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The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
“A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir • Winner of the New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction
MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together , Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work
For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own.
In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.
Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.
MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together , Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work
For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own.
In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.
Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published March 2, 2021
273 people are currently reading
4060 people want to read
About the author
Sherry Turkle
29 books514 followersSherry 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 year" by Ms. Magazine and among the "forty under forty" who are changing the nation by Esquire Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.
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 year" by Ms. Magazine and among the "forty under forty" who are changing the nation by Esquire Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.
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February 27, 2022
Learning To Not Understand
None of us understands all that we need to understand until after it’s too late to matter. In this remarkable memoir Sherry Turkle shows that she has understood a great deal. Some of it even before it was too late. As for the rest, she learned something even more important: “When I consider elementary school, I think that permission to not understand was its greatest gift.”
Ms Turkle and I are contemporaries (I’m her senior by 17 months). We also spent a part of our infancy together in Bayside, Queens (who knows but that our mothers may have bumped prams). And although our upbringing diverged, hers in Jewish Brooklyn mine 15 miles away in a Catholic enclave of Nassau County (the internal dynamics of the two groups were not dissimilar), we shared in the Spirit of the Times - the educational opportunities made available through prosperity; the hope for a less misogynist, racist, violent and unjust world; the idea of personal contribution through intellect; and an unconscious confidence in the institutions of religion, education, and government.
Our mothers shopped at the same stores (Mays and A&S mostly). They had the same worries about tight money and ailing relatives. But the greatest similarity was the “magical thinking,” in which difficulties could be resolved and the future assured simply by not talking about them. Such a condition is not a state of optimism in the face of adversity, but a denial that adversity exists at all. People died without warning because terminal illness didn’t fit in with family conversation. Men, in general, were volatile, unreliable creatures who exploited women. We “should know without words what was off limits.”
As Turkle says, “The expected is invisible.” We took all this for grated. This was how the world worked. But she and I were able to learn, however belatedly, how different the world outside our insulated cultural bubbles was. And we were both fortunate to learn not through overwhelming shock but through “slight and constructive dissociation from self.” In other words, the world was kind to us.
This made our parents look naive and even embarrassing at times. Why had they never prepared us for the ‘realities’ of life? There were different ways of thinking, of dressing, of behaving that we knew nothing about. There was a class structure in America, made all the more rigid in its denial as a matter of principle. There were incomprehensibly horrid people who committed atrocious acts while waving the Bible, the Constitution, or the latest issue of the National Observer.
Of course our parents didn’t tell us about such things because to know about them would have been corrupting. Better to suffer the shock of discovery than to be damaged through premature knowing. They protected us. But it seemed as if they had misled us. Family secrecy implies to a child that its family is the only one with secrets to hide. Intense religious education becomes a kind of secretive tribal pact rather than a spiritual event. Parental love is a burden. Some reject it, some succumb to its weight, but some, like Turkle, find another way: “My parents gave me burdens in childhood that I honed into gifts.”
And this is what she passes on to her students: “I say this to my students: You are at university to understand your gifts and what you love to do. If you are lucky, they will be the same thing. If not, let’s talk and see if we can increase the overlap.” This kind of wisdom is the product of dreams - dreams discarded as well as fulfilled, but mostly dreams demolished through their fulfilment. This is ultimately why the old cannot teach much to the young until the young have failed by achieving their dreams. “Stumbling and trying again,” not pursuing the same ambitions but changing them, is our real education.
As Turkle and I entered adulthood, the differences in the initial conditions of our lives became more pronounced. She attended Radcliffe College (the ‘sister college’ to Harvard before being merged into it progressively from 1977 to 1999). My university, also in New England, was somewhat less prestigious. She then went on, through academic brilliance, immense energy, and not a little luck, to become a leading figure in the psychology and sociology of technology. Among other things, she has pursued the study of “evocative objects” as the mechanism of learning: “We love the objects we think with; we think with the objects we love.” She also addresses “the lies we take for truth,” a not insignificant issue in social today’s technology.
But even then I was on the fringes of her world when I joined a consulting firm in Cambridge not far from the MIT Media Lab. Once again our shadows may have crossed. In any case, I got to read her marvellous insights about technology (as well as about herself, and for that matter about myself). In a way our lives converged as we both developed an identity as bricoleur, a sort of professional crofting which takes bits and pieces from various fields and tries to put them together with some coherence. I think it is clear that Turkle has achieved her objective: “You start with self-knowledge and then you generalize what you have learned to help others.” And sometimes this means not understanding at all. But that’s OK too.
None of us understands all that we need to understand until after it’s too late to matter. In this remarkable memoir Sherry Turkle shows that she has understood a great deal. Some of it even before it was too late. As for the rest, she learned something even more important: “When I consider elementary school, I think that permission to not understand was its greatest gift.”
Ms Turkle and I are contemporaries (I’m her senior by 17 months). We also spent a part of our infancy together in Bayside, Queens (who knows but that our mothers may have bumped prams). And although our upbringing diverged, hers in Jewish Brooklyn mine 15 miles away in a Catholic enclave of Nassau County (the internal dynamics of the two groups were not dissimilar), we shared in the Spirit of the Times - the educational opportunities made available through prosperity; the hope for a less misogynist, racist, violent and unjust world; the idea of personal contribution through intellect; and an unconscious confidence in the institutions of religion, education, and government.
Our mothers shopped at the same stores (Mays and A&S mostly). They had the same worries about tight money and ailing relatives. But the greatest similarity was the “magical thinking,” in which difficulties could be resolved and the future assured simply by not talking about them. Such a condition is not a state of optimism in the face of adversity, but a denial that adversity exists at all. People died without warning because terminal illness didn’t fit in with family conversation. Men, in general, were volatile, unreliable creatures who exploited women. We “should know without words what was off limits.”
