86 Quotes & Sayings By Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She is the author of two books, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Dawn of the 'Spidey Sense'. Her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other was a New York Times bestseller. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Time, Newsweek, PBS's Frontline, and NPR's All Things Considered Read more

She is a member of American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other...
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The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy. Sherry Turkle
Because you can text while doing something else, texting does...
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Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical. Sherry Turkle
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A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments. Sherry Turkle
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To understand desire, one needs language and flesh. Sherry Turkle
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Discovering an inner history requires listening — and often not to the first story told. Sherry Turkle
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It's too late to leave the future to the futurists. Sherry Turkle
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I miss those days even though I wasn't alive. Sherry Turkle
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The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil. Sherry Turkle
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One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance. Sherry Turkle
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We expect more from technology and less from each other. Sherry Turkle
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We now expect more from technology and less from each other. Sherry Turkle
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Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves. Sherry Turkle
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Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds. Sherry Turkle
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Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler. Sherry Turkle
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Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real. Sherry Turkle
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The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become. Sherry Turkle
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We go from curiosity to a search for communion. Sherry Turkle
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Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice. Sherry Turkle
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As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts. Sherry Turkle
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She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber. Sherry Turkle
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This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by "solving" it without addressing it. Sherry Turkle
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Children make theories when they are confused or anxious. Sherry Turkle
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When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests — personal metrics to reassure themselves. Sherry Turkle
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Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate? Sherry Turkle
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Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself. Sherry Turkle
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A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect. Sherry Turkle
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If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind. Sherry Turkle
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We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us. Sherry Turkle
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We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory. Sherry Turkle
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Underestimation has its uses. Sherry Turkle
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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
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Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. Sherry Turkle
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There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete. Sherry Turkle
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This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected. Sherry Turkle
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We have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep -- it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." For Kafka, "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked." For Thomas Mann, "Solitude gives birth the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry." For Picasso, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible. Sherry Turkle
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In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness. Sherry Turkle
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Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available. Sherry Turkle
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My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely. Sherry Turkle
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You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. . Sherry Turkle
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He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder. Sherry Turkle
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When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for, " he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for? Sherry Turkle
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I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other we can have each other at a digital distance–not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. Sherry Turkle
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I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance–not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. Sherry Turkle
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A woman in her late sixties described her new i Phone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet. Sherry Turkle
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Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine. Sherry Turkle
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From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game. Sherry Turkle
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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
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My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me. Sherry Turkle
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Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY. Sherry Turkle
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Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one. Sherry Turkle
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Computers brought philosophy into everyday life. Sherry Turkle
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Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right. Sherry Turkle
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Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages. Sherry Turkle
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Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent. Sherry Turkle
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One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults. Sherry Turkle
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Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate. Sherry Turkle
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Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life. Sherry Turkle
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When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part. Sherry Turkle
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Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us? Sherry Turkle
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In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide. Sherry Turkle
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For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy. Sherry Turkle
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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
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Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision. Sherry Turkle
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The idea of the original had no place. Sherry Turkle
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The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one. Sherry Turkle
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Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead. Sherry Turkle
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We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection. Sherry Turkle
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Online life is about premeditation. Sherry Turkle
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He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook. Sherry Turkle
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With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up, " sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities. . Sherry Turkle
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Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. Sherry Turkle
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Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity. Sherry Turkle
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He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous. Sherry Turkle
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But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life. Sherry Turkle
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Connectivity becomes a craving. Sherry Turkle
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Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. Sherry Turkle
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There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things–her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation– I think of it as 'whole person conversation'–if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness. . Sherry Turkle
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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
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Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by. Sherry Turkle
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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 doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation. Sherry Turkle
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I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day. Sherry Turkle
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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. Sherry Turkle
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Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are. Sherry Turkle
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There are moments of opportunity for families moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school - a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent! Sherry Turkle
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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. Sherry Turkle