Alone Together and Solitude

Home , Sherry Turkle

(continued from front flap) CU Rrent EVENTS / SOCIOLOGY $28.95 US / $35.00 CAN how we understand privacy and community, intimacy p r a i s e f o r alone together and solitude. It is a story of emotional dislocation, acebook. Twitter. Second Life. “Smart” phones. of risks taken unknowingly. But it is also a story of Robot pets. Robot lovers. Thirty years ago “No one has a better handle on how we are using material technology to transform our immaterial hope, for even in the places where digital saturation is we asked what we would use computers for. ‘self’ than Sherry Turkle. She is our techno-Freud, illuminating our inner transformation long before F Now the question is what don’t we use them for. Now, greatest, there are people—especially the young—who we are able to see it. This immensely satisfying book is a deep journey into our future selves.” T u rkle are asking the hard questions about costs, about checks —Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants through technology, we create, navigate, and carry out and balances, about returning to what is most sustaining our emotional lives.

“Alone Together is a brilliant, profound, stirring, and often disturbing portrait of the future by America’s together alone about direct human connection. At the threshold of S h erry We shape our buildings, Winston Churchill argued, leading expert on how computers affect us as humans. She reveals the secrets of ‘Walden 2.0’ and tells us what Turkle calls “the robotic moment,” our devices then they shape us. The same is true of our digital that we deserve better than caring robots. Grab this book, then turn off your smart phones and absorb prompt us to recall that we have human purposes and, technologies. Technology has become the architect of Sherry Turkle’s powerful message.” —Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tu r k l e perhaps, to rediscover what they are. Harvard Business School professor and author of Evolve!, Confidence, and SuperCorp our intimacies. Online, we face a moment of temptation. A uthor of The Second Self Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the and Life on the Screen “Sherry Turkle is the Margaret Mead of digital culture. Parents and teachers: If you want to understand demands of intimacy, we conduct “risk free” affairs on (and support) your children as they navigate the emotional undercurrents in today’s technological world, Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on this is the book you need to read. Every chapter is full of great insights and great writing.” a Facebook wall with authentic communication. And —Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research now, we are promised “sociable robots” that will marry and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory companionship with convenience. “Based on an ambitious research program, and written in a clear and beguiling style, this book will Technology promises to let us do anything from captivate both scholar and general reader and it will be a landmark in the study of the impact of social alone anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to media.” —Jill ker Conway, President Emerita, Smith College, and author of The Road from Coorain do everything everywhere. We begin to feel overwhelmed 6.25 x 9.5”

eter Urban “Alone Together is a deep yet accessible, bold yet gentle, frightening yet reassuring account of how and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. We P S: 1-3/16” © people continue to find one another in an increasingly mediated landscape. If the net and humanity may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also B: 15/16” could have a couples therapist, it would be Sherry Turkle.” —Douglas Rushkoff, together prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist, S herry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller author of Program or Be Programmed Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn BASIC to new technology to fill the void, but as technology HC Technology at MIT, the founder and director of the MIT “Sherry Turkle has observed more widely and thought more deeply about human-computer Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical relations than any other scholar. Her book is essential reading for all who hope to understand our ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. W h y W e E x p e c t M o r e f r o m 4/COLOR psychologist. She is the author of The Second Self and changing relation to technology.” —Howard Gardner, Alone Together is the result of MIT technology and Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education Life on the Screen, with which Alone Together forms a society specialist Sherry Turkle’s nearly fifteen-year T e c h n o l o g y FINISH: trilogy. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based $28.95 US / $35.00 CAN matte poly ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9 on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, it 5 2 8 9 5 a n d L e s s f r o m E a c h O t h e r A Member of the Perseus Books Group describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, Jacket design by Alyssa Stepien www.basicbooks.com lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in Jacket photograph © PhotoAlto / Getty Images 9 7 8 0 4 6 5 0 1 0 2 1 9 01/11 (continued on back flap) 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page iii

alone together

Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle

A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/11/10 12:09 PM Page iv

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turkle, Sherry. Alone together : why we expect more from technology and less from each other / Sherry Turkle. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9 (alk. paper) 1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Interpersonal relations. 3. Human-computer interaction. I. Title. HM851.T86 2010 303.48'33—dc22 2010030614 E-book ISBN 978-0-465-02234-2 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page vii

contents

Author’s Note: Turning Points ix Introduction: Alone Together 1

PART ONE THE ROBOTIC MOMENT: IN SOLITUDE, NEW INTIMACIES 1. Nearest Neighbors 23 2. Alive Enough 35 3. True Companions 53 4. Enchantment 67 5. Complicities 83 6. Love’s Labor Lost 103 7. Communion 127

PART TWO NETWORKED: IN INTIMACY, NEW SOLITUDES 8. Always On 151 9. Growing Up Tethered 171

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viii Contents

10. No Need to Call 187 11. Reduction and Betrayal 211 12. True Confessions 229 13. Anxiety 241 14. The Nostalgia of the Young 265 Conclusion: Necessary Conversations 279 Epilogue: The Letter 297

Notes, 307 Index, 349 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page ix

AUTHOR’S NOTE

turning points

hirty years ago, when I joined the faculty at MIT to study computer culture, t the world retained a certain innocence. Children played tic-tac-toe with their electronic toys, video game missiles took on invading asteroids, and “intelligent” programs could hold up their end of a serious chess match. The first home computers were being bought by people called hobbyists. The people who bought or built them experimented with programming, often making their own simple games. No one knew to what further uses home computers might be put. The intellectual buzz in the still-young field of artificial intelligence was over programs that could recognize simple shapes and manipulate blocks. AI scientists debated whether machines of the future would have their smarts programmed into them or whether intelligence might emerge from simple instructions written into machine hardware, just as neurobiologists currently imagine that intelligence and reflective self-consciousness emerge from the rel- atively simple architecture and activity of the human brain. Now I was among them and, like any anthropologist, something of a stranger in a strange land. I had just spent several years in Paris studying how psychoanalytic ideas had spread into everyday life in France—how people were picking up and trying on this new language for thinking about the self. I had come to MIT because I sensed that something similar was happening with the language of computers. Computational metaphors, such as “debugging” and “programming,”

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were starting to be used to think about politics, education, social life, and—most central to the analogy with psychoanalysis—about the self. While my computer science colleagues were immersed in getting computers to do ingenious things, I had other concerns. How were computers changing us as people? My colleagues often objected, insisting that computers were “just tools.” But I was certain that the “just” in that sentence was deceiving. We are shaped by our tools. And now, the computer, a machine on the border of becoming a mind, was changing and shaping us. As a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, I wanted to explore what I have called the “inner history of devices.”1 Discovering an inner history requires listening—and often not to the ﬁrst story told. Much is learned from the tossed- off aside, the comment made when the interview is “officially” over. To do my work, I adopted an ethnographic and clinical style of research as I lived in worlds new to me. But instead of spending hundreds of hours in simple dwellings, as an anthropologist in a traditional setting would do, listening to the local lore, I lurked around computer science departments, home computer hobbyist clubs, and junior high school computer laboratories. I asked questions of scientists, home computer owners, and children, but mostly I listened to how they talked and watched how they behaved among their new “thinking” machines. I heard computers provoke erudite conversations. Perhaps, people wondered, the human mind is just a programmed machine, much like a computer. Perhaps if the mind is a program, free will is an illusion. Most strikingly, these conversations occurred not just in seminar rooms. They were taking place around kitchen tables and in playrooms. Computers brought philosophy into everyday life; in particular, they turned children into philosophers. In the presence of their simple electronic games—games that played tic-tac-toe or challenged them in spelling—children asked if computers were alive, if they had different ways of thinking from people, and what, in the age of smart machines, was special about being a person. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I witnessed a moment when we were confronted with machines that invited us to think differently about human thought, memory, and understanding. The computer was an evocative object that provoked self-reﬂection. For me, this was captured in a conversation I had with thirteen-year-old Deborah in the early 1980s. After a year of studying programming, Deborah said that, when working with the computer, “there’s a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind.” Once this was achieved, you could see yourself “differently.”2 Face-to-“face” with a computer, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xi

Author’s Note: Turning Points xi

people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine. In 1984, thinking about Deborah (and in homage as well to Simone de Beauvoir), I called my first book on computers and people The Second Self. That date, 1984, is of course iconic in Western intellectual thinking, tethered as it is to George Orwell’s novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a society that subjects people to constant government surveillance, public mind control, and loss of individual rights. I find it ironic that my own 1984 book, about the technology that in many a science fiction novel makes possible such a dystopian world, was by contrast full of hope and optimism. I had concerns about the “holding power” of the new technology: some people found computers so compelling that they did not want to be separated from them. And I worried whether losing oneself in worlds within the machine would distract us from facing our problems in the real—both personal and political. But, in this first work, I focused on how evocative computers fostered new reflection about the self. In the decade following the publication of The Second Self, people’s relationships with computers changed. Whereas in the 1980s that relationship was almost always one-on-one, a person alone with a machine, in the 1990s, this was no longer the case. By then, the computer had become a portal that enabled people to lead parallel lives in virtual worlds. People joined networks such as America Online and discovered a new sense of “place.” These were heady times: we were no longer limited to handfuls of close friends and contacts. Now we could have hundreds, even thousands, a dazzling breadth of connection. My focus shifted from the one-on-one with a computer to the relationships people formed with each other using the computer as an intermediary. I began throwing weekly pizza parties in the Boston area to meet people who could tell me the stories of their lives in the new virtual worlds. They described the erosion of boundaries between the real and virtual as they moved in and out of their lives on the screen. Views of self became less unitary, more protean. I again felt witness, through the prism of technology, to a shift in how we create and experience our own identities. I reported on this work in my 1995 Life on the Screen, which offered, on balance, a positive view of new opportunities for exploring identity online. But by then, my optimism of 1984 had been challenged. I was meeting people, many people, who found online life more satisfying than what some derisively called “RL,” that is, real life. Doug, a Midwestern college student, played four avatars, distributed across three different online worlds. He always had these worlds open as windows on his computer screen along with his schoolwork, e-mail program, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xii