As Turkle says, “The expected is invisible.” We took all this for grated. This was how the world worked. But she and I were able to learn, however belatedly, how different the world outside our insulated cultural bubbles was. And we were both fortunate to learn not through overwhelming shock but through “slight and constructive dissociation from self.” In other words, the world was kind to us.
This made our parents look naive and even embarrassing at times. Why had they never prepared us for the ‘realities’ of life? There were different ways of thinking, of dressing, of behaving that we knew nothing about. There was a class structure in America, made all the more rigid in its denial as a matter of principle. There were incomprehensibly horrid people who committed atrocious acts while waving the Bible, the Constitution, or the latest issue of the National Observer.
Of course our parents didn’t tell us about such things because to know about them would have been corrupting. Better to suffer the shock of discovery than to be damaged through premature knowing. They protected us. But it seemed as if they had misled us. Family secrecy implies to a child that its family is the only one with secrets to hide. Intense religious education becomes a kind of secretive tribal pact rather than a spiritual event. Parental love is a burden. Some reject it, some succumb to its weight, but some, like Turkle, find another way: “My parents gave me burdens in childhood that I honed into gifts.”
And this is what she passes on to her students: “I say this to my students: You are at university to understand your gifts and what you love to do. If you are lucky, they will be the same thing. If not, let’s talk and see if we can increase the overlap.” This kind of wisdom is the product of dreams - dreams discarded as well as fulfilled, but mostly dreams demolished through their fulfilment. This is ultimately why the old cannot teach much to the young until the young have failed by achieving their dreams. “Stumbling and trying again,” not pursuing the same ambitions but changing them, is our real education.
As Turkle and I entered adulthood, the differences in the initial conditions of our lives became more pronounced. She attended Radcliffe College (the ‘sister college’ to Harvard before being merged into it progressively from 1977 to 1999). My university, also in New England, was somewhat less prestigious. She then went on, through academic brilliance, immense energy, and not a little luck, to become a leading figure in the psychology and sociology of technology. Among other things, she has pursued the study of “evocative objects” as the mechanism of learning: “We love the objects we think with; we think with the objects we love.” She also addresses “the lies we take for truth,” a not insignificant issue in social today’s technology.
But even then I was on the fringes of her world when I joined a consulting firm in Cambridge not far from the MIT Media Lab. Once again our shadows may have crossed. In any case, I got to read her marvellous insights about technology (as well as about herself, and for that matter about myself). In a way our lives converged as we both developed an identity as bricoleur, a sort of professional crofting which takes bits and pieces from various fields and tries to put them together with some coherence. I think it is clear that Turkle has achieved her objective: “You start with self-knowledge and then you generalize what you have learned to help others.” And sometimes this means not understanding at all. But that’s OK too.
December 16, 2020
It was a bit academic for me, but I enjoyed the story of her life.
April 17, 2021
This is a very interesting book. Turkle has been at MIT almost her whole career. She is something of an outsider because she is an ethnographer rather than a data scientist. She studies the intersection of technology and empathy (or what makes humans unique from machines). The book is also a memoir and Turkle's family background is, of course, wound up in her professional ideas. In the first half of the book, Turkle lays all the family secrets on the line and the reader feels that she really understands herself and wants to share her complete story. But then, abruptly, we find out she has a daughter from a second marriage which she barely mentions. Was she not ready to share the whole story? There are lots of fascinating insights into the kind of people who were on the cutting edge of computer technology at MIT (her first husband, 20 years her senior, was one of them.) But Turkle's experiences plus what we now know about the Media Lab at MIT, paint a different picture. Some of them were pretty nutty and unethical. Turkle was initially denied tenure but she fought back and this was reversed. I was left with mixed feelings about the quality of her scholarship, and the defense of her theories at the end of the book seem a little out of place. But the book is worth a read. It is full of great stories -- like the time Steve Jobs visited MIT and Turkle was tasked with the dinner preparations. He ate nothing saying it "was the wrong kind of vegetarian." Turkle says it took her years to ask herself why she was fixing dinner rather than being in the meetings with Jobs and all the other faculty.
March 20, 2021
A thoughtful, intimate memoir by the renowned MIT professor and writer on technology and society. I would have enjoyed the inclusion of more of her academic work, but there was lots to enjoy nonetheless. Turkle’s humanistic focus on technology and her reframing of AI as artificial intimacy make this wonderful companion reading for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
January 5, 2025
An interesting account by an academic, a woman, in the winds of evolving and morphing female/male relationships during the decades of the seventies, eighties …; and paddling against the incessant data waves from a now digital world, was, and still is, vexing for most of us, wherein this savant found her niche, at MIT.
It was a different time. One does think of the decimation caused by technology. It’s why one generation does not get to understand another generation although nothing has changed in the world.
Her liminal entrance begins with her youth and ends as an older woman, post-seventies. She is not dramatic, she is not hyperbolic, she is fact-based in most areas except in the social ones, which she realizes is subjective.
As always, men do not matter.
And this is one aspect of the book I find unsettling although she leads with it. Her dissociation with her father whom her mother kept hidden from her for the entirety of mother’s lifetime.
She seeks to reconcile with him later, but her emotions are tantamount to her scientific fact-based training.
And yet she retains fond memories of her self-proclaimed stealthy and manipulative mother.
A phlegmatic scientist and author, perturbed by her emotions and unwilling to endure a relationship with her dad although it might lead to future possibilities for both.
What was the title of this book again?
Mmm…
It was a different time. One does think of the decimation caused by technology. It’s why one generation does not get to understand another generation although nothing has changed in the world.
Her liminal entrance begins with her youth and ends as an older woman, post-seventies. She is not dramatic, she is not hyperbolic, she is fact-based in most areas except in the social ones, which she realizes is subjective.
As always, men do not matter.
And this is one aspect of the book I find unsettling although she leads with it. Her dissociation with her father whom her mother kept hidden from her for the entirety of mother’s lifetime.
