Turkle's Alone Together, published last year, is good, but not nearly as engaged with the more fundamental ideas that lie beneath our psychology and technology's effect on it. The first couple sections of Life on the Screen address a continuing dichotomy between top-down design and learn through use. Or, as Turkle puts it, between modernists and postmodernists.

And maybe that's what I appreciate more about Life on the Screen Turkle is more invested in relating the world of technology to the world at large. She uses terms that would be more familiar to culture critics. Alone Together feels more like a series of case studies. They're fun to read. But I feel more compelled by Life on the Screen. I pose more significant questions after reading the chapters in it.

Both books wrestle with the definition of "artificial intelligence," for instance. And both consider whether its human perception of intelligence or objectively fulfilled notions of intelligence that would define A.I. It's just Life on the Screen is more willing to entertain the objective definition of intelligence, and therefore to truly open the issues surrounding our work with the machines.