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and favorite games. He cycled easily through them. He told me that RL “is just one more window.” And, he added, “it’s not usually my best one.”3 Where was this leading? Two avenues forward became apparent by the mid-1990s. The first was the development of a fully networked life. Access to the network no longer required that we know our destination. With browsers and search engines—Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Google—one had the sense of traversing an infinite landscape always there to be discovered. And as connections to the Internet went mobile, we no longer “logged on” from a desktop, tethered by cables to an object called a “computer.” The network was with us, on us, all the time. So, we could be with each other all the time. Second, there was an evolution in robotics. Now, instead of simply taking on difficult or dangerous jobs for us, robots would try to be our friends. The fruits of such research made their way into children’s playrooms: by the late 1990s, children were presented with digital “creatures” that made demands for attention and seemed to pay attention to them. Alone Together picks up these two strands in the story of digital culture over the past fifteen years, with a focus on the young, those from five through their early twenties—“digital natives” growing up with cell phones and toys that ask for love. If, by the end of researching Life on the Screen, I was troubled about the costs of life with simulation, in the course of researching this book, my concerns have grown. These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. This can happen when one is finding one’s way through a blizzard of text messages; it can happen when interacting with a robot. I feel witness for a third time to a turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves. We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other. In this book I concentrate on observations during the past fifteen years, but I also reach back to the prehistory of recent developments. To tell the story of artifacts that encourage relationship, I begin with the ELIZA program in the 1970s and take the story through to the “sociable” humanoid robots, such as Domo and Mertz, built at MIT in the 2000s. Along the way there have been many other digital “creatures,” including Tamagotchis, Furbies, AIBOs, My Real Babies, Kismet, Cog, and Paros, these last, robot baby seals designed specifically to provide companionship for the elderly. I thank the more than 250 people in- volved in my robot studies. Some who met robots came to MIT; other times I 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xiii

Author’s Note: Turning Points xiii

brought robots to schools, after-school centers, and nursing homes. When working with children, whenever possible, I provided them with a robot to take home for several weeks. Children and their families were asked to keep “robot diaries,” accounts of home life with an AIBO, My Real Baby, or Furby. In the story of computer-mediated communication, I began my investigations in the 1980s and early 1990s with e-mail, bulletin boards, Internet Relay Chat, and America Online and went on from there to the first virtual communities and multiuser online role-playing games. Over the past decade, as the network dramatically changed its contours, I broadened my investigation to include mobile devices, texts, instant messages, social networks, Twitter, and massively mul- tiplayer online games. My work also included studies of virtual communities where three-dimensional avatars inhabit photorealistic spaces. The focus of my research on networking was the young, and so I did most of my observations in high schools and on college campuses. But I also spoke with adults who gave me insight into how the network is changing parenting and communications patterns in fields from architecture to management consulting. Over 450 people have participated in my studies of connectivity, roughly 300 children and 150 adults. I thank everyone who lent their voices to this work over the past fifteen years. I am grateful for their generosity and good will. The work reported on here, as all of my work, includes field research and clinical studies. In field research, one goes to where people and their technologies meet to observe interactions, sometimes ask questions, and take detailed notes. Depending on the nature of the field setting, casual conversations may take place over coffee or over snacks of milk and cookies. I teach courses about the computer culture and the psychology of computation, and some of my material comes from the give-and-take of the classroom. In the clinical component of my work, I pursue more detailed interviews, usually in an office or other quiet setting. I call these studies clinical, but of course my role in them is as a re- searcher, not a therapist. My interest in the “inner history” of technology means that I try to bring together the sensibility of ethnographer and clinician in all my work. A sensitive ethnographer is always open to the slip, to a tear, to an un- expected association. I think of the product as an intimate ethnography. In my studies of robots, I provided the artifacts (from primitive Tamagotchis and Furbies to sophisticated robots such as Kismet and Cog). This meant that I was able to study children and seniors from a range of social and economic backgrounds. In the research on the networked life, I did not distribute any technology. I spoke to children, adolescents, and adults who already had Web 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xiv

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access and mobile phones. Necessarily, my claims about new connectivity devices and the self apply to those who can afford such things. This turned out to be a larger group than I had originally supposed. For example, in a public high school study in the spring of 2008, every student, across a wide range of economic and cultural situations, had a mobile phone that could support texting. Most students had phones that could put them on the Web. I am studying a moving target. In January 2010, a Nielson study reported that the average teen sends over three thousand text messages a month.4 My data suggests that this number is steadily increasing. What I report here is nothing less than the future unfolding.* My investigations continue. These days, parents wait in line to buy their children interactive Zhu Zhu robotic pet hamsters, advertised as “living to feel the love.” And one of the hottest online programs is Chatroulette, with 1.5 million users, which randomly connects you to other users all over the world. You see each other on live video. You can talk or write notes. People mostly hit “next” after about two seconds to bring another person up on their screens. It seems right that Zhu Zhu pets and Chatroulette are the final “objects” I report on in this book: the Zhu Zhus are designed to be loved; in Chatroulette, people are objectified and quickly discarded. I leave my story at a point of disturbing sym- metry: we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things. I preserve my subjects’ anonymity by changing identifying details, except where I cite scientists and researchers on the public record or those who have asked to be cited by name. Without mentioning “real” names and places, I express appreciation to everyone who has spoken with me and to the school directors and principals, teachers, and nursing home directors and staff who made my work possible. I studied robots in two nursing homes and have data from students in seven high schools (two public and coeducational; five private, one for girls, two for boys, one coeducational; and one coeducational Catholic high school). In some cases I have been able to follow children who grew up with Tamagotchis and Furbies through their adolescence and young adulthood as they entered the networked culture to become fluent with texting, Twitter,

* In this book I use the terms the Net, the network, and connectivity to refer to our new world of online connections—from the experience of surﬁng the Web, to e-mail, texting, gaming, and social networking. And I use the term cell phone to describe a range of connectivity devices such as BlackBerries and iPhones that do a lot more than make “calls.” They provide access to instant messaging, texting, e-mail, and the Web. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xv

Author’s Note: Turning Points xv

MySpace, Facebook, and the world of iPhone apps. I thank these young adults for their patience with me and this project. I did much of the work reported here under the auspices of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. I thank all of my colleagues and students who worked with the initiative and in the Program for Science, Technology, and Society, which is its academic home. I have profited from their support and good ideas. Collegial relationships across MIT have enriched my thinking and been sources of much appreciated practical assistance. Rodney Brooks provided me with an office at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to help me get the lay of the land. He gave me the best possible start. Cynthia Breazeal and Brian Scassellati, the principal developers of Kismet and Cog, worked with me on the first-encounters study that introduced sixty children to these robots. These two generous colleagues helped me to think through so many of the issues in this book. On this study, I worked with research assistants Anita Say Chan, Rebecca Hurwitz, and Tamara Knutsen, and later with Robert Briscoe and Olivia Dasté. The Kismet and Cog support team, including Lijin Aryananda, Aaron Edsinger, Paul Fitzpatrick, Matthew Marjanavic, and Paulina Varchavskaia, provided much needed assistance. At the very beginning of my research on virtual worlds, I worked with Amy Bruckman. For me, it was a touchstone collaboration. Jen- nifer Audley, Joanna Barnes, Robert Briscoe, Olivia Dasté, Alice Driscoll, Cory Kidd, Anne Pollack, Rachel Prentice, Jocelyn Scheirer, T.L. Taylor, and William Taggart all made precious contributions during the years of interviews with children, families, and elders. I worked with Federico Castelegno at MIT on a study of online gaming; I thank him for his insights. In this diverse and talented group, four colleagues deserve special recognition: Jennifer Audley worked on this project from the earliest studies of Tam- agotchis and Furbies through the work on the robots Kismet and Cog. Olivia Dasté joined the project in 2001, working closely with me in nursing homes and schools and on the analysis of the “first encounters” of Kismet and Cog. William Taggart and Cory Kidd worked in nursing homes, primarily with the Paro robot. Each of them has my deepest thanks. I also am grateful to Professors Caroline Jones, Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, William Mitchell, Rosalind Picard, and William Porter. Conversations with each of them brought new ideas. For my thinking about Domo and Mertz, thanks to Pia Lindman, Aaron Edsinger, and Lijin Aryananda of MIT’s Com- puter Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s successor) who shared their experiences and their robots with me. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xvi

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Conversations with five psychoanalytic colleagues were particularly important in shaping my thinking on children and the culture of simulation, both online and robotic: Dr. Ellen Dolnansky, Dr. James Frosch, Dr. Monica Horovitz, Dr. David Mann, and Dr. Patrick Miller. My MIT colleague Hal Abelson sent me an e-mail in 1997, suggesting that I “study those dolls,” and I always take his advice. In the late 1970s, he was the first to introduce me to the special hopes of personal computer owners who were not content until they understood the “innards” of their machines. In the late 1980s, he introduced me to the first generation of virtual communities, known at the time as “MUDs.” Following his leads has always led me to my life’s work. I can only repay my debt to Hal Abelson by following up on his wonderful tips. I thank him and hope I have done him proud. Colleagues at Harvard and presentations at that institution have consistently broadened my perspective. In particular I thank Professors Homi Baba, Mario Biagioli, Svetlana Bohm, Vanessa Conley, Peter Galison, Howard Gardner, Sheila Jasonoff, Nancy Rosenblum, Michael Sandel, and Susan Sulieman for individual conversations and opportunities to meet with groups. There are other debts: Thad Kull tirelessly tracked down sources. Ada Brustein, William Friedberg, Katie Hafner, Roger Lewin, David McIntosh, Katinka Matson, Margaret Morris, Clifford Nass, Susan Pollak, Ellen Poss, Catherine Rea, and Meredith Traquina gave excellent advice at key moments. Jill Ker Conway’s reading of my first full draft provided encouragement and direction. Thomas Kelleher at Basic Books contributed organizational ideas and a much-appreciated line editing; Jennifer Kelland Fagan copyedited this manu- script with great care. Any infelicities of language are surely the result of my not taking their good advice. Grace Costa and Judith Spitzer provided the admin- istrative support that freed my time so I could interview, think, and write. I have worked with Kelly Gray on six book projects. In each one, her dedica- tion, intelligence, and love of language have been sustaining. In Alone Together, whose primary data spans thirty years of life in the computer culture, it was Kelly who helped me find the narrative for the book I wanted to write. Additionally, some of my favorite turns of phrase in this book are ones that Kelly introduced into our many conversations. I wanted to list them; she told me not to, but her modesty should not deceive my readers about her profound contribution. My work on robotics has been funded by the Intel Corporation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, the Kurzweil Foundation, and the National Science Foun- dation (NSF Grant # SES-0115668, “Relational Artifacts”). Takanori Shibata, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page xvii

