Alone Together Quotes

“I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin’s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of “as if ” performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.2 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”3 In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“We are shaped by our tools.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Online life is about premeditation.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Anxieties migrate, proliferate.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Connectivity becomes a craving.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other