Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other

379 Pages·2010·1.76 MB·English

by  Sherry Turkle

(continued from front flap) CUrrent eVentS / SoCIologY $28.95 US / $35.00 Can
how we understand privacy and community, intimacy alone together
praIse For F
and solitude. It is a story of emotional dislocation, acebook. twitter. second Life. “smart” phones.
of risks taken unknowingly. But it is also a story of robot pets. robot lovers. thirty years ago
“No one has a better handle on how we are using material technology to transform our immaterial
hope, for even in the places where digital saturation is we asked what we would use computers for.
‘self’ than sherry turkle. she is our techno-Freud, illuminating our inner transformation long before
turkle
greatest, there are people—especially the young—who Now the question is what don’t we use them for. Now,
we are able to see it. this immensely satisfying book is a deep journey into our future selves.”
are asking the hard questions about costs, about checks  —KevinKelly,author of What Technology Wants through technology, we create, navigate, and carry out
and balances, about returning to what is most sustaining s h e r r y our emotional lives.
“Alone Together is a brilliant, profound, stirring, and often disturbing portrait of the future by america’s
about direct human connection. at the threshold of a We shape our buildings, Winston churchill argued,
leading expert on how computers affect us as humans. she reveals the secrets of ‘Walden 2.0’ and tells us
what turkle calls “the robotic moment,” our devices then they shape us. the same is true of our digital
t u r k l e
that we deserve better than caring robots. Grab this book, then turn off your smart phones and absorb
prompt us to recall that we have human purposes and, l technologies. technology has become the architect of
sherry turkle’s powerful message.” —RosabeThMossKanTeR,
perhaps, to rediscover what they are. our intimacies. online, we face a moment of temptation.
harvard Business school professor and author of Evolve!, Confidence, and SuperCorp o
author of The Second Self
Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the
and Life on the Screen
“sherry turkle is the Margaret Mead of digital culture. parents and teachers: If you want to understand
demands of intimacy, we conduct “risk free” affairs on
n
(and support) your children as they navigate the emotional undercurrents in today’s technological world,
second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on
this is the book you need to read. every chapter is full of great insights and great writing.”
e a lo n e a Facebook wall with authentic communication. and
 —MiTchelResnicK, LeGo papert professor of Learning research
now, we are promised “sociable robots” that will marry
and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIt Media Laboratory

companionship with convenience.
t
“Based on an ambitious research program, and written in a clear and beguiling style, this book will
technology promises to let us do anything from
captivate both scholar and general reader and it will be a landmark in the study of the impact of social o
anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to
n media.” —JillKeRconway, president emerita, smith college, and author of The Road from Coorain
eter Urba “Alone Together is a deep yet accessible, bold yet gentle, frightening yet reassuring account of how g to g e t h e r danod e vdeerpyltehtiendg beyv ethryew lhiveerse .t eWche nboelgoigny tmo afekeels opvoesrswibhleel.m Wede 6s.:2 15- 3x/ 91.65””
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people continue to find one another in an increasingly mediated landscape. If the net and humanity may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also B: 15/16”
e
sherry turkle could have a couples therapist, it would be sherry turkle.” —DouglasRushKoff, prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist,
is the abby rockefeller
author of Program or Be Programmed t relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn BasIc
Mauzé professor of the social studies of science and
hc
to new technology to fill the void, but as technology
technology at MIt, the founder and director of the MIt “sherry turkle has observed more widely and thought more deeply about human-computer h
Initiative on technology and self, and a licensed clinical relations than any other scholar. her book is essential reading for all who hope to understand our W h y W e e x p e c t M o r e f r o m ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.
4/coLor
psychologist. she is the author of The Second Self and changing relation to technology.” —howaRDgaRDneR, e Alone Together is the result of MIt technology and
T e c h n o l o g y
hobbs professor of cognition and education, harvard Graduate school of education society specialist sherry turkle’s nearly fifteen-year
Life on the Screen, with which Alone Together forms a
r FINIsh:
exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based
trilogy. she lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
$28.95 US / $35.00 CAN
matte poly
ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9 a n d L e s s f r o m e a c h o t h e r on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, it
52895
a Member of the perseus Books Group describes new, unsettling relationships between friends,
Jacket design by alyssa stepien www.basicbooks.com
lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in
Jacket photograph © photoalto / Getty Images
01/11 9 780465 010219 (continued on back flap)
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page i
Alone Together
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page ii
also by sherry turkle
Psychoanalytic Politics
The Second Self
Life on the Screen
Evocative Objects (Ed.)
Falling for Science (Ed.)
The Inner History of Devices (Ed.)
Simulation and Its Discontents
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page iii
alone together
Why We Expect
More from Technology
and
Less from Each Other
Sherry Turkle
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/11/10 12:09 PM Page iv
Copyright © 2011 by Sherry Turkle
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South,
New York, NY 10016-8810.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk
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organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets
Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200,
Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call [phone], ext. 5000, or e-mail
[email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turkle, Sherry.
Alone together : why we expect more from technology and less from each
other / Sherry Turkle.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9 (alk. paper)
1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Interpersonal relations. 3.
Human-computer interaction. I. Title.
HM851.T86 2010
303.48'33—dc22
2010030614
E-book ISBN 978-0-465-02234-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page v
To Rebecca
My letter to you, with love
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page vi
“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”
—Plato, The Republic
“I’m done with smart machines. I want a machine
that’s attentive to my needs. Where are the sensitive
machines?”
—Tweet available at dig_natRT @tigoe via @ramonapringle
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page vii
contents
Author’s Note: Turning Points ix
Introduction: Alone Together 1
PART ONE
THE ROBOTIC MOMENT: IN SOLITUDE, NEW INTIMACIES
1. Nearest Neighbors 23
2. Alive Enough 35
3. True Companions 53
4. Enchantment 67
5. Complicities 83
6. Love’s Labor Lost 103
7. Communion 127
PART TWO
NETWORKED: IN INTIMACY, NEW SOLITUDES
8. Always On 151
9. Growing Up Tethered 171
vii
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page viii
viii Contents
10. No Need to Call 187
11. Reduction and Betrayal 211
12. True Confessions 229
13. Anxiety 241
14. The Nostalgia of the Young 265
Conclusion: Necessary Conversations 279
Epilogue: The Letter 297
Notes, 307
Index, 349
0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page ix
AUTHOR’S NOTE
turning points
t
hirty years ago, when I joined the faculty at MIT to study computer culture,
the world retained a certain innocence. Children played tic-tac-toe with
their electronic toys, video game missiles took on invading asteroids, and “in-
telligent” programs could hold up their end of a serious chess match. The first
home computers were being bought by people called hobbyists. The people who
bought or built them experimented with programming, often making their own
simple games. No one knew to what further uses home computers might be put.
The intellectual buzz in the still-young field of artificial intelligence was over
programs that could recognize simple shapes and manipulate blocks. AI scien-
tists debated whether machines of the future would have their smarts pro-
grammed into them or whether intelligence might emerge from simple
instructions written into machine hardware, just as neurobiologists currently
imagine that intelligence and reflective self-consciousness emerge from the rel-
atively simple architecture and activity of the human brain.
Now I was among them and, like any anthropologist, something of a stranger
in a strange land. I had just spent several years in Paris studying how psychoana-
lytic ideas had spread into everyday life in France—how people were picking up
and trying on this new language for thinking about the self. I had come to MIT
because I sensed that something similar was happening with the language of
computers. Computational metaphors, such as “debugging” and “programming,”
ix