Sherry Turkle Quotes & Sayings

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

There are moments of opportunity for families; moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school - a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent! — Sherry Turkle

We expect more from technology and less from each other. — Sherry Turkle

Connectivity becomes a craving. — Sherry Turkle

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages. — Sherry Turkle

In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don't know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are. We take what we need from them in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves. — Sherry Turkle

Underestimation has its uses. — Sherry Turkle

For three decades, in describing people's relationships with computers, I have often used the metaphor of the Rorschach, the inkblot test that psychologists use as a screen onto which people can project their feelings and styles of thought. But as children interact with sociable robots like Furbies, they move beyond a psychology of projection to a new psychology of engagement. They try to deal with the robot as they would deal with a pet or a person. — Sherry Turkle

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

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? — Sherry Turkle

What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

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. — Sherry Turkle

Most relationships are a blend of online and off-line interaction. Courtships take place via text. Political debates are sparked and social movements mobilize on websites. Why not focus on the positive - a celebration of these new exchanges? Because these are the stories we tell each other to explain why our technologies are proof of progress. We like to hear these positive stories because they do not discourage us in our pursuit of the new - our new comforts, our new distractions, our new forms of commerce. And we like to hear them because if these are the only stories that matter, then we don't have to attend to other feelings that persist - that we are somehow more lonely than before, that our children are less empathic than they should be for their age, and that it seems nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation at a family dinner. We — Sherry Turkle

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

We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And — Sherry Turkle

The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, the anxiety of always. — Sherry Turkle

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. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely — Sherry Turkle

For one woman, a college sophomore, "It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person." For a senior man, "If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves. — Sherry Turkle

Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much. — Sherry Turkle

When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. — Sherry Turkle

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

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

We go from curiosity to a search for communion. — Sherry Turkle

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and slowness. — Sherry Turkle

Despite the seriousness of our moment, I write with optimism. Once aware, we can begin to rethink our practices. When we do, conversation is there to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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, — Sherry Turkle

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

Is not a problem looking for a quick fix. Life is a conversation and you need places to have it. The virtual provides us with more spaces for these conversations and these are enriching. But what makes the physical so precious is that it supports continuity in a different way; it doesn't come and go, and it binds people to it. You can't just log off or drop out. — Sherry Turkle

[Faculty ... ] insisted that the lecture and live demonstration was a sacred space. Faculty talked about the importance of debating with students, responding to questions, and presenting a model for how to argue a point and respect differences. They talked about the sanctity of live demonstrations - the importance of doing science in real time. They wanted students to watch live, imperfect lectures and demonstrations and feel part of an in-person community. They say the classroom as a place where you learned to love the 'as-is' of nature as much as you love the 'as-if' of the virtual. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are. — Sherry Turkle

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another. — Sherry Turkle

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate? — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

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. — Sherry Turkle

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day. — Sherry Turkle

When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive. — Sherry Turkle

Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation. — Sherry Turkle

It used to be that we imagined our mobile phones were there so that we could talk to each other. Now we want our mobile phones to talk to us. — Sherry Turkle

Again, there is psychological risk in the robotic moment. Logan's comment about talking with the AIBO to "get thoughts out" suggests using technology to know oneself better. But it also suggests a fantasy in which we cheapen the notion of companionship to a baseline of "interacting with something." We reduce relationship and come to see this reduction as the norm. — Sherry Turkle

I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows. — Sherry Turkle

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

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

We are shaped by our tools. — Sherry Turkle

Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation. — Sherry Turkle

What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us. — Sherry Turkle

The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright. — Sherry Turkle

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

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions. — Sherry Turkle

Become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We've seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they're not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

if your pet is a robot, it might always stay a cute puppy. By extension, if your lover were a robot, you would always be the center of its universe. A robot would not just be better than nothing or better than something, but better than anything. From — Sherry Turkle

Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs. — Sherry Turkle

This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. — Sherry Turkle

Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to. — Sherry Turkle

Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it's like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: I think the way we're going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they're with is there, you don't get the feeling of real connection. You just have information. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

From watching children play with objects designed as "amusements," we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us. — Sherry Turkle

The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us. — Sherry Turkle

But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness. — Sherry Turkle

We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place, — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. — Sherry Turkle

If you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything. — Sherry Turkle

It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' — Sherry Turkle

People are surprised by how upset they get in this theater of distress. And then they get upset that they are upset. They often try to reassure themselves, saying things like, "Chill, chill, it's only a toy!" They are experiencing something new: you can feel bad about yourself for how you behave with a computer program. Adults come to the upside-down test knowing two things: the Furby is a machine and they are not torturers. By the end, with a whimpering Furby in tow, they are on new ethical terrain. — Sherry Turkle

Shakespeare might have said, we are consumed with that with which we are nourished by. — Sherry Turkle

We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. — Sherry Turkle

I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport. — Sherry Turkle

What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face. — Sherry Turkle

From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game. — Sherry Turkle

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly. — Sherry Turkle