She seeks to reconcile with him later, but her emotions are tantamount to her scientific fact-based training.
And yet she retains fond memories of her self-proclaimed stealthy and manipulative mother.
A phlegmatic scientist and author, perturbed by her emotions and unwilling to endure a relationship with her dad although it might lead to future possibilities for both.
What was the title of this book again?
Mmm…
April 23, 2021
What a lovely memoir, and a remarkable life. Sherry Turkle was a poor(ish), Jewish, Brooklyn kid in the 1950s (Flatbush and Rockaway) with an extremely complicated relationship with her mom, her real dad, and her eventually-adoptive dad, who got a full ride at Radcliffe, happened to live in Paris for a bit in the glorious late 1960s, and went on to get multiple graduate degrees (she's a psychologist) and become a superstar/gadfly at MIT at the dawn of the internet age and author of bestselling books about the ethnography of the digital world, which I guess means the study of our relationship with computers (she is much, much, much smarter than me) and the concurrent decline in basic human empathy. There are family secrets, a tempestuous relationship with an equally smart boyfriend/husband, plenty of emotional rollercoasters, decades of analysis, and, at the core, an intellectually rigorous journey that's as admirable to witness as it is personally incomprehensible. It was such a pleasure to spend time with her.
July 8, 2022
A pleasant and entertaining read. I cannot improve on this review. Except perhaps that taking Lacan, Derrida et al. seriously never fails to baffle me.
April 8, 2021
Technology makes us forget what we know about life. -- The Empathy DiariesFocusing especially on children, Sherry Turkle has been a pioneer in investigating the relationship between people and computers. Her 1984 book The Second Self was well received by the public, but as Turkle recounts in The Empathy Diaries, it did not do much to help her tenure case at MIT. Her colleagues criticized her research as insufficiently rigorous, lacking in experimental data, and not seriously academic because it was published by Simon & Schuster rather than by an academic press. Although Turkle was initially denied tenure, she appealed the decision, which was subsequently reversed.
As a woman researching human-computer interaction, and placed at an institution long dominated by men, Turkle has fought more than her her share of academic battles, and her skepticism about the human costs of technological immersion has not always endeared her to others. Her new book is forthright in chronicling those issues, as well as revealing some rather embarrassing family secrets. Ironically, its title does not fully announce its content, since two of the most important people in it -- her long-absent biological father (Charlie Zimmerman), and her first husband (Seymour Papert) -- seem virtually incapable of empathy. When Turkle eventually located Charlie, she discovered that he had used her as a child-subject in some rather appalling psychological experiments. And it's surprising that Turkle was able to endure ten years with Papert, who was initially dishonest about his past marriages, and who more than once suddenly remembered that he was due at a conference on another continent, leaving his wife to host a dinner party at which he then failed to appear. For Papert, being regarded as brilliant could apparently be considered an excuse for terrible behavior. (Another notable example is Steve Jobs, who gets a cameo in this account.)
I suppose it's impossible to compose a memoir that's entirely devoid of self-aggrandizement; however, Turkle's honest depiction of her own vulnerabilities and failings serves as a counterbalance to that tendency. The Empathy Diaries is in part an intellectual autobiography, so it naturally includes extended summaries of Turkle's research career, beginning with Jacques Lacan. But this seems likely to curtail its appeal.
The book ends rather abruptly. Having devoted considerable space to describing her chaotic first marriage to Seymour Papert, Turkle dispatches her decade-long second marriage in just two sentences. At that point, she seems mainly interested in drawing out conclusions from her research, which is what her Epilogue accomplishes.
Sherry Turkle is clearly a bright, sophisticated, and interesting woman, and The Empathy Diaries is receiving a lot of acclaim. But when a book like this one is released with great fanfare and gushing reviews, a letdown of some readers can only be expected. I confess to being one of them.
September 23, 2021
As befits an author with multiple academic specialties, this memoir is really three books in one. They're all interesting, but none is really satisfying.
Still, I want to emphasize what I found most impressive: Turkle is not only brilliant, but she is also tough and brave enough to create a brand-new academic field while battling incredible challenges in her personal life. To give one example: Even as she was studying for a year at a demanding French university, she was also holding down two jobs and mourning the recent death of her mother and her stepfather's awful behavior.
The book's first half flies by like a well-written novel, the story of Turkle's unusual childhood within what seems the standard milieu of a post-World War II, Jewish family in Brooklyn. (No one ever talks about her absent father; her stepfather clearly has problems.) Occasionally, throughout these pages, the author points out interesting examples of empathy, or lack of empathy, or a pre-computer instance of "screen" personalities, and I wish there were more of those.
The second half is way too bogged down with dry discussions of academic debate. I'd like to understand more about the various theories of how the mind works, children's views of the world and of computers, and Turkle's own synthesis. Her warnings about technology are important. But she eats up too much space with jargon and name-dropping.
Mixed in with that half are many long sections about Turkle's first marriage, to fellow MIT professor Seymour Papert. I was glad to read about her personal life, but I would have liked to see something more than Seymour.
Still, I want to emphasize what I found most impressive: Turkle is not only brilliant, but she is also tough and brave enough to create a brand-new academic field while battling incredible challenges in her personal life. To give one example: Even as she was studying for a year at a demanding French university, she was also holding down two jobs and mourning the recent death of her mother and her stepfather's awful behavior.
The book's first half flies by like a well-written novel, the story of Turkle's unusual childhood within what seems the standard milieu of a post-World War II, Jewish family in Brooklyn. (No one ever talks about her absent father; her stepfather clearly has problems.) Occasionally, throughout these pages, the author points out interesting examples of empathy, or lack of empathy, or a pre-computer instance of "screen" personalities, and I wish there were more of those.
The second half is way too bogged down with dry discussions of academic debate. I'd like to understand more about the various theories of how the mind works, children's views of the world and of computers, and Turkle's own synthesis. Her warnings about technology are important. But she eats up too much space with jargon and name-dropping.
