Sherry Turkle Quotes

Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.

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.

We used to think, 'I have a feeling; I want to make a call.' Now our impulse is, 'I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.'

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk.

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.

We have relationships with many different things, creatures and beings. We have relationships with cats, with dogs, with horses, and we know that there are certain things they can't do. So we'll add robots to that list, and we'll learn what they can and cannot do. No harm, no foul.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of the people [they're] with and this other reality.

I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.

As a therapist, I know that when you're vulnerable, the best way to move on is to admit your vulnerability, don't beat yourself up for it, and try to find a way to analyze your vulnerability. Pull up your socks and try to do better for you and your family.

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.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.

Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much.

Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.

We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins.

It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesnt teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.

We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

We're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to connect, and sometimes we're too busy communicating to create. This is true for individuals and also true for organizations.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

We are not as strong as technology's pull.