Alone Together Quotes

“If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“We go from curiosity to a search for communion.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The idea of the original had no place.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“When I interview candidates, I like to go where they live, so I can see them in their environment, not just in mind.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“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

“Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“From watching children play with objects designed as “amusements,” we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“In the early days of cubism, the simultaneous presentation of many perspectives of the human face was subversive. But at a certain point, one becomes accustomed to looking at a face in this new way. A face, after all, does have multiple aspects; only representational conventions keep us from appreciating them together. But once convention is challenged, the new view of the face suggests depth and new complexities. Lester has a cubist view of AIBO; he is aware of it as machine, bodily creature, and mind. An AIBO’s sentience, he says, is “awesome.” The creature is endearing. He appreciates the programming behind the exact swing of the “floppy puppy ears.” To Lester, that programming gives AIBO a mind.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Artificial intelligence is often described as the art and science of “getting machines to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people.” We are coming to a parallel definition of artificial emotion as the art of “getting machines to express things that would be considered feelings if expressed by people.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Again, there is psychological risk in the robotic moment. Logan’s comment about talking with the AIBO to “get thoughts out” suggests using technology to know oneself better. But it also suggests a fantasy in which we cheapen the notion of companionship to a baseline of “interacting with something.” We reduce relationship and come to see this reduction as the norm.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Zane, six, knows that AIBO doesn’t have a “real brain and heart,” but they are “real enough.” AIBO is “kind of alive” because it can function “as if it had a brain and heart.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“If AIBO is in some sense a toy, it is a toy that changes minds. It does this in several ways. It heightens our sense of being close to developing a postbiological life and not just in theory or in the laboratory. And it suggests how this passage will take place. It will begin with our seeing the new life as “as if ” life and then deciding that “as if ” may be life enough. Even now, as we contemplate “creatures” with artificial feelings and intelligence, we come to reflect differently on our own. The question here is not whether machines can be made to think like people but whether people have always thought like machines.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“uncanny as something long familiar that feels strangely unfamiliar. The uncanny stands between standard categories and challenges the categories themselves. It is familiar to see a doll at rest. But we don’t need to cover its eyes, for it is we who animate it. It is familiar to have a person’s expressive face beckon to us, but if we blindfold that person and put them behind a curtain, we are inflicting punishment. The Furby with its expressions of fear and the gendered Nexi with her blindfold are the new uncanny in the culture of computing.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers insight into the origins of this guilt. Damasio describes two levels of experiencing pain. The first is a physical response to a painful stimulus. The second, a far more complex reaction, is an emotion associated with pain. This is an internal representation of the physical.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“People are surprised by how upset they get in this theater of distress. And then they get upset that they are upset. They often try to reassure themselves, saying things like, “Chill, chill, it’s only a toy!” They are experiencing something new: you can feel bad about yourself for how you behave with a computer program. Adults come to the upside-down test knowing two things: the Furby is a machine and they are not torturers. By the end, with a whimpering Furby in tow, they are on new ethical terrain.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“some children become more anxious as the operation continues. One suggests that if the Furby dies, it might haunt them. It is alive enough to turn into a ghost. Indeed, a group of children start to call the empty Furby skin “the ghost of Furby” and the Furby’s naked body “the goblin.” They are not happy that this operation might leave a Furby goblin and ghost at large. One girl comes up with the idea that the ghost of the Furby will be less fearful if distributed. She asks if it would be okay “if every child took home a piece of Furby skin.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“For three decades, in describing people’s relationships with computers, I have often used the metaphor of the Rorschach, the inkblot test that psychologists use as a screen onto which people can project their feelings and styles of thought. But as children interact with sociable robots like Furbies, they move beyond a psychology of projection to a new psychology of engagement. They try to deal with the robot as they would deal with a pet or a person.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Because of my training as a clinician, I believe that this kind of moment, if it happens between people, has profound therapeutic potential. We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other