Sherry Turkle Quotes - Page 3

Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!

If you're happy with where the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter have taken you, I'm not the Grinch. Someone called me Sherry Turkle's "evil Luddite twin." I'm not that. I enjoy the bounties of this technology. But if you fear that your connected life is running away with you, read the book, reflect, talk to your family and friends. I think we deserve better than some of the places that we've gotten with this technology.

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

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

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.

I apologize to all of my colleagues who've been writing up storms, but as a culture we've essentially put ourselves into a position where Mark Zuckerberg can say, "Privacy as a social norm is no longer relevant," and a lot of people don't blink an eye.

Everything that enchants may be said to deceive.

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.

There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking.

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.

One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians--threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.

What is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to a shared store of human meaning?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely.

I don't tell a story unless I have a very deep bench. If you tell an idiosyncratic story, there's no resonance. People read it and say, "I don't see anyone like that." So I tell a story only when I have many stories behind it.

We're in partnership with technology, influencing each other in a dance. My loyalties are to our making and shaping technology to conform to our human values; and to confronting the hard job of figuring out what those values are, and how are we're going to get technology to do that.

The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.

Telephone companies sell us voice plans because they know we're not going to use them. We're hiding from each other. People say that calls aren't efficient, but trying to bring efficiency into your intimacy can get you into a lot of trouble.

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.