Author’s Note: Turning Points xvii

the inventor of Paro, provided me with the baby seal robots to use in my studies. The Sony Corporation donated one of their very first AIBOs. My work on adolescents has been funded by the Intel Corporation, the Mitchell Kapor Founda- tion, and the Spencer Foundation. Among all this generosity, the contribution of Mitchell Kapor must be singled out. He understood what I was trying to ac- complish with an Initiative on Technology and Self and gave it his full support. In all cases, the findings and opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect the positions of the organizations and individuals who have helped me. I have worked on the themes of this book for decades. It is certain that I have many unacknowledged debts. I take this opportunity to say thank you. There is a final debt to my daughter Rebecca. Since she was six, she has pa- tiently made friends with the talkative robots—simple and fancy—that I have brought into our home. I have asked her to take care of Tamagotchis, to play with Kismet and Cog, to befriend our own stay-at-home Paro. The My Real Ba- bies frightened her, but she made a good effort to tell me why. Rebecca calls our basement storage room “the robot cemetery” and doesn’t much like to go down there. I thank Rebecca for her forbearance, for her insightful and decisive edi- torial support, and for giving me permission to quote her. She refused to friend me on Facebook, but she taught me how to text. The story of digital culture has been the story of Rebecca’s life. The book is written as a letter to her about how her mother sees the conversations in her future. Now Rebecca is nineteen, and I know that, out of love for me, she is glad this book is finished. As for me, I’m not so sure. Thinking about robots, as I argue in these pages, is a way of thinking about the essence of personhood. Thinking about connectivity is a way to think about what we mean to each other. This book project is over; my preoccupation with its themes stays with me. Sherry Turkle Boston, Massachusetts August 2010 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 1

INTRODUCTION

alone together

echnology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. These days, it t suggests substitutions that put the real on the run. The advertising for Sec- ond Life, a virtual world where you get to build an avatar, a house, a family, and a social life, basically says, “Finally, a place to love your body, love your friends, and love your life.”1 On Second Life, a lot of people, as represented by their avatars, are richer than they are in first life and a lot younger, thinner, and better dressed. And we are smitten with the idea of sociable robots, which most people first meet in the guise of artificial pets. Zhu Zhu pet hamsters, the “it” toy of the 2009–2010 holiday season, are presented as “better” than any real pet could be. We are told they are lovable and responsive, don’t require cleanup, and will never die. 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. A simple story makes this last point, told in her own words by a harried mother in her late forties:

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2 Alone Together

I needed to ﬁnd a new nanny. When I interview nannies, I like to go to where they live, so that I can see them in their environment, not just in mine. So, I made an appointment to interview Ronnie, who had applied for the job. I show up at her apartment and her housemate answers the door. She is a young woman, around twenty-one, texting on her Black- Berry. Her thumbs are bandaged. I look at them, pained at the tiny thumb splints, and I try to be sympathetic. “That must hurt.” But she just shrugs. She explains that she is still able to text. I tell her I am here to speak with Ronnie; this is her job interview. Could she please knock on Ronnie’s bed- room door? The girl with the bandaged thumbs looks surprised. “Oh no,” she says, “I would never do that. That would be intrusive. I’ll text her.” And so she sent a text message to Ronnie, no more than ﬁfteen feet away.

This book, which completes a trilogy on computers and people, asks how we got to this place and whether we are content to be here. In The Second Self, I traced the subjective side of personal computers—not what computers do for us but what they do to us, to our ways of thinking about ourselves, our relationships, our sense of being human. From the start, people used interactive and reactive computers to reﬂect on the self and think about the difference between machines and people. Were intelligent machines alive? If not, why not? In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as “sort of” alive—a story that has continued to evolve. In Life on the Screen, my focus shifted from how people see computers to how they forge new identities in online spaces. In Alone To- gether, I show how technology has taken both of these stories to a new level. Computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. They ask us to take care of them; in response, we imagine that they might care for us in return. Indeed, among the most talked about robotic designs are in the area of care and companionship. In summer 2010, there are enthusiastic reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on robotic teachers, companions, and therapists. And Microsoft demonstrates a virtual human, Milo, that recognizes the people it interacts with and whose personality is sculpted by them. Tellingly, in the video that introduces Milo to the public, a young man begins by playing games with Milo in a virtual garden; by the end of the demonstration, things have heated up—he conﬁdes in Milo after being told off by his parents.2 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 3

Introduction: Alone Together 3

We are challenged to ask what such things augur. Some people are looking for robots to clean rugs and help with the laundry. Others hope for a mechanical bride. As sociable robots propose themselves as substitutes for people, new networked devices offer us machine-mediated relationships with each other, another kind of substitution. We romance the robot and become inseparable from our smartphones. As this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines. People talk about Web access on their BlackBerries as “the place for hope” in life, the place where loneliness can be defeated. A woman in her late sixties describes her new iPhone: “It’s like having a little Times Square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.” People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

THE ROBOTIC MOMENT In late November 2005, I took my daughter Rebecca, then fourteen, to the Dar- win exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From the moment you step into the museum and come face-to-face with a full-size dinosaur, you become part of a celebration of life on Earth, what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful.” Millions upon millions of now lifeless specimens represent nature’s invention in every corner of the globe. There could be no better venue for documenting Darwin’s life and thought and his theory of evolution by natural selection, the central truth that underpins contemporary biology. The exhibition aimed to please and, a bit defensively in these days of attacks on the theory of evolution, wanted to convince. At the exhibit’s entrance were two giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands, the best-known inhabitants of the archipelago where Darwin did his most famous investigations. The museum had been advertising these tortoises as won- ders, curiosities, and marvels. Here, among the plastic models at the museum, was the life that Darwin saw more than a century and a half ago. One tortoise was hidden from view; the other rested in its cage, utterly still. Rebecca inspected the visible tortoise thoughtfully for a while and then said matter-of-factly, “They could have used a robot.” I was taken aback and asked what she meant. She said she thought it was a shame to bring the turtle all this way from its island home in the Paciﬁc, when it was just going to sit there in the museum, motionless, doing nothing. Rebecca was both concerned for the imprisoned turtle and un- moved by its authenticity. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 4

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It was Thanksgiving weekend. The line was long, the crowd frozen in place. I began to talk with some of the other parents and children. My question— “Do you care that the turtle is alive?”—was a welcome diversion from the boredom of the wait. A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: “Its water looks dirty. Gross.” More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looked at her, mystified: “But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point.” The Darwin exhibition put authenticity front and center: on display were the actual magnifying glass that Darwin used in his travels, the very notebook in which he wrote the famous sentences that first described his theory of evolution. Yet, in the children’s reactions to the inert but alive Galápagos tortoise, the idea of the original had no place. What I heard in the museum reminded me of Re- becca’s reaction as a seven-year-old during a boat ride in the postcard-blue Med- iterranean. Already an expert in the world of simulated fish tanks, she saw something in the water, pointed to it excitedly, and said, “Look, Mommy, a jel- lyfish! It looks so realistic!” When I told this story to a vice president at the Dis- ney Corporation, he said he was not surprised. When Animal Kingdom opened in Orlando, populated by “real”—that is, biological—animals, its first visitors complained that they were not as “realistic” as the animatronic creatures in other parts of Disneyworld. The robotic crocodiles slapped their tails and rolled their eyes—in sum, they displayed archetypal “crocodile” behavior. The biological crocodiles, like the Galápagos tortoises, pretty much kept to themselves. I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Dar- win’s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves. I asked the children a further question: “If you put a robot instead of a living turtle in the exhibit, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?” Not really, said many children. Data on aliveness can be shared on a “need-to-know basis”—for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? Only a year later, I was shocked to be confronted with the idea that these purposes were more up for grabs than I had ever dreamed. I received a call from a 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 5

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Scientific American reporter to talk about robots and our future. During that conversation, he accused me of harboring sentiments that would put me squarely in the camp of those who have for so long stood in the way of marriage for homosexual couples. I was stunned, first because I harbor no such sentiments, but also because his accusation was prompted not by any objection I had made to the mating or marriage of people. The reporter was bothered because I had objected to the mating and marriage of people to robots. The call had been prompted by a new book about robots by David Levy, a British-born entrepreneur and computer scientist. In 1968 Levy, an international chess master, famously wagered four artificial intelligence (AI) experts that no computer program would defeat him at the game in the subsequent decade. Levy won his bet. The sum was modest, 1,250 British pounds, but the AI community was chastened. They had overreached in their predictions for their young science. It would be another decade before Levy was bested in chess by a computer program, Deep Thought, an early version of the program that beat Gary Kasparov, the reigning chess champion in the 1990s.3 These days, Levy is the chief executive officer at a company that develops “smart” toys for children. In 2009, Levy and his team won—and this for the second time—the prestigious Loebner Prize, widely regarded as the world championship for conversational software. In this contest, Levy’s “chat bot” program was best at convincing people that they were talking to another person and not to a machine. Always impressed with Levy’s inventiveness, I found myself underwhelmed by the message of this latest book, Love and Sex with Robots.4 No tongue-in- cheek science fiction fantasy, it was reviewed without irony in the New York Times by a reporter who had just spent two weeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and wrote glowingly about its robotics culture as creating “new forms of life.”5 Love and Sex is earnest in its predictions about where people and robots will find themselves by mid-century: “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots will teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals com- bined.”6 Levy argues that robots will teach us to be better friends and lovers because we will be able to practice on them. Beyond this, they will substitute where people fail. Levy proposes, among other things, the virtues of marriage to robots. He argues that robots are, of course, “other” but, in many ways, better. No cheating. No heartbreak. In Levy’s argument, there is one simple criterion for judging the worth of robots in even the most intimate domains: Does being with a robot 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 6

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make you feel better? The master of today’s computerspeak judges future robots by the impact of their behavior. And his next bet is that in a very few years, this is all we will care about as well. I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. Both by temperament and profession, I place high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity. Granting that an AI might develop its own origami of lovemaking positions, I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of “as if” performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to the other because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death.7 A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop. So, I turned the pages of Levy’s book with a cool eye. What if a robot is not a “form of life” but a kind of performance art? What if “relating” to robots makes us feel “good” or “better” simply because we feel more in control? Feeling good is no golden rule. One can feel good for bad reasons. What if a robot companion makes us feel good but leaves us somehow diminished? The virtue of Levy’s bold position is that it forces reﬂection: What kinds of relationships with machines are possible, desirable, or ethical? What does it mean to love a robot? As I read Love and Sex, my feelings on these matters were clear. A love relationship involves coming to savor the surprises and the rough patches of looking at the world from another’s point of view, shaped by history, biology, trauma, and joy. Computers and robots do not have these experiences to share. We look at mass media and worry about our culture being intellectually “dumbed down.” Love and Sex seems to celebrate an emotional dumbing down, a willful turning away from the complexities of human partnerships—the inauthentic as a new aesthetic. I was further discomforted as I read Love and Sex because Levy had inter- preted my ﬁndings about the “holding power” of computers to argue his case. Indeed, Levy dedicated his book to Anthony,* an MIT computer hacker I interviewed in the early 1980s. Anthony was nineteen when I met him, a shy young man who found computers reassuring. He felt insecure in the world of people

* This name and the names of others I observed and interviewed for this book are pseu- donyms. To protect the anonymity of my subjects, I also change identifying details such as location and profession. When I cite the opinions of scientists or public ﬁgures, I use their words with permission. And, of course, I cite material on the public record. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 7

