Thank you NPR for always adding things to my "to-read" list. I picked up this book at the library after listening to this RadioLab episode on machines. It's hard to write a review or summary of this book. For sure it's really interesting, but it's also really dense. There are a lot of really similar academic examples. The book definitely shows a thoroughness of research. There are also so many moments that had me going - yes, yes, yes.

I'm a huge fan of the internet and the possibilities it creates for relationships. Most of the people reading this now are people I originally met on the Internet. But interestingly Turkle points to example after example of people escaping into relationships online because their inter-personal ones are unsatisfying. Teenagers who find phone calls, too hard or too emotional. To easy to betray their real feelings, while online or text conversations can be carefully constructed. Children and old people being happier playing with robots because they can approximate caring in way that they don't receive from parents or caregivers.

"Online, we easily find "company" but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other's full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in reductive genres of abbreviation. We like that the Web 'knows' us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially. We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be "put on hold" if better ones come along...The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are ties that preoccupy. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don't want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in "real time".