Mixed in with that half are many long sections about Turkle's first marriage, to fellow MIT professor Seymour Papert. I was glad to read about her personal life, but I would have liked to see something more than Seymour.
August 27, 2023
I've loved Turkle's nonfiction on technology and how it impacts social relationships. This book wasn't quite my cup of tea, though. I couldn't quite figure out what its main focus was. Was it a story of her rise to academic success? A story of her learning to stand up for herself? A story of her learning the importance of engaging with your emotions? Every story (real or otherwise) is going to tackle a lot of different themes. But this book felt all over the place with its focus, and so while there were many interesting parts in the memoir, I left feeling a bit disappointed. Still highly recommend Turkle's nonfiction on technology, though!
Rating: 3 Stars (Fairly Good).
Rating: 3 Stars (Fairly Good).
March 13, 2021
I really enjoyed this book. I remember reading Sherry Turkle's book "The Second Self" while I was in college in the '80s. I believe it was in a class on artificial intelligence, which at the time was completely foreign and frankly seemed ridiculous to me. Little did I know how groundbreaking she was in her field, and how forward thinking my professor must have been to assign this book published by (gasp!) Simon & Schuster instead of an academic press.
"The Empathy Diaries" is Turkle's memoir of her childhood, education, and emerging professional life at MIT, as a young faculty member bridging the discipline of psychology with computer culture - what she describes as a study of "the emotional and social aspects of computer culture." I was riveted by how it all fit together. She spends the last chapter reflecting on where we are today, especially after spending time in lockdown and heavily supported by (dependent on?) technology. As she observes, "The computer offered the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship," and, "As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human." She warns, "If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely." Much to think about here.
"The Empathy Diaries" is Turkle's memoir of her childhood, education, and emerging professional life at MIT, as a young faculty member bridging the discipline of psychology with computer culture - what she describes as a study of "the emotional and social aspects of computer culture." I was riveted by how it all fit together. She spends the last chapter reflecting on where we are today, especially after spending time in lockdown and heavily supported by (dependent on?) technology. As she observes, "The computer offered the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship," and, "As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human." She warns, "If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely." Much to think about here.
April 20, 2021
If I could rename this memoir, I would call it, The Book of A**hole Men. It really seemed to be about the men in her life who let her down, although she did not frame it that way. In many respects, she internalized their behavior rather than condemning it. Examples of this include Lacan's visit to to MIT, her biological father's experiments on her; her ex husband's, Seymour Papert's infidelities and her tenure denial at MIT.
She reminded me a little bit of Simone de Beauvoir in the way much of the book was about how her thinking evolved over time, how she came to focus on empathy and human connections to technology. However, the memoir's pacing felt off, how rather than giving us scenes, she retold parts of her life, glossing over parts where she published her first book or why she left Chicago or how her divorce impacted her but going into so much detail about her reaction to Lacan's theories.
Turkle is obviously brilliant and influential. But I struggled to connect with her or the story despite its title.
She reminded me a little bit of Simone de Beauvoir in the way much of the book was about how her thinking evolved over time, how she came to focus on empathy and human connections to technology. However, the memoir's pacing felt off, how rather than giving us scenes, she retold parts of her life, glossing over parts where she published her first book or why she left Chicago or how her divorce impacted her but going into so much detail about her reaction to Lacan's theories.
Turkle is obviously brilliant and influential. But I struggled to connect with her or the story despite its title.
May 14, 2021
I've read and read about Sherry Turkle's work over the years and found it fascinating and insightful. This memoir of her life was interesting in that it provides insight into some of the influences on her thinking, and it tells many intense little anecdotes. It reminded me strongly of two things: 1) some academic parties I've attended where people are talking about their lives in ways that seem to have not-quite-enough self-awareness for the high level of intelligence in the room, and 2) some women from back in the day (and there are still some around) who make their way in a male-dominated world by focusing only on the men in it, by adopting certain male standards for themselves and others. I sympathized with Turkle, and I was interested in all that she went through gaining acceptance for her work in academia. But as memoir the writing was stiff and distant; as a passionate reader of memoir, I expected just a bit more, though there is a lot of worthy stuff here.
November 21, 2021
This was a very good memoir that reads like a memoir of a regular person really opening up about very relatable struggles. It manages to avoid the pitfalls of memoirs written by successful people that are just an account of a series of success with a sprinkling of challenges that are "overcome." Turkle seems to be continuing to write and rethink her struggles and the stories she told herself about them. It's also another depressing read about a brilliant thinker and theorist who was never taken seriously by her male colleagues who undoubtedly were much much dumber than she is
March 14, 2021
Excellent start, but the author began an excessive and detailed focus of her academic pursuits mid-way through.
April 8, 2022
A very well written and interesting memoir, delivered almost as an analytic case study - girl in a certain family situation grows up, uses the lacunae of her family (and her brilliance) to forge a significant career - that called on the family troubles to set it up. (= circles)
The memoir is interesting, one sided as memoirs are, but honest, and full of interesting things about growing up Jewish in NY and the shore in the 50s, going to Radcliffe and becoming a wunderkind of a WOMAN at MIT. (Her tenure story is so painful and revealing, how many of us women have similar tales from our entry into academics in the latter half of last century -- that's prob what I'll remember most about this book. But don't ask me...)
The scholarship side is a bit harder to figure, but provocative. The chapter on Lacan was, for me, nearly impenetrable. Also thinking about the "soft science" of watching kids (then us) interacting with computers and making conclusions about it. All fascinating, but maybe, as the MIT engineers would say, the data...is scant? OK, lest you all the social scientists shout me down, I mostly agree with her idea that the internet is a un-alive entity that is capable of objectifying us and that's not good. -- But most (?) of us manage to pull away and interact with other people. (And some read books.)
