Alone Together Quotes

“Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic; the jewel in the crown.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Teenagers make it clear that games, worlds, and social networking (on the surface, rather different) have much in common. They all ask you to compose and project an identity.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Today’s young people have grown up with robot pets and on the network in a fully tethered life. In their views of robots, they are pioneers, the first generation that does not necessarily take simulation to be second best. As for online life, they see its power—they are, after all risking their lives to check their messages—but they also view it as one might the weather: to be taken for granted, enjoyed, and sometimes endured. They’ve gotten used to this weather but there are signs of weather fatigue. There are so many performances; it takes energy to keep things up; and it takes time, a lot of time. “Sometimes you don’t have time for your friends except if they’re online,” is a common complaint.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“In the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.5 Without alterity, there can be no empathy.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Wilson’s way of keeping in mind the dual aspects of the Furby’s nature seems to me a philosophical version of multitasking, so central to our twentieth-century attentional ecology. His attitude is pragmatic. If something that seems to have a self is before him, he deals with the aspect of self he finds most relevant to the context.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed— and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. This can happen when one is finding one’s way through a blizzard of text messages; it can happen when interacting with a robot. I feel witness for a third time to a turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves. We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“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 new reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it 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.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“if you never teach your children how to be alone then they will only know how to be lonely for the rest of their lives.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“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

“They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.”23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“When we know that everything in our lives is captured, will we begin to live the life that we hope to have archived?”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“if your pet is a robot, it might always stay a cute puppy. By extension, if your lover were a robot, you would always be the center of its universe. A robot would not just be better than nothing or better than something, but better than anything. From”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as “sort of” alive—a”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

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

“I’m done with smart machines. I want a machine that’s attentive to my needs. Where are the sensitive machines?” —Tweet available at dig_natRT @tigoe via @ramonapringle”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other