Turkle Quotes & Sayings

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

Connectivity becomes a craving. — Sherry Turkle

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet — 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

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

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

Space is infinite. To the mind that means freedom, liberation.' So wrote Arisko, our greatest turkle philosopher, in his most famous work, 'Thoughts In A Bathtub'," said Dottia, dreamily, in an inspired state. — Philip Dodd

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

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

Being silenced by our technologies - in a way, "cured of talking." These silences - often in the presence of our children - have led to a crisis of empathy that has diminished us at home, at work, and in public life. I've said that the remedy, most simply, is a talking cure. This book is my case for conversation. — 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

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

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup. — Sherry Turkle

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

Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed - and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing. — 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

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

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

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities. — Sherry Turkle

one text can change the whole dynamic of a budding relationship. In a certain context, even just saying something as innocuous as "Hey, let's hang out sometime" or spelling errors or punctuation choices can irritate someone. When I spoke with Sherry Turkle about this, she said that texting, unlike an in-person conversation, is not a forgiving medium for mistakes. — Aziz Ansari

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. — 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

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy. — Sherry Turkle

We ... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need. — Sherry Turkle

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

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

We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become. — Sherry Turkle

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

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

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

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. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

When I interview candidates, I like to go where they live, so I can see them in their environment, not just in mind. — 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

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

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit. — 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

Professional life requires that one live with the tension of using technology and remembering to distrust it. — Sherry Turkle

A similar concern about using the web to provide just-in-time information shows up among physicians arguing the future of medical education. Increasingly, and particularly while making a first diagnosis, physicians rely on handheld databases, what one philosopher calls "E-memory." The physicians type in symptoms and the digital tool recommends a potential diagnosis and suggested course of treatment. Eighty-nine percent of medical residents regard one of these E-memory tools, UpToDate, as their first choice for answering clinical questions. But will this "just-in-time" and "just enough" information teach young doctors to organize their own ideas and draw their own conclusions? — 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

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. — Sherry Turkle

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism. — Sherry Turkle

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

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

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. — Sherry Turkle

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

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other we can have each other at a digital distance - not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. — Sherry Turkle

We have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. — Sherry Turkle

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

People teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation. — Sherry Turkle

But these conversations require time and space, and we say we're too busy. Distracted at our dinner tables and living rooms, at our business meetings, and on our streets, we find traces of a new "silent spring" - a term Rachel Carson coined when we were ready to see that with technological change had come an assault on our environment. Now, we have arrived at another moment of recognition. This time, technology is implicated in an assault on empathy. We have learned that even a silent phone inhibits conversations that matter. — 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 new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. — 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

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

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. — 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

What do we forget when we talk to machines? We forget what is special about being human. We forget what it means to have authentic conversation. Machines are programmed to have conversations "as if" they understood what the conversation is about. So when we talk to them, we, too, are reduced and confined to the "as if. — Sherry Turkle

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

Technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.

"A song that became popular on YouTube in 2010, 'Do You Want to Date My Avatar?' ends with the lyrics 'And if you think I'm not the one, log off, log off, and we'll be done.' "

from a review of Alone Together by S. Turkle — Michiko Kakutani

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

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

It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us. — Sherry Turkle

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

The web promises to make our world bigger. But as it works now, it also narrows our exposure to ideas. We can end up in a bubble in which we hear only the ideas we already know. Or already like. — Sherry Turkle

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

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy. — Sherry Turkle

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. — 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

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. — 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

Online life is about premeditation. — 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

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. — 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

Turkle recounts the story of Marcia, a tenth grader she interviewed about Sim City. Marcia had developed a set of guidelines for playing the game, including this one: "Raising taxes always leads to riots."46 Turkle worries gravely about Marcia's inability to conceive of a simulation in which the rules would differ, in which, for example, "increased taxes led to increased productivity and social harmony."" Turkle calls for a new kind of literacy that would teach Marcia and her peers how to develop a reading competency of simulation. — Ian Bogost

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? — Sherry Turkle

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists. — 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

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