Many of the names flying through the book, BTW, are vaguely recognizable to even me: the author has worked in lofty company. And as a woman, and likely, for that reason, for much of her career, she has been under-appreciated. So let me appreciate her! YAY!
The memoir is interesting, one sided as memoirs are, but honest, and full of interesting things about growing up Jewish in NY and the shore in the 50s, going to Radcliffe and becoming a wunderkind of a WOMAN at MIT. (Her tenure story is so painful and revealing, how many of us women have similar tales from our entry into academics in the latter half of last century -- that's prob what I'll remember most about this book. But don't ask me...)
The scholarship side is a bit harder to figure, but provocative. The chapter on Lacan was, for me, nearly impenetrable. Also thinking about the "soft science" of watching kids (then us) interacting with computers and making conclusions about it. All fascinating, but maybe, as the MIT engineers would say, the data...is scant? OK, lest you all the social scientists shout me down, I mostly agree with her idea that the internet is a un-alive entity that is capable of objectifying us and that's not good. -- But most (?) of us manage to pull away and interact with other people. (And some read books.)
Many of the names flying through the book, BTW, are vaguely recognizable to even me: the author has worked in lofty company. And as a woman, and likely, for that reason, for much of her career, she has been under-appreciated. So let me appreciate her! YAY!
February 15, 2022
I adored Turkle’s conjuring of her Brooklyn childhood, which felt like a window into my in-laws’ childhoods in many ways. The intimate Jewish family life she depicted felt so compelling even as the toxic secrecy that plagued her family hummed threateningly throughout. I also so enjoyed her sketching of her life as a young, smart, ambitious woman at Radcliffe, in Paris, in grad school — seeing her intellectual identity form and the interplay of ideas between the personal and the professional/academic as her story unfolded. Really well-crafted, thoughtful, and frankly inspiring.
July 20, 2021
This gets four stars because I forsook all other e-reader books to stay with this one--it was so engaging for me that it feels dishonest to give it a lower rating.
THAT SAID, it's not really what it says on the tin. This book is not focused on empathy, although Dr Turkle does bring it up repeatedly. This book is also not necessarily what I'd call a memoir, as parts of it become very academic and are more focused on Dr Turkle's studies and work than they are on her life. (And, none of this is a diary. You can call a lot of books "diaries" that aren't in a diary format, of course, and it can work fine, but for this book it feels particularly inapt. Your mileage may vary here.) The result is a mix of her life story and her academic work that's not enough of either, and while a discussion of empathy is supposedly the thread that ties it all together, it--just doesn't. It feels like she wanted to write a memoir, but also wanted to tie in some ideas about her childhood into her academic work, and when she realized that the common denominator is empathy, she tried to work that in after the fact, without finishing the memoir OR fully fleshing out her academic thoughts.
At the end, I was frustrated. The memoir part mostly ended when she was in her 30s (she's 73 now, come on!) and the academic discussion was somehow both intense (Jacques Lacan!) and skimpy (I know enough to be intrigued about her work but not enough about the work itself). I think this book was supposed to be two different books, and I hope Dr Turkle will remedy this by finishing at least one of them and publishing it.
tl;dr Very engaging but also unsatisfying. Feels like two different, unfinished books that Dr Turkle attempted to stitch together after the fact using the concept of empathy, and her effort was not entirely successful.
THAT SAID, it's not really what it says on the tin. This book is not focused on empathy, although Dr Turkle does bring it up repeatedly. This book is also not necessarily what I'd call a memoir, as parts of it become very academic and are more focused on Dr Turkle's studies and work than they are on her life. (And, none of this is a diary. You can call a lot of books "diaries" that aren't in a diary format, of course, and it can work fine, but for this book it feels particularly inapt. Your mileage may vary here.) The result is a mix of her life story and her academic work that's not enough of either, and while a discussion of empathy is supposedly the thread that ties it all together, it--just doesn't. It feels like she wanted to write a memoir, but also wanted to tie in some ideas about her childhood into her academic work, and when she realized that the common denominator is empathy, she tried to work that in after the fact, without finishing the memoir OR fully fleshing out her academic thoughts.
At the end, I was frustrated. The memoir part mostly ended when she was in her 30s (she's 73 now, come on!) and the academic discussion was somehow both intense (Jacques Lacan!) and skimpy (I know enough to be intrigued about her work but not enough about the work itself). I think this book was supposed to be two different books, and I hope Dr Turkle will remedy this by finishing at least one of them and publishing it.
tl;dr Very engaging but also unsatisfying. Feels like two different, unfinished books that Dr Turkle attempted to stitch together after the fact using the concept of empathy, and her effort was not entirely successful.
August 2, 2021
Turkle's empathy extends both to her past self and to the sometimes dysfunctional people close to her. Reading this, I thought of Hillbilly Elegy and how J. D. Vance largely fails to extend the same empathy to his family of origin as he moves into a different world. (Perhaps that explains his current career choices). Turkle's impulse is always to share her life with her family, not to leave them behind.
The book is a history of both Turkle's personal and her intellectual growth, and how they are connected. Fascinating and unsparing. Some of what will stay with me: The scene in the shower. (OMG.) Jacques Lacan ordering her caviar and toast points when she interviews him in a restaurant (and his later disastrous visit to MIT). And the scene where a bunch of MIT engineers ponder the brand new personal computer, and "how we will keep computers busy" when people have them in their own homes. After all, normal people don't write as much as MIT professors! WE, as Turkle says, turned out to be the "killer app."
The book is a history of both Turkle's personal and her intellectual growth, and how they are connected. Fascinating and unsparing. Some of what will stay with me: The scene in the shower. (OMG.) Jacques Lacan ordering her caviar and toast points when she interviews him in a restaurant (and his later disastrous visit to MIT). And the scene where a bunch of MIT engineers ponder the brand new personal computer, and "how we will keep computers busy" when people have them in their own homes. After all, normal people don't write as much as MIT professors! WE, as Turkle says, turned out to be the "killer app."
