learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity. When we imagine a robot as a true companion, there is no need to do any of this work.

I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin’s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves.

when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

Online life is about premeditation.

Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic; the jewel in the crown.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

Anxieties migrate, proliferate.

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

Teenagers make it clear that games, worlds, and social networking (on the surface, rather different) have much in common. They all ask you to compose and project an identity.

They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.5 Without alterity, there can be no empathy.

enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right.

It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?

Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself.

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.

Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.

Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.2 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”3 In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.

Wilson’s way of keeping in mind the dual aspects of the Furby’s nature seems to me a philosophical version of multitasking, so central to our twentieth-century attentional ecology. His attitude is pragmatic. If something that seems to have a self is before him, he deals with the aspect of self he finds most relevant to the context.

Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke.

This change in communication may have some side effects, though. In her book Alone Together, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation—kids on the left, parents on the right—a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents’ side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids’ side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them. It made me wonder whether our ability and desire to interact with strangers is another muscle that risks atrophy in the smartphone world. You

In the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature.

I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of “as if ” performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.

In her book Alone Together, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining.

Today’s young people have grown up with robot pets and on the network in a fully tethered life. In their views of robots, they are pioneers, the first generation that does not necessarily take simulation to be second best. As for online life, they see its power—they are, after all risking their lives to check their messages—but they also view it as one might the weather: to be taken for granted, enjoyed, and sometimes endured. They’ve gotten used to this weather but there are signs of weather fatigue. There are so many performances; it takes energy to keep things up; and it takes time, a lot of time. “Sometimes you don’t have time for your friends except if they’re online,” is a common complaint.

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all.

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone Together, has written about the cost of constantly documenting—i.e., photographing—our lives. These interruptions, she writes, “make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.” And by so-obsessively documenting our experiences, we never truly have them.

But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. THE

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by "solving" it without addressing it.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.