Sherry Turkle famous quotes

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

#Phones #Light #Seductive

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

#Progress

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Lonely #Technology #Seductive

Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of people [they're] with and this 'other' reality.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Reality #People #World

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

#Motivation #Inspiration #Technology

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

#Technology #Feelings #Listening

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

#Giving #Quality #Determined

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

#Technology #Talking #Romance

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

#Sex #Taken #Long

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

#Lying #Insecure #Mirrors

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

#Loneliness #Emotional #Self

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Self #Ideas #Psychology

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

#Real #Color #Law

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

#May #Abandon

Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!
-- Sherry Turkle

#Passion #Needs

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Thinking #Ironic #Faces

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

#Phones #Would Be #Mobile Phones

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

#Teenager #Too Much #Feels

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

#Technology #Photograph #Term

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

#Technology #Attachment #People

Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Mean #Giving #Mind

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesnt teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Thinking #Knowing #Culture

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

#Sports #Thinking #Blood

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

#Information #Faces #Telephones

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

#Technology #Who We Are #Doe

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Powerful #Computer

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

#Encounters #Doe #Kind

We used to think, 'I have a feeling; I want to make a call.' Now our impulse is, 'I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.'
-- Sherry Turkle

#Thinking #Feelings #Want

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Technology #Spirit #Easy

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

#Technology #Intimacy #Architect

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

#Lonely #People #Seductive

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Giving #Texting #Doe

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Sacrifice #Caring #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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Self #Mind #Machines

Loneliness is failed solitude.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Loneliness #Solitude #Introvert

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Uplifting #Loneliness #Heart

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Technology #Want

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

#Lonely #Technology #Giving

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.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Mean #Technology #Self

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

#Giving #Needs #Heal

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

#Children #School #Eye

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

#World #Links #Might

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

#Insecure #Technology #Looks

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

#Football #Children #Phones

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

#Lonely #Children #Able

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

#Needs #Boring

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

#Mean #Technology #Challenges

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

#Expectations #Risk #Comforting

We are not as strong as technology's pull.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Strong #Technology

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 #Light #Skills

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

#Thinking #Boredom #People

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

#Technology #Needs #Rejects

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

#Someday #Conversation

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

#Teenager #School #Phones

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

#Writing #Thinking #Appreciate

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
-- Sherry Turkle

#Technology #Demand #Companionship