April 23, 2021
Such an enjoyable and thoughtful read. Although I wasn't familiar with Turkle prior to reading this (I heard a positive review of the book so added it) I now know she's prominent in her field (she studies psychology in relation to machines and machine learning).
Turkle writes with compassion and yes, empathy, which reads as kind of remarkable. I always like seeing insight in a memoir and this delivers. She was so close to her mother, aunt and grandmother growing up and although there were secrets, she learned to navigate them and still show love.
I also appreciated her descriptions of navigating tenure at MIT in the 1980s as a woman. Not easy.
There's no major trauma in this book and Turkle is still alive and well, which is just refreshing.
This is a delightful memoir, maybe a favorite of the year!
Turkle writes with compassion and yes, empathy, which reads as kind of remarkable. I always like seeing insight in a memoir and this delivers. She was so close to her mother, aunt and grandmother growing up and although there were secrets, she learned to navigate them and still show love.
I also appreciated her descriptions of navigating tenure at MIT in the 1980s as a woman. Not easy.
There's no major trauma in this book and Turkle is still alive and well, which is just refreshing.
This is a delightful memoir, maybe a favorite of the year!
March 20, 2021
The first half of the book was the most fascinating to me in it’s vivid descriptions of family relationships and experiences. It has rich emotional content. The last third of the book I struggled with as I have rudimentary knowledge of the field of psychology and even though I recognized some of the famous names (Bettelheim, Erickson),I found it hard to relate to as it referred to very specific academic content. I highly recommend this book however and think that it has a wide appeal despite the pedagogical content.
May 4, 2021
The first half about her family and her father are very compelling and totally absorbing but after the narrative switches from the mystery of her father to going to Radcliffe and getting tenure, it took my patience to stay on track. The switching back to focusing on motherhood and her mother’s sacrifice to keep her from her father doesn’t jell. The momentum was lost.
January 29, 2024
Looking forward to exploring more of her work. This was an intellectually stimulating read. I get the feeling that Turkle's stuff on technology, empathy and "evocative objects" are very important for our cultural moment.
March 18, 2021
Like her earlier Alone Together, this is a thought-provoking, personal book whose manifest and latent messages are or seem quite different. In Alone, the manifest story was about how social media technology was hurting the bonds between us; I saw the latent story as that of a mother dealing with human dependency, and the process of separation from an increasingly autonomous, loved daughter on the cusp of adulthood.
In a sense, this memoir reverses these two levels: Manifestly, Empathy Diaries is the story of social relationships with family, colleagues, and the challenges of navigating not just academe, but a peculiar niche within it. Just beneath this, it is the story of her career and her advocacy for the social over the technological, for the primacy of emotions rather than cognition as the hallmark of humanness.
But the relationship between her life's work and the life behind it is not a simple one, nor does it pretend to be. (Indeed, the book doesn't pretend at all I think). Turkle has spent her career studying technology and is fascinated by it, indicating not simple opposition but ambivalence. And her social life, her early attachments, left her with challenges, too, marked by ambivalence as well.
The child is mother to the woman, and the career. It's been hard. But out of these things, an accomplished and wonderful life has grown.
The afterword credits conversations with Jill Ker Conway, of The Road From Coorain, as inspiring the book. I get it. I wonder what a recommendation engine would predict for someone who enjoyed both of these memoirs?
In a sense, this memoir reverses these two levels: Manifestly, Empathy Diaries is the story of social relationships with family, colleagues, and the challenges of navigating not just academe, but a peculiar niche within it. Just beneath this, it is the story of her career and her advocacy for the social over the technological, for the primacy of emotions rather than cognition as the hallmark of humanness.
But the relationship between her life's work and the life behind it is not a simple one, nor does it pretend to be. (Indeed, the book doesn't pretend at all I think). Turkle has spent her career studying technology and is fascinated by it, indicating not simple opposition but ambivalence. And her social life, her early attachments, left her with challenges, too, marked by ambivalence as well.
The child is mother to the woman, and the career. It's been hard. But out of these things, an accomplished and wonderful life has grown.
The afterword credits conversations with Jill Ker Conway, of The Road From Coorain, as inspiring the book. I get it. I wonder what a recommendation engine would predict for someone who enjoyed both of these memoirs?
May 31, 2021
This was a great book. I have to admit I did not expect to read it. I got hooked on what the mystery was that she sets her story up with- i.e. her biological father's experiments with her, that were not sexual. I picked it up thinking it was a theory book or case study book about empathy and I was familiar with Turkle. This should be graduate student reading because it is a personal memoir of an academic that shows how personal history impacts one's academic pursuits. Also, she shares some obstacles in her academic career and how she navigated them-such as getting tenure at MIT. I do wish she had shared more about her relationship with her step-father as well as with her step brother and sister. Her mother's secrets shaped her upbringing-i.e. keeping her real name a secret and her Mom's breast cancer and masectomy.
I liked her writing assignment about writing about an object that shaped you. She had asked students to write on an object that impacted how they think about science (268). I want to check out her edited volumes on essays with objects. She talked about how objects can inform our ways of thinking. This book had wonderful concise summaries of the major theorists she read as a student. She chronicles which courses and professors impacted her thinking and approach to thinking. I enjoyed her personal history from describing how her grandparents boycotted any German products, to her living in France, her fashion history... I certainly would read a second volume of her memoir!
I liked her writing assignment about writing about an object that shaped you. She had asked students to write on an object that impacted how they think about science (268). I want to check out her edited volumes on essays with objects. She talked about how objects can inform our ways of thinking. This book had wonderful concise summaries of the major theorists she read as a student. She chronicles which courses and professors impacted her thinking and approach to thinking. I enjoyed her personal history from describing how her grandparents boycotted any German products, to her living in France, her fashion history... I certainly would read a second volume of her memoir!
