Sherry Turkle





Sherry Turkle

Author profile


gender
female

website

twitter username


About this author

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle writes on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She has been named "woman of the...more


Average rating: 3.63 · 1,794 ratings · 360 reviews · 10 distinct works · Similar authors
Alone Together: Why We Expe...
3.59 of 5 stars 3.59 avg rating — 1,336 ratings — published 2011 — 11 editions
Life on the Screen
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 192 ratings — published 1995 — 10 editions
Evocative Objects: Things W...
by
3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 avg rating — 116 ratings — published 2007 — 3 editions
The Second Self: Computers ...
3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 avg rating — 72 ratings — published 2005 — 6 editions
The Inner History of Devices
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 2008 — 4 editions
Falling for Science: Object...
3.5 of 5 stars 3.50 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 2008 — 4 editions
Simulation and Its Discontents
3.4 of 5 stars 3.40 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 2009 — 3 editions
Psychoanalytic Politics: Ja...
3.56 of 5 stars 3.56 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 1978 — 8 editions
La vita sullo schermo Nuove...
3.0 of 5 stars 3.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1997
Writing Choices: Shaping Co...
by
4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2000
More books by Sherry Turkle…

Upcoming Events

No scheduled events. Add an event.

“...we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?”
Sherry Turkle

“we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other



Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Sherry to Goodreads.