Sherry Turkle Quotes

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
Connectivity becomes a craving.
Sherry Turkle
Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.
Sherry Turkle
Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.
Sherry Turkle
He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.
Sherry Turkle
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
Sherry Turkle
We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.
Sherry Turkle
Online life is about premeditation.
Sherry Turkle
He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.
Sherry Turkle
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
Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.
Sherry Turkle
The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.
Sherry Turkle
Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.
Sherry Turkle
The idea of the original had no place.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.
Sherry Turkle
Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.
Sherry Turkle
One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.
Sherry Turkle
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
Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.
Sherry Turkle
When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.
Sherry Turkle
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
Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.
Sherry Turkle
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
My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.
Sherry Turkle
Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.
Sherry Turkle
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
Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.
Sherry Turkle
Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
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
He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.
Sherry Turkle
Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
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
Underestimation has its uses.
Sherry Turkle
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
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
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
Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.
Sherry Turkle
Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Sherry Turkle
When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.
Sherry Turkle
Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.
Sherry Turkle
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
Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.
Sherry Turkle