June 21, 2021
I cannot stop talking about this book, and not just because the author is a favorite of mine, with her earlier books about the effect of technology on education and our psyches. She describes encounters with so many other famous writers and technologists -- she was Present at the Creation of our computer-saturated internet world. Note that the title is purposely plural: several personal points are interwoven into the chapters, sometimes repeating details that a "normal" book would elide. But she is a talented writer and psychologist: the very writing style is intended to affect the reader and illustrate psychological points. I did cringe at the repeated references to the Freudian incident with her stepfather (fear not, dear reader -- no outright abuse here, just psychological trauma unearthed by years of analysis, along with all-too-typical infidelity and familial dysfunction). The book demonstrates the result of years of psychoanalysis and a brutally honest voice of a truly empathic and brilliant person. I will gladly attend any lecture of hers and read any future book, and I tell everyone about how this book struck me -- its technology-history, or its psychoanalytic tone, may not be everyone's cup of tea; but I give it five stars!
June 13, 2021
Stupendously interesting, but slightly repetitive and, at times rather arcane, this book was something I wanted to put everything else aside for and just listen, listen, listen. This is a book about a woman who was supported enough and loved enough so that, despite some nasty setbacks in life and in love, she still believes in the human connection and its supreme importance, be it in formation of political movements; in psychological growth and development; around the explosion of of personal computing and portable devices; and about us, as a race, turning into objects being controlled by other objects. I could not read a more timely book after fourteen months of isolation, deprivation, and a desperate need to connect once again. With humans, that is. Real humans, in real time, using their real voices, and letting me see their body language, their sense of comfort, and whether or not they might want to give or receive a hug. I cannot wait for this life to resume (rhymes with Zoom) ! It’s too bad, though, that the narrator, one Jill Larson, has not checked her pronunciation of certain Boston locations. Eeks!
April 21, 2024
I picked up this book after hearing Dr. Turkle speak at an event. I found her points incredibly moving and well-put. I just had to know more about her. This book definitely satisfied that desire, but it also felt torn between trying to be many different things. It is about her family, her romantic relationships, the formation of identity (in Dr. Turkle's sake, I think it's fair to say, in a crucible of significant neurosis) and what it means to feel like you belong, but also the ins and outs of the psychoanalytic scene of the 70s, and also about making it as a female academic in a heavily male-dominated culture, and also about society's relationship to emerging technology and its effects on empathy. It's okay for a book to be about many things, of course, especially a memoir—life is about many things!—but I found that it seemed like the whole didn't add up to any more than the sum of its parts. I worry that this review may come off as harsh, but I hope it doesn't.
I thought Parts 1 and 3 were well-paced (though the choice to end where she does, after her first divorce and subsequent tenure was an interesting one). However, in my opinion, Part 2, and especially chapters 8-12, dragged. Dr. Turkle is at her worst when talking about the French. Too many random details are included, I think for no other reason than that they are quaintly foreign, or convey to her some sense of continental glamour. In truth, though, it's not just the French sections that feel this way. Dr. Turkle seems somewhat occupied with what I might call Perfect Little Things. An outfit, a piece of luggage, the feeling of an afternoon, a flavor of drink, the name of the street her apartment sits on. I can't deny that this attention to detail does fit the broader theme of the book that objects can be something we think with, constitutive to how we conceptualize ourselves. There's a sense that these details are maybe nostalgic for her, satisfying to recount. But they don't always mean much to me. In this way, the book is true to title: a diary, unafraid to include the (sometimes mundane) details that make up a life.
My enjoyment was definitely aided by a shared experience with Dr. Turkle: studying at MIT and becoming profoundly disillusioned with its engineering culture. I think my experience allows me to fill in some of (what I perceive to be) gaps in her explanations. She takes some amount of her perspective on the dangers of technology to be self-evident, but I don't know that they always are? Take for example, her father's willingness to experiment on how she "responded to deprivation." She was clearly horrified by this, so much so that when she first mentioned these experiments, I thought she was alluding to sexual abuse. But when she later writes about experiences of horrifying sexual harassment in no uncertain terms, I only then realized that in the case of her father she referred to a literal psychological experiment, like leaving her alone or without physical contact and seeing how she reacted, reminiscent of a human trial of Harlow's infamous monkey isolation experiments. I don't want to sound heartless, and maybe the reality of the situation was worse than what she described in the text (which struck me as somewhat mild?) but I feel I never fully understood why this affected Dr. Turkle the way it did. It seemed like many worse things befell her, including her treatment by her mother, which it seems she did eventually come to terms with, and even found a way to better understand and respect her mother's choices. Put differently, I can certainly imagine that learning this about one's father could deeply and negatively affect someone, but I could also imagine that for someone else it might have a totally different impact, that it could be just an odd or even funny story, but not perceived as something emblematic of a growing societal ill (our lack of empathy) nor a constitutive, canonical event in one's life. I can imagine someone else, someone with different experiences perhaps than Dr. Turkle, laughing it off. That reaction wouldn't be any more or any less correct than Dr. Turkle's reaction, but it makes her theories about the engineering mindset begetting a deficit of empathy feel almost arbitrary? The psychoanalytic lens is just one lens and it think it illuminates some things with clarity and obscures others. I couldn't shake the feeling that studying Freud and Lacan primed Dr. Turkle to recontextualize her childhood relationships with her parents in a very specific way—not a wrong way, just a particular one—and she might think very differently about those relationships had she gone to school to study, say, theology, or queer theory, or economics. Dr. Turkle's theories about technology are entwined with her personal relationships, and that isn't bad so much as it is inevitable, but when I fail to understand why she feels the way she does about her relationship to her parents or to Seymour (as an aside, and I suspect Dr. Turkle is the normal one, and I'm the outlier, I didn't relate at all to her feelings of jealousy and worries about infidelity, even though it seems her worries were 100% founded, I just am not affected much by jealousy), it makes me feel as though I can't fully understand the danger she sees in emerging technologies.