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with its emotional risks and shades of gray. The activity and interactivity of computer programming gave Anthony—lonely, yet afraid of intimacy—the feeling that he was not alone.8 In Love and Sex, Levy idealizes Anthony’s accom- modation and suggests that loving a robot would be a reasonable next step for people like him. I was sent an advance copy of the book, and Levy asked if I could get a copy to Anthony, thinking he would be flattered. I was less sure. I didn’t remember Anthony as being at peace with his retreat to what he called “the machine world.” I remembered him as wistful, feeling himself a spectator of the human world, like a kid with his nose to the window of a candy store. When we imagine robots as our future companions, we all put our noses to that same window. I was deep in the irony of my unhappy Anthony as a role model for intimacy with robots when the Scientific American reporter called. I was not shy about my lack of enthusiasm for Levy’s ideas and suggested that the very fact we were discussing marriage to robots at all was a comment on human disappointments—that in matters of love and sex, we must be failing each other. I did not see marriage to a machine as a welcome evolution in human relationships. And so I was taken aback when the reporter suggested that I was no better than bigots who deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. I tried to explain that just because I didn’t think people should marry machines didn’t mean that any mix of adult people wasn’t fair territory. He accused me of species chauvinism: Wasn’t I with- holding from robots their right to “realness”? Why was I presuming that a relationship with a robot lacked authenticity? For me, the story of computers and the evocation of life had come to a new place. At that point, I told the reporter that I, too, was taking notes on our conversation. The reporter’s point of view was now data for my own work on our shift- ing cultural expectations of technology—data, that is, for the book you are reading. His analogizing of robots to gay men and women demonstrated that, for him, future intimacy with machines would not be a second-best substitute for finding a person to love. More than this, the reporter was insisting that machines would bring their own special qualities to an intimate partnership that needed to be honored in its own right. In his eyes, the love, sex, and marriage robot was not merely “better than nothing,” a substitute. Rather, a robot had become “better than something.” The machine could be preferable—for any number of reasons—to what we currently experience in the sometimes messy, often frustrating, and always complex world of people. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 8

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This episode with the Scientific American reporter shook me—perhaps in part because the magazine had been for me, since childhood, a gold standard in scientific publication. But the extravagance of the reporter’s hopes for robots fell into a pattern I had been observing for nearly a decade. The encounter over Love and Sex most reminded me of another time, two years before, when I met a female graduate student at a large psychology conference in New Orleans; she had taken me aside to ask about the current state of research on robots designed to serve as human companions. At the conference, I had given a presentation on anthropomorphism—on how we see robots as close to human if they do such things as make eye contact, track our motion, and gesture in a show of friendship. These appear to be “Darwinian buttons” that cause people to imagine that the robot is an “other,” that there is, colloquially speaking, “somebody home.” During a session break, the graduate student, Anne, a lovely, raven-haired woman in her mid-twenties, wanted specifics. She confided that she would trade in her boyfriend “for a sophisticated Japanese robot” if the robot would produce what she called “caring behavior.” She told me that she relied on a “feeling of ci- vility in the house.” She did not want to be alone. She said, “If the robot could provide the environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me.” She was looking for a “no-risk relationship” that would stave off loneliness. A responsive robot, even one just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than a demanding boyfriend. I asked her, gently, if she was joking. She told me she was not. An even more poignant encounter was with Miriam, a seventy-two-year-old woman living in a subur- ban Boston nursing home, a participant in one of my studies of robots and the elderly. I meet Miriam in an office that has been set aside for my interviews. She is a slight figure in a teal blue silk blouse and slim black pants, her long gray hair parted down the middle and tied behind her head in a low bun. Although elegant and composed, she is sad. In part, this is because of her circumstances. For someone who was once among Boston’s best-known interior designers, the nursing home is a stark and lonely place. But there is also something immediate: Miriam’s son has recently broken off his relationship with her. He has a job and family on the West Coast, and when he visits, he and his mother quarrel—he feels she wants more from him than he can give. Now Miriam sits quietly, stroking Paro, a sociable robot in the shape of a baby harp seal. Paro, developed in Japan, has been advertised as the first “therapeutic robot” for its ostensibly 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 9

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positive effects on the ill, elderly, and emotionally troubled. Paro can make eye contact by sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has a small working English vocabulary for “understanding” its users (the robot’s Japanese vocabulary is larger); most importantly, it has “states of mind” affected by how it is treated. For example, it can sense whether it is being stroked gently or with aggression. Now, with Paro, Miriam is lost in her reverie, patting down the robot’s soft fur with care. On this day, she is particularly depressed and believes that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him again, and says, “Yes, you’re sad, aren’t you? It’s tough out there. Yes, it’s hard.” Miriam’s tender touch triggers a warm response in Paro: it turns its head toward her and purrs approvingly. Encouraged, Miriam shows yet more affection for the little robot. In attempting to provide the comfort she believes it needs, she comforts herself. Because of my training as a clinician, I believe that this kind of moment, if it happens between people, has profound therapeutic potential. We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need. But what are we to make of this transaction between a depressed woman and a robot? When I talk to colleagues and friends about such encounters—for Miriam’s story is not unusual—their first associations are usually to their pets and the solace they provide. I hear stories of how pets “know” when their owners are unhappy and need comfort. The comparison with pets sharpens the question of what it means to have a relationship with a robot. I do not know whether a pet could sense Miriam’s unhappi- ness, her feelings of loss. I do know that in the moment of apparent connection between Miriam and her Paro, a moment that comforted her, the robot understood nothing. Miriam experienced an intimacy with another, but she was in fact alone. Her son had left her, and as she looked to the robot, I felt that we had abandoned her as well. Experiences such as these—with the idea of aliveness on a “need-to-know” basis, with the proposal and defense of marriage to robots, with a young woman dreaming of a robot lover, and with Miriam and her Paro—have caused me to think of our time as the “robotic moment.” This does not mean that companionate robots are common among us; it refers to our state of emotional—and I would say philosophical—readiness. I find people willing to seriously consider robots not only as pets but as potential friends, confidants, and even romantic partners. We don’t seem to care what these artificial intelligences “know” or “understand” of the human moments we might “share” with them. At the robotic moment, the performance of connection seems connection enough. We are poised 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 10

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to attach to the inanimate without prejudice. The phrase “technological promis- cuity” comes to mind. As I listen for what stands behind this moment, I hear a certain fatigue with the difficulties of life with people. We insert robots into every narrative of human frailty. People make too many demands; robot demands would be of a more manageable sort. People disappoint; robots will not. When people talk about relationships with robots, they talk about cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, and children who take drugs. They talk about how hard it is to understand family and friends. I am at first surprised by these comments. Their clear intent is to bring people down a notch. A forty-four-year-old woman says, “After all, we never know how another person really feels. People put on a good face. Robots would be safer.” A thirty-year-old man remarks, “I’d rather talk to a robot. Friends can be exhausting. The robot will always be there for me. And whenever I’m done, I can walk away.” The idea of sociable robots suggests that we might navigate intimacy by skirt- ing it. People seem comforted by the belief that if we alienate or fail each other, robots will be there, programmed to provide simulations of love.9 Our population is aging; there will be robots to take care of us. Our children are neglected; robots will tend to them. We are too exhausted to deal with each other in ad- versity; robots will have the energy. Robots won’t be judgmental. We will be ac- commodated. An older woman says of her robot dog, “It is better than a real dog. . . . It won’t do dangerous things, and it won’t betray you. . . . Also, it won’t die suddenly and abandon you and make you very sad.”10 The elderly are the first to have companionate robots aggressively marketed to them, but young people also see the merits of robotic companionship. These days, teenagers have sexual adulthood thrust upon them before they are ready to deal with the complexities of relationships. They are drawn to the comfort of connection without the demands of intimacy. This may lead them to a hookup— sex without commitment or even caring. Or it may lead to an online romance— companionship that can always be interrupted. Not surprisingly, teenagers are drawn to love stories in which full intimacy cannot occur—here I think of current passions for films and novels about high school vampires who cannot sex- ually consummate relationships for fear of hurting those they love. And teenagers are drawn to the idea of technological communion. They talk easily of robots that would be safe and predictable companions.11 These young people have grown up with sociable robot pets, the companions of their playrooms, which portrayed emotion, said they cared, and asked to be 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 11

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cared for.12 We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture. So even simple artificial creatures can provoke heartfelt attachment. Many teenagers anticipate that the robot toys of their childhood will give way to full-fledged machine companions. In the psychoanalytic tradition, a symptom addresses a conflict but distracts us from understanding or resolving it; a dream expresses a wish.13 Sociable robots serve as both symptom and dream: as a symptom, they promise a way to sidestep conflicts about intimacy; as a dream, they express a wish for relationships with limits, a way to be both together and alone.14 Some people even talk about robots as providing respite from feeling overwhelmed by technology. In Japan, companionate robots are specifically marketed as a way to seduce people out of cyberspace; robots plant a new flag in the physical real. If the problem is that too much technology has made us busy and anxious, the solution will be another technology that will organize, amuse, and relax us. So, although historically robots provoked anxieties about technology out of control, these days they are more likely to represent the reassuring idea that in a world of problems, science will offer solutions.15 Robots have become a twenty-first-century deus ex machina. Putting hope in robots expresses an en- during technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right. In a complicated world, robots seem a simple salvation. It is like calling in the cavalry. But this is not a book about robots. Rather, it is about how we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to- avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 12

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half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind? The blurring of intimacy and solitude may reach its starkest expression when a robot is proposed as a romantic partner. But for most people it begins when one creates a profile on a social-networking site or builds a persona or avatar for a game or virtual world.16 Over time, such performances of identity may feel like identity itself. And this is where robotics and the networked life first inter- sect. For the performance of caring is all that robots, no matter how sociable, know how to do. I was enthusiastic about online worlds as “identity workshops” when they first appeared, and all of their possibilities remain.17 Creating an avatar—perhaps of a different age, a different gender, a different temperament—is a way to explore the self. But if you’re spending three, four, or five hours a day in an online game or virtual world (a time commitment that is not unusual), there’s got to be someplace you’re not. And that someplace you’re not is often with your family and friends—sitting around, playing Scrabble face-to-face, taking a walk, watch- ing a movie together in the old-fashioned way. And with performance can come disorientation. You might have begun your online life in a spirit of compensa- tion. If you were lonely and isolated, it seemed better than nothing. But online, you’re slim, rich, and buffed up, and you feel you have more opportunities than in the real world. So, here, too, better than nothing can become better than something—or better than anything. Not surprisingly, people report feeling let down when they move from the virtual to the real world. It is not uncommon to see people fidget with their smartphones, looking for virtual places where they might once again be more. Sociable robots and online life both suggest the possibility of relationships the way we want them. Just as we can program a made-to-measure robot, we can reinvent ourselves as comely avatars. We can write the Facebook profile that pleases us. We can edit our messages until they project the self we want to be. And we can keep things short and sweet. Our new media are well suited for ac- complishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other. An impatient high school senior says, “If you really need to reach me, just shoot me a text.” He sounds just like my 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 13

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colleagues on a consulting job, who tell me they would prefer to communicate with “real-time texts.” Our first embrace of sociable robotics (both the idea of it and its first exem- plars) is a window onto what we want from technology and what we are willing to do to accommodate it. From the perspective of our robotic dreams, networked life takes on a new cast. We imagine it as expansive. But we are just as fond of its constraints. We celebrate its “weak ties,” the bonds of acquaintance with people we may never meet. But that does not mean we prosper in them.18 We often find ourselves standing depleted in the hype. When people talk about the pleasures of these weak-tie relationships as “friction free,” they are usually referring to the kind of relationships you can have without leaving your desk. Technology ties us up as it promises to free us up. Connectivity technologies once promised to give us more time. But as the cell phone and smartphone eroded the boundaries between work and leisure, all the time in the world was not enough. Even when we are not “at work,” we experience ourselves as “on call”; pressed, we want to edit out complexity and “cut to the chase.”

CONNECTIVITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Online connections were ﬁrst conceived as a substitute for face-to-face contact, when the latter was for some reason impractical: Don’t have time to make a phone call? Shoot off a text message. But very quickly, the text message became the connection of choice. We discovered the network—the world of connectivity—to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections. Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will. A few years ago at a dinner party in Paris, I met Ellen, an ambitious, elegant young woman in her early thirties, thrilled to be working at her dream job in advertising. Once a week, she would call her grandmother in Philadelphia using Skype, an Internet service that functions as a telephone with a Web camera. Be- fore Skype, Ellen’s calls to her grandmother were costly and brief. With Skype, the calls are free and give the compelling sense that the other person is present—Skype is an almost real-time video link. Ellen could now call more fre- quently: “Twice a week and I stay on the call for an hour,” she told me. It should have been rewarding; instead, when I met her, Ellen was unhappy. She knew that her grandmother was unaware that Skype allows surreptitious multitasking. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 14

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Her grandmother could see Ellen’s face on the screen but not her hands. Ellen admitted to me, “I do my e-mail during the calls. I’m not really paying attention to our conversation.” Ellen’s multitasking removed her to another place. She felt her grandmother was talking to someone who was not really there. During their Skype conversations, Ellen and her grandmother were more connected than they had ever been before, but at the same time, each was alone. Ellen felt guilty and confused: she knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen, another task among multitasks. I have often observed this distinctive confusion: these days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart. I remember my own sense of disorientation the first time I realized that I was “alone together.” I had traveled an exhausting thirty-six hours to attend a conference on advanced robotic technology held in central Japan. The packed grand ballroom was Wi-Fi enabled: the speaker was using the Web for his presentation, laptops were open throughout the audience, fingers were flying, and there was a sense of great concentration and intensity. But not many in the audience were attending to the speaker. Most people seemed to be doing their e- mail, downloading files, and surfing the Net. The man next to me was searching for a New Yorker cartoon to illustrate his upcoming presentation. Every once in a while, audience members gave the speaker some attention, lowering their lap- top screens in a kind of curtsy, a gesture of courtesy. Outside, in the hallways, the people milling around me were looking past me to virtual others. They were on their laptops and their phones, connecting to colleagues at the conference going on around them and to others around the globe. There but not there. Of course, clusters of people chatted with each other, making dinner plans, “networking” in that old sense of the word, the one that implies having a coffee or sharing a meal. But at this conference, it was clear that what people mostly want from public space is to be alone with their personal networks. It is good to come together physically, but it is more important to stay tethered to our devices. I thought of how Sigmund Freud considered the power of communities both to shape and to subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun came to mind: “connectivity and its discontents.” The phrase comes back to me months later as I interview management con- sultants who seem to have lost touch with their best instincts for what makes them competitive. They complain about the BlackBerry revolution, yet accept it as inevitable while decrying it as corrosive. They say they used to talk to each other as 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 15

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they waited to give presentations or took taxis to the airport; now they spend that time doing e-mail. Some tell me they are making better use of their “downtime,” but they argue without conviction. The time that they once used to talk as they waited for appointments or drove to the airport was never downtime. It was the time when far-flung global teams solidified relationships and refined ideas. In corporations, among friends, and within academic departments, people readily admit that they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face-to-face. Some who say “I live my life on my BlackBerry” are forthright about avoiding the “real-time” commitment of a phone call. The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. I recently overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two women. “No one answers the phone in our house anymore,” the first woman proclaimed with some consternation. “It used to be that the kids would race to pick up the phone. Now they are up in their rooms, knowing no one is going to call them, and texting and going on Facebook or whatever instead.” Parents with teenage children will be nodding at this very familiar story in recognition and perhaps a sense of wonderment that this has happened, and so quickly. And teenagers will simply be saying, “Well, what’s your point?” A thirteen-year-old tells me she “hates the phone and never listens to voicemail.” Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay. A twenty-one-year-old college student reflects on the new balance: “I don’t use my phone for calls any more. I don’t have the time to just go on and on. I like texting, Twitter, looking at someone’s Facebook wall. I learn what I need to know.” Randy, twenty-seven, has a younger sister—a Goldilocks who got her dis- tances wrong. Randy is an American lawyer now working in California. His family lives in New York, and he flies to the East Coast to see them three or four times a year. When I meet Randy, his sister Nora, twenty-four, had just an- nounced her engagement and wedding date via e-mail to a list of friends and family. “That,” Randy says to me bitterly, “is how I got the news.” He doesn’t know if he is more angry or hurt. “It doesn’t feel right that she didn’t call,” he says. “I was getting ready for a trip home. Couldn’t she have told me then? She’s my sister, but I didn’t have a private moment when she told me in person. Or at least a call, just the two of us. When I told her I was upset, she sort of understood, but 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 16

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laughed and said that she and her fiancé just wanted to do things simply, as simply as possible. I feel very far away from her.” Nora did not mean to offend her brother. She saw e-mail as efficient and did not see beyond. We have long turned to technology to make us more efficient in work; now Nora illustrates how we want it to make us more efficient in our private lives. But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes. And with constant connection comes new anxieties of disconnection, a kind of panic. Even Randy, who longs for a phone call from Nora on such an important matter as her wedding, is never without his BlackBerry. He holds it in his hands during our entire conversation. Once, he puts it in his pocket. A few moments later, it comes out, fingered like a talisman. In interviews with young and old, I find people genuinely terrified of being cut off from the “grid.” People say that the loss of a cell phone can “feel like a death.” One television producer in her mid-forties tells me that without her smartphone, “I felt like I had lost my mind.” Whether or not our devices are in use, without them we feel disconnected, adrift. A danger even to ourselves, we insist on our right to send text messages while driving our cars and object to rules that would limit the practice.19 Only a decade ago, I would have been mystified that fifteen-year-olds in my urban neighborhood, a neighborhood of parks and shopping malls, of front stoops and coffee shops, would feel the need to send and receive close to six thousand messages a month via portable digital devices or that best friends would assume that when they visited, it would usually be on the virtual real es- tate of Facebook.20 It might have seemed intrusive, if not illegal, that my mobile phone would tell me the location of all my acquaintances within a ten-mile ra- dius.21 But these days we are accustomed to all this. Life in a media bubble has come to seem natural. So has the end of a certain public etiquette: on the street, we speak into the invisible microphones on our mobile phones and appear to be talking to ourselves. We share intimacies with the air as though unconcerned about who can hear us or the details of our physical surroundings. I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of mind. Now the metaphor no longer goes far enough. Our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology. Teenagers tell me they sleep with their cell phone, and even when it isn’t on their person, when it has been banished to the school locker, for instance, they 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 17

Introduction: Alone Together 17

know when their phone is vibrating. The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities. They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated. They become confused about companionship. Can they find it in their lives on the screen? Could they find it with a robot? Their digitized friendships—played out with emoticon emotions, so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection—may prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that could bring superficiality to a higher power, that is, for relationships with the inanimate. They come to accept lower expectations for connection and, finally, the idea that robot friendships could be sufficient unto the day. Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself. We come to see what robots offer as relationship. The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm. Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? Many roboticists are enthusiastic about having robots tend to our children and our aging parents, for instance. Are these psychologically, socially, and ethically acceptable propositions? What are our responsibilities here? And are we comfortable with virtual environments that propose themselves not as places for recreation but as new worlds to live in? What do we have, now that we have what we say we want—now that we have what technology makes easy?22 This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists.

ROMANCING THE MACHINE: TWO STORIES I tell two stories in Alone Together: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all. I do not tell tomorrow’s story to 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 18

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predict an exotic future. Rather, as a dream in development, sociable robots cast new light on our current circumstances. Our willingness to consider their company says a lot about the dissatisfactions we feel in our networked lives today. Part One, “The Robotic Moment,” moves from the sociable robots in children’s playrooms to the more advanced ones in the laboratory and those being developed and deployed for elder care. As the robots become more complex, the intensity of our relationships to them ramps up. I begin my story with a kind of prehistory, going back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the introduction of the first animated, interactive computer toys into children’s lives. It was a time of curiosity about the nature of these new machines. These first computational objects of the playroom provoked a change in children’s way of sorting out the question of aliveness. Decisions about whether something was alive would no longer turn on how something moved but on what it knew: physics gave way to psychology. This set the stage for how in the late 1990s, the ground would shift again when children met sociable robots that asked for care. Unlike traditional dolls, the robots wouldn’t thrive without attention, and they let you know how you were doing. But even the most primitive of these objects—Tamagotchis and Furbies—made children’s evaluation of aliveness less about cognition than about an object’s seeming potential for mutual affection. If something asks for your care, you don’t want to analyze it but take it “at interface value.” It becomes “alive enough” for relationship. And with this, the heightened expectations begin. Now—for adults and children—robots are not seen as machines but as “creatures,” and then, for most people, the quotation marks are dropped. Curiosity gives way to a desire to care, to nurture. From there, we look toward companionship and more. So, for example, when sociable robots are given to the elderly, it is with the suggestion that robots will cure the troubles of their time of life. We go from curiosity to a search for communion. In the company of the robotic, people are alone, yet feel connected: in solitude, new intimacies. Part Two, “Networked,” turns to the online life as it reshapes the self. I acknowledge the many positive things that the network has to offer—enhancing friendship, family connections, education, commerce, and recreation. The triumphalist narrative of the Web is the reassuring story that people want to hear and that technologists want to tell. But the heroic story is not the whole story. In virtual words and computer games, people are flattened into personae. On social networks, people are reduced to their profiles. On our mobile devices, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/11/10 12:09 PM Page 19

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we often talk to each other on the move and with little disposable time—so little, in fact, that we communicate in a new language of abbreviation in which letters stand for words and emoticons for feelings. We don’t ask the open ended “How are you?” Instead, we ask the more limited “Where are you?” and “What’s up?” These are good questions for getting someone’s location and making a simple plan. They are not so good for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling. We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone: in intimacy, new solitudes. In the conclusion, I bring my stories together. Relationships with robots are ramping up; relationships with people are ramping down. What road are we travelling? Technology presents itself as a one-way street; we are likely to dismiss discontents about its direction because we read them as growing out of nostalgia or a Luddite impulse or as simply in vain. But when we ask what we “miss,” we may discover what we care about, what we believe to be worth protecting. We prepare ourselves not necessarily to reject technology but to shape it in ways that honor what we hold dear. Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.”23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?— a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reﬂect on our values and direction. I intend Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity.

