Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle
Born	June 18, 1948 New York City, New York
Nationality	American
Field	Professor at MIT, Social Studies of Science and Technology
Training	Ph.D. in Sociology and Personality Psychology from Harvard University, BA Social Studies from Harvard University
Works	The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit", Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained a BA in Social Studies and later a Ph.D. in Sociology and Personality Psychology at Harvard University. She now focuses her research on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has written several books focusing on the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects.

In The Second Self, originally published in 1984, Turkle writes about how computers are not tools as much as they are a part of our social and psychological lives. “‘Technology,’ she writes, ‘catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think.’” She goes on using Jean Piaget's psychology discourse to discuss how children learn about computers and how this affects their minds. The Second Self was received well by critics and was praised for being “a very thorough and ambitious study.”

In Life on the Screen, Turkle discusses how emerging technology, specifically computers, affect the way we think and see ourselves as humans. She presents to us the different ways in which computers affect us, and how it has led us to the now prevalent use of "cyberspace." Turkle suggests that assuming different personal identities in a MUD (i.e. computer fantasy game) may be therapeutic. She also considers the problems that arise when using MUDs. Turkle discusses what she calls women's "non-linear" approach to the technology, calling it "soft mastery" and "bricolage" (as opposed to the "hard mastery" of linear, abstract thinking and computer programming). She discusses problems that arise when children pose as adults online.°

Turkle also explores the psychological and societal impact of such "relational artifacts" as sociable robots, and how these and other technologies are changing attitudes about human life and living things generally. One result may be a devaluation of authentic experience in a relationship.

Turkle was formerly married to Seymour Papert, and together they wrote the influential paper "Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete."

Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the effects of technology for CNN, NBC, ABC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline and 20/20.

Early life

Sherry Turkle was born on June 18, 1948. A Brooklyn native, Turkle attended Abraham Lincoln High School and graduated as a valedictorian in 1965. Afterwards, she attended Radcliffe College. Turkle visited France in the late 1960s and had a glimpse of France's era of social and intellectual unrest. She later returned to the United States in the 1970s. After receiving her Bachelors in Social Studies from Radcliffe College, she received her Masters in Sociology at Harvard University in 1973. She would then go on to earn her Doctorate in Sociology and Personality Psychology from Harvard in 1976, "writing about the relationship between Freudian thought and the modern French revolutionary movements."

Life on the Screen

In Life on the Screen, Turkle presents a study of how people's use of the computer has evolved over time, and the profound effect that this machine has on its users. The computer, which connects millions of people across the world together, is changing the way we think and see ourselves. Although it was originally intended to serve as a tool to help us to write and communicate with others, it has more recently transformed into a means of providing us with virtual worlds which we can step into and interact with other people.

The term “cyberspace” was coined and refers to our everyday interactions on the computer, such as checking our email or making airline reservations. Cyberspace allows us to come in contact with other people from across the world, and develop virtual relationships with them. The book discusses how such simulation affects our minds and the way we think about ourselves.

Turkle also discusses the way our human identity is changing due to the fading boundary between humans and computers, and how people now have trouble distinguishing between humans and machines. It used to be thought that humans were nothing like machines, because humans had feelings and machines did not. However, as technology has improved, computers have become more and more human-like, and these boundaries had to be redrawn. People now compare their own minds to machines, and talk to them freely without any shame or embarrassment. Turkle questions our ethics in defining and differentiating between real life and simulated life.

The Second Self

In the Second Self, Turkle defines the computer as more than just a tool, but part of our everyday personal and psychological lives. She looks at how the computer affects the way we look at ourselves and our relationships with others, claiming that technology defines the way we think and act. Turkle's book allows us to view and reevaluate our own relationships with technology.

In her process of evaluating our relationships with computers, Turkle interviews children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers and personal computer owners in order to further understand our relationships with computers and how we interact with them on a personal level. The interviews showed that computers are both a part of our selves as well as part of the external world. In this book, Turkle tries to figure out why we think of computers in such psychological terms, how this happens and what this means for all of us.

Alone Together

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Turkle discusses how newer technologies are greatly affecting this generation. In the first paragraph of a New York Times review, they use proper note of how adolescents are losing their attention spans and how they lose interest in many aspects. Examples include over-excessive texting, lack of interest in science, and an obsession with Facebook friends.

She focuses on the current era and how human encounters are growing fewer. Turkle talks about teenagers' actions of "friending" strangers on Facebook and how kids prefer to text or instant message rather than talking on the phone or even face to face. In her book, she focuses mainly on the consequences of the new texting trend.

MUDs

Turkle usually delves into MUD, or Multi-User Domain. Her book Life on the Screen composes of her thoroughly studying MUDs. She finds MUDs to be fulfilling for many users. "A MUD can become a context for discovering who one is and wishes to be. In this way, the games are laboratories for the construction of identity.”