I don't feel as though I've been clear in this review, I feel like there's a lot to be said here that I haven't fully unpacked for myself. But I guess in sum, it feels like Dr. Turkle has taken one particular lens to look at one particular set of life experiences, and drawn a rather wide conclusion from it. I happen to agree with this conclusion, in part due to my own lenses and life experiences! But I don't feel that I'm any closer to understanding a complete, cohesive theory to the dangers of AI and its effects on empathy that she discussed in her talk that inspired me to read this book in the first place. If anything, I feel almost a little further from understanding.
I thought Parts 1 and 3 were well-paced (though the choice to end where she does, after her first divorce and subsequent tenure was an interesting one). However, in my opinion, Part 2, and especially chapters 8-12, dragged. Dr. Turkle is at her worst when talking about the French. Too many random details are included, I think for no other reason than that they are quaintly foreign, or convey to her some sense of continental glamour. In truth, though, it's not just the French sections that feel this way. Dr. Turkle seems somewhat occupied with what I might call Perfect Little Things. An outfit, a piece of luggage, the feeling of an afternoon, a flavor of drink, the name of the street her apartment sits on. I can't deny that this attention to detail does fit the broader theme of the book that objects can be something we think with, constitutive to how we conceptualize ourselves. There's a sense that these details are maybe nostalgic for her, satisfying to recount. But they don't always mean much to me. In this way, the book is true to title: a diary, unafraid to include the (sometimes mundane) details that make up a life.
My enjoyment was definitely aided by a shared experience with Dr. Turkle: studying at MIT and becoming profoundly disillusioned with its engineering culture. I think my experience allows me to fill in some of (what I perceive to be) gaps in her explanations. She takes some amount of her perspective on the dangers of technology to be self-evident, but I don't know that they always are? Take for example, her father's willingness to experiment on how she "responded to deprivation." She was clearly horrified by this, so much so that when she first mentioned these experiments, I thought she was alluding to sexual abuse. But when she later writes about experiences of horrifying sexual harassment in no uncertain terms, I only then realized that in the case of her father she referred to a literal psychological experiment, like leaving her alone or without physical contact and seeing how she reacted, reminiscent of a human trial of Harlow's infamous monkey isolation experiments. I don't want to sound heartless, and maybe the reality of the situation was worse than what she described in the text (which struck me as somewhat mild?) but I feel I never fully understood why this affected Dr. Turkle the way it did. It seemed like many worse things befell her, including her treatment by her mother, which it seems she did eventually come to terms with, and even found a way to better understand and respect her mother's choices. Put differently, I can certainly imagine that learning this about one's father could deeply and negatively affect someone, but I could also imagine that for someone else it might have a totally different impact, that it could be just an odd or even funny story, but not perceived as something emblematic of a growing societal ill (our lack of empathy) nor a constitutive, canonical event in one's life. I can imagine someone else, someone with different experiences perhaps than Dr. Turkle, laughing it off. That reaction wouldn't be any more or any less correct than Dr. Turkle's reaction, but it makes her theories about the engineering mindset begetting a deficit of empathy feel almost arbitrary? The psychoanalytic lens is just one lens and it think it illuminates some things with clarity and obscures others. I couldn't shake the feeling that studying Freud and Lacan primed Dr. Turkle to recontextualize her childhood relationships with her parents in a very specific way—not a wrong way, just a particular one—and she might think very differently about those relationships had she gone to school to study, say, theology, or queer theory, or economics. Dr. Turkle's theories about technology are entwined with her personal relationships, and that isn't bad so much as it is inevitable, but when I fail to understand why she feels the way she does about her relationship to her parents or to Seymour (as an aside, and I suspect Dr. Turkle is the normal one, and I'm the outlier, I didn't relate at all to her feelings of jealousy and worries about infidelity, even though it seems her worries were 100% founded, I just am not affected much by jealousy), it makes me feel as though I can't fully understand the danger she sees in emerging technologies.
I don't feel as though I've been clear in this review, I feel like there's a lot to be said here that I haven't fully unpacked for myself. But I guess in sum, it feels like Dr. Turkle has taken one particular lens to look at one particular set of life experiences, and drawn a rather wide conclusion from it. I happen to agree with this conclusion, in part due to my own lenses and life experiences! But I don't feel that I'm any closer to understanding a complete, cohesive theory to the dangers of AI and its effects on empathy that she discussed in her talk that inspired me to read this book in the first place. If anything, I feel almost a little further from understanding.
September 1, 2021
I knew Sherry Turkle as one of the first to discuss children's development in the advent and widespread use of technology. I failed to realize her as an ethnographic researcher who worked at MIT, using psychology, human development, psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence/computer programming as the primary lenses - rather decidedly less MIT-ish domains, for the most part. I really enjoyed reading about her navigating academia at MIT, and how she has evolved in her ideas using interdisciplinary synthesis and qualitative/ethnographic research methods. Her first marriage figured much more than her second (a single paragraph!); her family of origin is likewise described in depth, while her central family later in life is much less discussed. I imagine this is intentional. Turkle really makes you think about the ramifications of technology now, on all of our development. I rather liked this book and how she writes and thinks.
May 5, 2021
Not as good as the ecstatic reviews on the cover, but better than the average memoir. There's a good through line, following the author's efforts to untangle her history and how that leads to her interest in the relationship between people and objects. She discusses her studies in an accessible way that inspires me to read more of her academic work. I became impatient with her excessively analytical approach to her relationships. It was astounding how her first marriage - with a "genius"- gets 20% of the book, while her 2nd, to the father of her child, warrants a single paragraph. It doesn't answer any questions about how we can better structure our relationships with technology, but it does show how a woman pioneer in a technological field fought to hold her ground.
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