I turn now to the story of the robotic moment. It must begin with objects of the playroom because it is there that a generation was introduced to the idea that machines might be partners in mutual affection. But my story is not about child’s play. We are on the verge of seeking the company and counsel of sociable robots as a natural part of life. Before we cross this threshold, we should ask why we are doing so. It is one thing to design a robot for an instrumental purpose: to search for explosives in a war zone or, in a more homely register, to vacuum ﬂoors and wash dishes. But the robots in this book are designed to be with us. As some of the children ask, we must ask, Why do people no longer suffice? What are we thinking about when we are thinking about robots? We are thinking about the meaning of being alive, about the nature of attachment, about what makes a person. And then, more generally, we are rethinking, What is a relationship? We reconsider intimacy and authenticity. What are we willing to 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page 20

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give up when we turn to robots rather than humans? To ask these questions is not to put robots down or deny that they are engineering marvels; it is only to put them in their place. In the 1960s through the 1980s, debates about artiﬁcial intelligence centered on the question of whether machines could “really” be intelligent. These dis- cussions were about the objects themselves, what they could and could not do. Our new encounters with sociable robots—encounters that began in the past decade with the introduction of simple robot toys into children’s playrooms— provoke responses that are not about these machines’ capabilities but our vulnerabilities. As we will see, when we are asked to care for an object, when an object thrives under our care, we experience that object as intelligent, but, more importantly, we feel ourselves to be in a relationship with it. The attachments I describe do not follow from whether computational objects really have emotion or intelligence, because they do not. The attachments follow from what they evoke in their users. Our new objects don’t so much “fool us” into thinking they are communicating with us; roboticists have learned those few triggers that help us fool ourselves. We don’t need much. We are ready to enter the romance. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 279

CONCLUSION

necessary conversations

uring my earliest days at MIT, I met the idea (at that time altogether novel d to me) that part of my job would be to think of ways to keep technology busy. In the fall of 1978, Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Com- puter Science, held a two-day retreat at MIT’s Endicott House on the future of personal computers, at the time widely called “home computers.” It was clear that “everyday people,” as Dertouzos put it, would soon be able to have their own computers. The first of these—the first that could be bought and didn’t have to be built—were just coming on the market. But what could people do with them? There was technological potential, but it needed to be put to work. Some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world—such pioneers of information processing and artificial intelligence as Robert Fano, J. C. R. Lick- leider, Marvin Minsky, and Seymour Papert—were asked to brainstorm on the question. My notes from this meeting show suggestions on tax preparation and teaching children to program. No one thought that anyone except academics would really want to write on computers. Several people suggested a calendar; others thought that was a dumb idea. There would be games. Now we know that once computers connected us to each other, once we became tethered to the network, we really didn’t need to keep computers busy. They keep us busy. It is as though we have become their killer app. As a friend of mine put it in a moment of pique, “We don’t do our e-mail; our e-mail does

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us.” We talk about “spending” hours on e-mail, but we, too, are being spent. Niels Bohr suggests that the opposite of a “deep truth” is a truth no less profound.1 As we contemplate online life, it helps to keep this in mind. Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in new reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it that the Web “knows” us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially. We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be put “on hold” if better ones come along. Indeed, new encounters need not be better to get our attention. We are wired to respond positively to their simply being new. We can work from home, but our work bleeds into our private lives until we can barely discern the boundaries between them. We like being able to reach each other almost instantaneously but have to hide our phones to force ourselves to take a quiet moment. Overwhelmed by the pace that technology makes possible, we think about how new, more efficient technologies might help dig us out. But new devices encourage ever-greater volume and velocity. In this escalation of demands, one of the things that comes to feel safe is using technology to connect to people at a distance, or more precisely, to a lot of people from a distance. But even a lot of people from a distance can turn out to be not enough people at all. We brag about how many we have “friended” on Facebook, yet Americans say they have fewer friends than before.2 When asked in whom they can confide and to whom they turn in an emergency, more and more say that their only resource is their family. The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in “real time.” When we misplace our mobile devices, we become anxious—impossible really. We have heard teenagers insist that even when their cell phones are not on their person, they can feel them vibrate. “I know when I’m being called,” says a sixteen-year-old. “I just do.” Sentiments of dependency echo across generations. “I never am without my cell phone,” says a fifty-two- year-old father. “It is my protection.” In the evening, when sensibilities such as these come together, they are likely to form what have been called “postfamilial families.”3 Their members are alone 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 281

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together, each in their own rooms, each on a networked computer or mobile device. We go online because we are busy but end up spending more time with technology and less with each other. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other. At the limit, we will settle for the inanimate, if that’s what it takes. Bohr’s dictum is equally true in the area of sociable robotics, where things are no less tangled. Roboticists insist that robotic emotions are made up of the same ultimate particles as human ones (because mind is ultimately made of matter), but it is also true that robots’ claims to emotion derive from programs designed to get an emotional rise out of us.4 Roboticists present, as though it were a first principle, the idea that as our population ages, we simply won’t have enough people to take care of our human needs, and so, as a companion, a sociable robot is “better than nothing.” But what are our first principles? We know that we warm to machines when they seem to show interest in us, when their affordances speak to our vulnerabilities. But we don’t have to say yes to everything that speaks to us in this way. Even if, as adults, we are intrigued by the idea that a sociable robot will distract our aging parents, our children ask, “Don’t we have people for these jobs?” We should attend to their hesitations. Sorting all this out will not be easy. But we are at a crossroads—at a time and place to initiate new conversations. As I was working on this book, I discussed its themes with a former colleague, Richard, who has been left severely disabled by an automobile accident. He is now confined to a wheelchair in his home and needs nearly full-time nursing care. Richard is interested in robots being developed to provide practical help and companionship to people in his situation, but his reaction to the idea is complex. He begins by saying, “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,” but then he makes the best possible case for robotic helpers when he turns the conversation to human cruelty. “Some of the aides and nurses at the rehab center hurt you because they are unskilled, and some hurt you because they mean to. I had both. One of them, she pulled me by the hair. One dragged me by my tubes. A robot would never do that,” he says. And then he adds, “But you know, in the end, that person who dragged me by my tubes had a story. I could find out about it. She had a story.” For Richard, being with a person, even an unpleasant, sadistic person, makes him feel that he is still alive. It signifies that his way of being in the world has a certain dignity, even if his activities are radically curtailed. For him, dignity 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 282

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requires a feeling of authenticity, a sense of being connected to the human narrative. It helps sustain him. Although he would not want his life endangered, he prefers the sadist to the robot. Richard’s perspective is a cautionary tale to those who would speak in too- simple terms of purely technical benchmarks for human and machine interactions. We animate robotic creatures by projecting meaning onto them and are thus tempted to speak of their emotions and even their “authenticity.” We can do this if we focus on the feelings that robots evoke in us. But too often the unasked question is, What does the robot feel? We know what the robot cannot feel: it cannot feel human empathy or the ﬂow of human connection. Indeed, the robot can feel nothing at all. Do we care? Or does the performance of feeling now suffice? Why would we want to be in conversation with machines that cannot understand or care for us? The question was ﬁrst raised for me by the ELIZA computer program.5 What made ELIZA a valued interlocutor? What matters were so private that they could only be discussed with a machine? Over years and with some reluctance, I came to understand that ELIZA’s pop- ularity revealed more than people’s willingness to talk to machines; it revealed their reluctance to talk to other people.6 The idea of an attentive machine provides the fantasy that we may escape from each other. When we say we look forward to computer judges, counselors, teachers, and pastors, we comment on our disappointments with people who have not cared or who have treated us with bias or even abuse. These disappointments begin to make a machine’s performance of caring seem like caring enough. We are willing to put aside a program’s lack of understanding and, indeed, to work to make it seem to understand more than it does—all to create the fantasy that there is an alternative to people. This is the deeper “ELIZA effect.” Trust in ELIZA does not speak to what we think ELIZA will understand but to our lack of trust in the people who might understand. Kevin Kelly asks, “What does technology want?” and insists that, whatever it is, technology is going to get it. Accepting his premise, what if one of the things technology wants is to exploit our disappointments and emotional vulnerabilities? When this is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom.

SYMPTOMS AND DREAMS Wary of each other, the idea of a robot companion brings a sense of control, of welcome substitution. We allow ourselves to be comforted by unrequited love, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 283

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for there is no robot that can ever love us back. That same wariness marks our networked lives. There, too, we are vulnerable to a desire to control our connections, to titrate our level of availability. Things progress quickly. A lawyer says sensibly, “I can’t make it to a client meeting; I’ll send notes by e-mail instead.” Five steps later, colleagues who work on the same corridor no longer want to see or even telephone each other and explain that “texts are more efficient” or “I’ll post something on Facebook.” As we live the ﬂowering of connectivity culture, we dream of sociable robots.7 Lonely despite our connections, we send ourselves a technological Valentine. If online life is harsh and judgmental, the robot will always be on our side. The idea of a robot companion serves as both symptom and dream. Like all psycho- logical symptoms, it obscures a problem by “solving” it without addressing it. The robot will provide companionship and mask our fears of too-risky intimacies. As dream, robots reveal our wish for relationships we can control. A symptom carries knowledge that a person fears would be too much to bear. To do its job, a symptom disguises this knowledge so it doesn’t have to be faced day to day.8 So, it is “easier” to feel constantly hungry than to acknowledge that your mother did not nurture you. It is “easier” to be enraged by a long super- market line than to deal with the feeling that your spouse is not giving you the attention you crave. When technology is a symptom, it disconnects us from our real struggles. In treatment, symptoms disappear because they become irrelevant. Patients become more interested in looking at what symptoms hide—the ordinary thoughts and experiences of which they are the strangulated expression. So when we look at technology as symptom and dream, we shift our attention away from technology and onto ourselves. As Henry David Thoreau might ask, “Where do we live, and what do we live for?” Kelly writes of technophilia as our natural state: we love our objects and follow where they lead.9 I would reframe his insight: we love our objects, but enchantment comes with a price. The psychoanalytic tradition teaches that all creativity has a cost, a caution that applies to psychoanalysis itself.10 For psychoanalyst Robert Caper, “The transgression in the analytic enterprise is not that we try to make things better; the transgression is that we don’t allow ourselves to see its costs and limitations.”11 To make his point Caper revisits the story of Oedipus. As his story is traditionally understood, Oedipus is punished for seeking knowledge—in particular, the knowledge of his parentage. Caper suggests he is punished for something else: his refusal to recognize the limitations of knowledge. A parallel with technology 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 284

