Sherry Turkle
People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.Collection: Lonely
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.Collection: Mean
It all stems from the same thing - which is that when we are face to face - and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook ... when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We're aware that we're with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being.Collection: Thinking
What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.Collection: Technology
We're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to connect, and sometimes we're too busy communicating to create. This is true for individuals and also true for organizations.Collection: Thinking
Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.Collection: Powerful
If we don't teach kids how to be alone, they will end up only lonely.Collection: Lonely
We expect more from technology and less from each other.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Insecure
Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.Collection: Progress
We... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.Collection: Giving
Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.Collection: Someday
Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.Collection: Loneliness
Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of the people [they're] with and this other reality.Collection: Reality
If you're happy with where the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter have taken you, I'm not the Grinch. Someone called me Sherry Turkle's "evil Luddite twin." I'm not that. I enjoy the bounties of this technology. But if you fear that your connected life is running away with you, read the book, reflect, talk to your family and friends. I think we deserve better than some of the places that we've gotten with this technology.Collection: Running
We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.Collection: Motivation
As a therapist, I know that when you're vulnerable, the best way to move on is to admit your vulnerability, don't beat yourself up for it, and try to find a way to analyze your vulnerability. Pull up your socks and try to do better for you and your family.Collection: Moving
The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.Collection: Self
I apologize to all of my colleagues who've been writing up storms, but as a culture we've essentially put ourselves into a position where Mark Zuckerberg can say, "Privacy as a social norm is no longer relevant," and a lot of people don't blink an eye.Collection: Writing
Everything that enchants may be said to deceive.Collection: Deceiving
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.Collection: Giving
There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking.Collection: Giving
When the social network doesn't find it convenient to have privacy, we say, "Okay, social network, you don't want privacy, maybe we won't have it either." But we did this without having the conversation.Collection: Privacy
One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians--threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.Collection: Sex
What is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to a shared store of human meaning?Collection: Understanding
In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.Collection: Technology
People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of Wired magazine. [Then things began to change. In the early 80s,] we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.Collection: Technology
If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.Collection: Self
The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely.Collection: Lonely
We have relationships with many different things, creatures and beings. We have relationships with cats, with dogs, with horses, and we know that there are certain things they can't do. So we'll add robots to that list, and we'll learn what they can and cannot do. No harm, no foul.Collection: Dog
We're in partnership with technology, influencing each other in a dance. My loyalties are to our making and shaping technology to conform to our human values; and to confronting the hard job of figuring out what those values are, and how are we're going to get technology to do that.Collection: Loyalty
I don't tell a story unless I have a very deep bench. If you tell an idiosyncratic story, there's no resonance. People read it and say, "I don't see anyone like that." So I tell a story only when I have many stories behind it.Collection: People
The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.Collection: Psychology
Telephone companies sell us voice plans because they know we're not going to use them. We're hiding from each other. People say that calls aren't efficient, but trying to bring efficiency into your intimacy can get you into a lot of trouble.Collection: People
It’s a way of life to be always texting and when you looks at these texts it really is thoughts in formation. I do studies where I just sit for hours and hours at red lights watching people unable to tolerate being alone. Its as though being along has become a problem that needs to be solved and then technology presents itself as a solution to this problem…Being alone is not a problem that needs to be solved. The capacity for solitude is a very important human skill.Collection: Technology
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.Collection: Technology
As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.Collection: May
We are not as strong as technology's pull.Collection: Strong
We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place.Collection: Technology
My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude - the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.Collection: Uplifting
Loneliness is failed solitude.Collection: Loneliness
Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.Collection: Lying
We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk.Collection: Motivation
If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.Collection: Lonely
we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.Collection: Giving
When you're addicted to heroin, there is only one thing you can do - go off heroin. But we're not going to throw away these phones, we're not going to throw away our technology.Collection: Technology
Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?Collection: Encounters
We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins.Collection: Cyborg
We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.Collection: Lonely