Turkle lived in Boston and attended many pizza parties to carefully observe "MUDers." She discovered that people use virtual reality to act as if it were reality. Human behaviors such as romance are practiced in virtual reality. Spending a lot of time with these "MUDers," she realized how the Internet has become a modern day way of connecting to people. The Internet links millions of people and it has begun to dictate the way we think and learn. She is quoted as saying in Life on Screen, "Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity." She goes on to discuss the closer relationship between humans and computers.

Connected, but alone?

Sherry Turkle gave a TED talk in February 2012. The topic of the talk is “Connected, but alone?” She has been studying how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication and also how technology is shaping our modern relationships.

Points that can be summarized from her talk include: 1. The communication devices not only change what we do, but also change who we are. 2. People are getting trouble with how to relate to each other, how to relate to themselves and the capacity for self-reflection. 3. We expect more from technology and less from each other. We are designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. 4. We feel lonely and feel like nobody is willing to listen to us. Being alone seems to be an illness that needs to be cured. 5. The traditional conversation has changed into mediated connection, thus leads to the isolation of people.

Described as "the Margaret Mead of digital culture", Turkle has now turned her attention to the world of social media and sociable robots. Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis are confronting us with a moment of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection.

This talk was related to her early book called “Alone Together” and Meyrowitz’s theory of placelessness. The loss of a sense of place, and the increasing experience of a general sense of placelessness, is often taken to be one of the characteristic features of modernity. It is also a feature usually seen as tied closely to the enormous changes in communication and information technologies that have occurred over the last century. As Meyrowitz proposed, people are no longer defined by physical boundaries or places (where we are) but rather by networks of information and knowledge (what we know) – facilitated by new media technologies – that have no sense of place. Television and other electronic media can be regarded as important resources for social and political change in pursuit of banishing social inequalities.

The telephone, radio and television make the boundaries of all social spaces more permeable. This is very different from the impact of print media on society. Physical place and location are no longer necessarily important. People with different age, gender and other social differences get equal access to all information. They are surrounded and also separated by the mass media.

The relationship between conversation and mediated connection is similar with the relationship between ethnography and virtual ethnography. Virtual ethnography is doing the ethnographic research online instead of face-to-face interaction. There are mainly four key differences between online and face-to-face social interaction: First and perhaps most obvious, is alteration. Alteration simply means that the nature of the interaction is altered—both constrained and liberated—by the specific nature and rules of the technological medium in which it is carried. Next is anonymity, that widely-analyzed difference, particularly relevant in the early years of online interaction, but still meaningful today. The wide accessibility of many online forums to participation by anyone is the third crucial difference that our revised techniques must accommodate. Finally, there is the automatic archiving of conversations and data facilitated by the online medium.

As people are getting more involved in the mass media, for example the internet, it might be necessary to think about who the participants might ‘really be’. One thing people tend to get anxious about with the Internet is that we can have no idea who is contributing, what their ‘real’ identity is, or whether what they are saying has any validity.

The illusion of companionship and virtual relationship are all the outcomes of mediated connection. Turkle argued that we grew up with digital technology and we can not see it as all grown up. We should start thinking of solitude as a good thing, find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children, create sacred spaces at home and reclaim them for conversation, and also talk to your colleague at work. Try to develop a more self-aware relationship with digital technologies, with each other, and with ourselves.

Books

• Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (1978) ISBN 0-89862-474-6
• The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984). ISBN 0-262-70111-1
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) (paperback ISBN 0-684-83348-4)
• Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, (Ed.), MIT Press (2007). ISBN 0-262-20168-2
• Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, (Ed.), MIT Press (2008). ISBN 978-0-262-20172-8
• The Inner History of Devices, (Ed.), MIT Press (2008). ISBN 978-0-262-20176-6
• Simulation and Its Discontents, MIT Press (2009). ISBN 978-0-262-01270-6
• Alone Together, Basic Books (2011). ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9

Papers and reports

• Sherry Turkle, Will Taggart, Cory D. Kidd, and Olivia Dasté. (December 2006). "Relational Artifacts with Children and Elders: The Complexities of Cybercompanionship," Connection Science, 18(4).
• Sherry Turkle, (July 2006). "A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship," AAAI Technical Report Series.
• Sherry Turkle. (January 1996). "Who Am We? : We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system," Wired Magazine, Issue 4.01, January 1996.

Interviews

• Liz Else, Sherry Turkle. "Living online: I'll have to ask my friends", New Scientist, issue 2569, 20 September 2006. (interview; subscription needed for full article)
• Colbert Report, Jan. 17th, 2011.

References

• Meneses, J. (2006). Ten Years of (Everyday) Life on the Screen: A Critical Re-reading of the Proposal of Sherry Turkle

External links

• Bio
• Sherry Turkle's homepage
• Turkle's article "Virtuality and Its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace" (1996).
• Interview
• Detailed interview at priory.com (archived)
• Interview with Sherry Turkle Silicon Valley Radio
• Sherry Turkle Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show February 9, 2005
• Lecture about Alone Together (MP3) London School of Economics, 2 June 2011