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is clear: we transgress not because we try to build the new but because we don’t allow ourselves to consider what it disrupts or diminishes. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. A successful analysis disturbs the field in the interest of long-term gain; it learns to repair along the way.12 One moves forward in a chastened, self-reflective spirit. Acknowledging limits, stopping to make the corrections, doubling back—these are at the heart of the ethic of psychoanalysis. A similar approach to technology frees us from unbending narratives of technological optimism or despair. Consider how it would modulate Kelly’s argument about technophilia. Kelly refers to Henry Adams, who in 1900 had a moment of rapture when he first set eyes on forty-foot dynamos. Adams saw them as “symbols of infinity, objects that projected a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross.”13 Kelly believes that Adams’s desire to be at one with the dynamo foreshadows how Kelly now feels about the Web. As we have seen, Kelly wants to merge with the Web, to find its “lovely surrender.” Kelly continues,

I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast bene- factor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields up my de- sires, like a lover. . . . I want to remain submerged in its bottomless abundance. To stay. To be wrapped in its dreamy embrace. Surrendering to the web is like going on aboriginal walkabout. The comforting illogic of dreams reigns. In dreamtime you jump from one page, one thought, to another. . . . The net’s daydreams have touched my own, and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can’t give you directions to a stranger’s house, why can’t you love the web?14

Kelly has a view of connectivity as something that may assuage our deepest fears—of loneliness, loss, and death. This is the rapture. But connectivity also disrupts our attachments to things that have always sustained us—for example, the value we put on face-to-face human connection. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the comedy and tragedy in the arc of human life, can help keep us focused on the speciﬁcity of human conversation. Kelly is enthralled by the Web’s promise of limitless knowledge, its “bottomless abundance.” But the Oedi- pal story reminds us that rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences. Oedipus is also a story about the difference between getting what you want and getting what you think you want. Technology gives us more and more of 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 285

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what we think we want. These days, looking at sociable robots and digitized friends, one might assume that what we want is to be always in touch and never alone, no matter who or what we are in touch with. One might assume that what we want is a preponderance of weak ties, the informal networks that underpin online acquaintanceship. But if we pay attention to the real consequences of what we think we want, we may discover what we really want. We may want some stillness and solitude. As Thoreau put it, we may want to live less “thickly” and wait for more infrequent but meaningful face-to-face encounters. As we put in our many hours of typing—with all fingers or just thumbs—we may discover that we miss the human voice. We may decide that it is fine to play chess with a robot, but that robots are unfit for any conversation about family or friends. A robot might have needs, but to understand desire, one needs language and flesh. We may decide that for these conversations, we must have a person who knows, firsthand, what it means to be born, to have parents and a family, to wish for adult love and perhaps children, and to anticipate death. And, of course, no matter how much “wilderness” Kelly finds on the Web, we are not in a position to let the virtual take us away from our stewardship of nature, the nature that doesn’t go away with a power outage. We let things get away from us. Even now, we are emotionally dependent on online friends and intrigued by robots that, their designers claim, are almost ready to love us.15 And brave Kevin Kelly says what others are too timid to admit: he is in love with the Web itself. It has become something both erotic and ide- alized. What are we missing in our lives together that leads us to prefer lives alone together? As I have said, every new technology challenges us, generation after generation, to ask whether it serves our human purposes, something that causes us to reconsider what they are. In a design seminar, master architect Louis Kahn once asked, “What does a brick want?”16 In that spirit, if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants—it demands—immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands immersion but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betray- als that prepare us for life with the robotic. But being prepared does not mean that we need to take the next step. Sociable robotics puts science into the game of intimacy and the most sensitive moments of children’s development. There is no one to tell science what it cannot do, but 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 286

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here one wishes for a referee. Things start innocently: neuroscientists want to study attachment. But things end reductively, with claims that a robot “knows” how to form attachments because it has the algorithms. The dream of today’s roboticists is no less than to reverse engineer love. Are we indifferent to whether we are loved by robots or by our own kind? In Philip K. Dick’s classic science fiction story “Do Androids Dream of Elec- tric Sheep” (which most people know through its film adaptation, Blade Run- ner), loving and being loved by a robot seems a good thing. The film’s hero, Deckard, is a professional robot hunter in a world where humans and robots look and sound alike. He falls in love with Rachel, an android programmed with human memories and the knowledge that she will “die.” I have argued that knowledge of mortality and an experience of the life cycle are what make us uniquely human. This brilliant story asks whether the simulation of these things will suffice. By the end of the film, we are left to wonder whether Deckard himself may be an android but unaware of his identity. Unable to resolve this question, we cheer for Deckard and Rachel as they escape to whatever time they have remain- ing—in other words, to the human condition. Decades after the film’s release, we are still nowhere near developing its androids. But to me, the message of Blade Runner speaks to our current circumstance: long before we have devices that can pass any version of the Turing test, the test will seem beside the point. We will not care if our machines are clever but whether they love us. Indeed, roboticists want us to know that the point of affective machines is that they will take care of us. This narrative—that we are on our way to being tended by “caring” machines—is now cited as conventional wisdom. We have entered a realm in which conventional wisdom, always inadequate, is danger- ously inadequate. That it has become so commonplace reveals our willingness to take the performance of emotion as emotion enough.

EMOTION ENOUGH When roboticists argue that robots can develop emotions, they begin by assert- ing the material basis of all thought and take things from there. For example, Rodney Brooks says that a robot could be given a feeling like “sadness” by setting “a number in its computer code.” This sadness, for Brooks, would be akin to that felt by humans, for “isn’t humans’ level of sadness basically a number, too, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 287

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just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?”17 Given my training as a clinician, I tend to object to the relevance of a robot’s “numbers” for thinking about emotion because of something humans have that robots don’t: a human body and a human life. Living in our bodies sets our human “numbers.” Our emotions are tied to a developmental path—from childhood dependence to greater independence—and we experience the traces of our earlier dependencies in later fantasies, wishes, and fears. Brooks speaks of giving the robot the emotion of “sadness.” In a few months, I will send my daughter off to college. I’m both sad and thrilled. How would a robot “feel” such things? Why would its “numbers” even “want” to? Cynthia Breazeal, one of Brooks’s former students, takes another tack, arguing that robotic emotions are valid if you take care to consider them as a new category. Cats have cat emotions, and dogs have dog emotions. These dif- fer from each other and from human emotions. We have no problem, says Breazeal, seeing all of these as “genuine” and “authentic.” And now, robots will have robot emotions, also in their own category and likewise “genuine” and “authentic.” For Breazeal, once you give robotic emotions their own category, there is no need to compare. We should respect emotional robots as “different,” just as we respect all diversity.18 But this argument confuses the authentic with the sui generis. That the robotic performance of emotion might exist in its own category implies nothing about the authenticity of the emotions being per- formed. And robots do not “have” emotions that we must respect. We build robots to do things that make us feel as though they have emotions. Our responses are their design template. Whether one debates the question of robotic emotions in terms of material- ism or category, we end up in a quandary. Instead of asking whether a robot has emotions, which in the end boils down to how different constituencies define emotion, we should be asking what kind of relationships we want to have with machines. Why do we want robots to perform emotion? I began my career at MIT arguing with Joseph Weizenbaum about whether a computer program might be a valuable dialogue partner. Thirty years later, I find myself debating those who argue, with David Levy, that my daughter might want to marry one.19 Simulation is often justified as practice for real-life skills—to become a better pilot, sailor, or race-car driver. But when it comes to human relations, simulation gets us into trouble. Online, in virtual places, simulation turns us into its 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 288

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creatures. But when we step out of our online lives, we may feel suddenly as though in too-bright light. Hank, a law professor in his late thirties, is on the Net for at least twelve hours a day. Stepping out of a computer game is disori- enting, but so is stepping out of his e-mail. Leaving the bubble, Hank says, “makes the flat time with my family harder. Like it’s taking place in slow motion. I’m short with them.” After dinner with his family, Hank is grateful to return to the cool shade of his online life. Nothing in real life with real people vaguely resembles the environment (con- trolled yet with always-something-new connections) that Hank finds on the Net. Think of what is implied by his phrase “flat time.” Real people have consis- tency, so if things are going well in our relationships, change is gradual, worked through slowly. In online life, the pace of relationships speeds up. One quickly moves from infatuation to disillusionment and back. And the moment one grows even slightly bored, there is easy access to someone new. One races through e-mail and learns to attend to the “highlights.” Subject lines are exag- gerated to get attention. In online games, the action often reduces to a pattern of moving from scary to safe and back again. A frightening encounter presents itself. It is dealt with. You regroup, and then there is another. The adrenaline rush is continual; there is no “flat time.” Sometimes people try to make life with others resemble simulation. They try to heighten real-life drama or control those around them. It would be fair to say that such efforts do not often end well. Then, in failure, many are tempted to return to what they do well: living their lives on the screen. If there is an addiction here, it is not to a technology. It is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice. Online, we can lose confidence that we are communicating or cared for. Con- fused, we may seek solace in even more connection. We may become intolerant of our own company: “I never travel without my BlackBerry,” says a fifty-year- old management consultant. She cannot quiet her mind without having things on her mind. 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.20 To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely. In raising a daughter in the digital age, I have thought of this very often. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 289

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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.21 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.” These new practices bear a family resemblance to what I have described as the romantic reaction of the 1980s. Then, people declared that something about their human nature made them unlike any machine (“simulated feeling may be feeling; simulated love is never love”). These days, under the tutelage of imaging technology and neurochemistry, people seem willing to grant their own machine natures. What they rebel against is how we have responded to the affordances of the networked life. Offered continual connectivity, we have said yes. Offered an opportunity to abandon our privacy, so far we have not resisted. And now comes the challenge of a new “species”—sociable robots—whose “emotions” are designed to make us comfortable with them. What are we going to say? The romantic reaction of the 1980s made a statement about computation as a model of mind; today we struggle with who we have become in the presence of computers. In the 1980s, it was enough to change the way you saw yourself. These days, it is a question of how you live your life. The first manifestations of today’s “push back” are tentative experiments to do without the Net. But the Net has become intrinsic to getting an education, getting the news, and getting a job. So, today’s second thoughts will require that we actively reshape our lives on the screen. Finding a new balance will be more than a matter of “slowing down.” How can we make room for reflection?

