I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

When the social network doesn't find it convenient to have privacy, we say, "Okay, social network, you don't want privacy, maybe we won't have it either." But we did this without having the conversation.

People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of Wired magazine. [Then things began to change. In the early 80s,] we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

It all stems from the same thing - which is that when we are face to face - and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook ... when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We're aware that we're with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being.