Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkleis 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth18 June 1948
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
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.
It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'
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.
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.
I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.
We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.
As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.
Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!
We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place,
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
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.