QUANDARIES In arguing for “caring machines,” roboticists often make their case by putting things in terms of quandaries. So, they ask, “Do you want your parents and grandparents cared for by robots, or would you rather they not be cared for at all?” And alternatively, “Do you want seniors lonely and bored, or do you want them engaged with a robotic companion?”22 The forced choice of a quandary, posed over time, threatens to become no quandary at all because we come to accept its framing—in this case, the idea that there is only one choice, between robotic caregivers and loneliness. The widespread use of this particular 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 290

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quandary makes those uncomfortable with robotic companions out to be people who would consign an elderly population to boredom, isolation, and neglect. 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.23 This is what the children in Miss Grant’s fifth-grade class did. Caught up in a “for or against” discussion about robot caregivers, they turned away from the dilemma to ask a question (“Don’t we have people for these jobs?”) that could open up a different conversation. While the children only began that conversation, we, as adults, know where it might go. What about bringing in some new people? What must be done to get them where they are needed? How can we revisit social priorities so that funds are made available? We have the unemployed, the retired, and those currently at war—some of these might be available if there were money to pay them. One place to start would be to elevate elder care above the minimum-wage job that it usually is, often without benefits. The “robots-or- no-one” quandary takes social and political choice out of the picture when it belongs at the center of the picture. I experienced a moment of reframing during a seminar at MIT that took the role of robots in medicine as its focus. My class considered a robot that could help turn weak or paralyzed patients in their beds for bathing. A robot now on the market is designed as a kind of double spatula: one plate slides under the patient; another is placed on top. The head is supported, and the patient is flipped. The class responded to this technology as though it suggested a dilemma: machines for the elderly or not. So some students insisted that it is inevitable for robots to take over nursing roles (they cited cost, efficiency, and the insufficient numbers of people who want to take the job). Others countered that the elderly deserve the human touch and that anything else is demeaning. The conversation argued absolutes: the inevitable versus the unsupportable. Into this stalled debate came the voice of a woman in her late twenties whose mother had recently died. She did not buy into the terms of the discussion. Why limit our conversation to no robot or a robotic flipper? Why not imagine a machine that is an extension of the body of one human trying to care lovingly for another? Why not build robotic arms, supported by hydraulic power, into which people could slip their own arms, enhancing their strength? The problem as offered presented her with two unacceptable images: an autonomous machine or a neglected patient. She wanted to have a conversation about how she might have used technology as prosthesis. Had her arms been made stronger, she 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 291

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might have been able to lift her mother when she was ill. She would have wel- comed such help. It might have made it possible for her to keep her mother at home during her last weeks. A change of frame embraces technology even as it provides a mother with a daughter’s touch. In the spirit of “break the frame and see something new,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges quandary thinking:

The options are given in the description of the situation. We can call this the package problem. In the real world, situations are not bundled together with options. In the real world, the act of framing—the act of describing a situation, and thus of determining that there’s a decision to be made— is itself a moral task. It’s often the moral task. Learning how to recognize what is and isn’t an option is part of our ethical development. . . . In life, the challenge is not so much to ﬁgure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to ﬁgure out what game you’re playing.24

For Appiah, moral reasoning is best accomplished not by responding to quandaries but by questioning how they are posed, continually reminding ourselves that we are the ones choosing how to frame things.

FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENTS When the ﬁfth graders considered robot companions for their grandparents and wondered, “Don’t we have people for these jobs?” they knew they were asking, “Isn’t ‘taking care’ our parents’ job?” And by extension, “Are there people to take care of us if we become ‘inconvenient’?” When we consider the robots in our futures, we think through our responsibilities to each other. Why do we want robots to care for us? I understand the virtues of partnership with a robot in war, space, and medicine. I understand that robots are useful in dangerous working conditions. But why are we so keen on “caring”?25 To me, it seems transgressive, a “forbidden experiment.”26 Not everyone sees it this way. Some people consider the development of caring machines as simple common sense. Porter, sixty, recently lost his wife after a long illness. He thinks that if robotic helpers “had been able to do the grunt work, there might have been more time for human nurses to take care of the more personal and emotional things.” But often, relationships hinge on these 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 292

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investments of time. We know that the time we spend caring for children, doing the most basic things for them, lays down a crucial substrate.27 On this ground, children become confident that they are loved no matter what. And we who care for them become confirmed in our capacity to love and care. The ill and the elderly also deserve to be confirmed in this same sense of basic trust. As we provide it, we become more fully human. The most common justification for the delegation of care to robots focuses on things being “equal” for the person receiving care. This argument is most often used by those who feel that robots are appropriate for people with de- mentia, who will not “know the difference” between a person and a robot. But we do not really know how impaired people receive the human voice, face, and touch. Providing substitutes for human care may not be “equal” in the least. And again, delegating what was once love’s labor changes the person who del- egates. When we lose the “burden” of care, we begin to give up on our compact that human beings will care for other human beings. The daughter who wishes for hydraulic arms to lift her bedridden mother wants to keep her close. For the daughter, this last time of caring is among the most important she and her mother will share. If we divest ourselves of such things, we risk being coars- ened, reduced. And once you have elder bots and nurse bots, why not nanny bots? Why would we want a robot as a companion for a child? The relationship of a child to a sociable robot is, as I’ve said, very different from that of a child to a doll. Children do not try to model themselves on their dolls’ expressions. A child projects human expression onto a doll. But a robot babysitter, already envisaged, might seem close enough to human that a child might use it as a model. This raises grave questions. Human beings are capable of infinite combinations of vocal inflection and facial expression. It is from other people that we learn how to listen and bend to each other in conversation. Our eyes “light up” with interest and “darken” with passion or anxiety. We recognize, and are most comfortable with, other people who exhibit this fluidity. We recognize, and are less comfortable with, people—with autism or Asperger’s syndrome—who do not exhibit it. The developmental implications of children taking robots as models are un- known, potentially disastrous. Humans need to be surrounded by human touch, faces, and voices. Humans need to be brought up by humans. Sometimes when I make this point, others counter that even so, robots might do the “simpler” jobs for children, such as feeding them and changing their diapers. But children fed their string beans by a robot will not associate food with 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 293

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human companionship, talk, and relaxation. Eating will become dissociated from emotional nurturance. Children whose diapers are changed by robots will not feel that their bodies are dear to other human beings. Why are we willing to consider such risks?28 Some would say that we have already completed a forbidden experiment, using ourselves as subjects with no controls, and the unhappy findings are in: we are connected as we’ve never been connected before, and we seem to have damaged ourselves in the process. A 2010 analysis of data from over fourteen thousand college students over the past thirty years shows that since the year 2000, young people have reported a dramatic decline in interest in other people. Today’s college students are, for example, far less likely to say that it is valuable to try to put oneself in the place of others or to try to understand their feelings.29 The authors of this study associate students’ lack of empathy with the availability of online games and social networking. An online connection can be deeply felt, but you only need to deal with the part of the person you see in your game world or social network. Young people don’t seem to feel they need to deal with more, and over time they lose the inclination. One might say that absorbed in those they have “friended,” children lose interest in friendship. These findings confirm the impressions of those psychotherapists—psychi- atrists, psychologists, and social workers—who talk to me about the increasing numbers of patients who present in the consulting room as detached from their bodies and seem close to unaware of the most basic courtesies. Purpose-driven, plugged into their media, these patients pay little attention to those around them. In others, they seek what is of use, an echo of that primitive world of “parts.” Their detachment is not aggressive. It is as though they just don’t see the point.30

EARLY DAYS It is, of course, tempting to talk about all of this in terms of addiction. Adam, who started out playing computer games with people and ends up feeling compelled by a world of bots, certainly uses this language. The addiction metaphor ﬁts a common experience: the more time spent online, the more one wants to spend time online. But however apt the metaphor, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. Talking about addiction subverts our best thinking because it suggests that if there are problems, there is only one solution. To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance. But we are not going to “get rid” of the Internet. 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 294

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We will not go “cold turkey” or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to television as the family hearth. I believe we will find new paths toward each other, but considering ourselves victims of a bad substance is not a good first step. The idea of addiction, with its one solution that we know we won’t take, makes us feel hopeless. We have to find a way to live with seductive technology and make it work to our purposes. This is hard and will take work. Simple love of technology is not going to help. Nor is a Luddite impulse. What I call realtechnik suggests that we step back and reassess when we hear triumphalist or apocalyptic narratives about how to live with technology. Real- technik 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. I have said that this way of envisaging our lives with technology is close to the ethic of psychoanalysis. Old-fashioned perhaps, but our times have brought us back to such homilies. Because we grew up with the Net, we assume that the Net is grown-up. We tend to see it as a technology in its maturity. But in fact, we are in early days. There is time to make the corrections. It is, above all, the young who need to be convinced that when it comes to our networked life, we are still at the beginning of things. I am cautiously optimistic. We have seen young people try to reclaim personal privacy and each other’s attention. They crave things as simple as telephone calls made, as one eighteen-year-old puts it, “sitting down and giving each other full attention.” Today’s young people have a special vulnerability: although always connected, they feel deprived of attention. Some, as children, were pushed on swings while their parents spoke on cell phones.31 Now, these same parents do their e-mail at the dinner table. Some teenagers coolly compare a dedicated robot with a parent talking to them while doing e-mail, and parents do not always come out ahead. One seventeen-year-old boy says, “A robot would remember everything I said. It might not understand everything, but remem- bering is a first step. My father, talking to me while on his BlackBerry, he doesn’t know what I said, so it is not much use that if he did know, he might understand.” The networked culture is very young. Attendants at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or dis- 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 295

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parage technology. We need to put it in its place. The generation that has grown up with the Net is in a good position to do this, but these young people need help. So as they begin to fight for their right to privacy, we must be their partners. We know how easily information can be politically abused; we have the perspective of history. We have, perhaps, not shared enough about that history with our children. And as we, ourselves enchanted, turned away from them to lose ourselves in our e-mail, we did not sufficiently teach the importance of empathy and attention to what is real. The narrative of Alone Together describes an arc: we expect more from technology and less from each other. This puts us at the still center of a perfect storm. Overwhelmed, we have been drawn to connections that seem low risk and always at hand: Facebook friends, avatars, IRC chat partners. If convenience and control continue to be our priorities, we shall be tempted by sociable robots, where, like gamblers at their slot machines, we are promised excitement programmed in, just enough to keep us in the game. At the robotic moment, we have to be concerned that the simplification and reduction of relationship is no longer something we complain about. It may become what we expect, even desire. In this book I have referred to our vulnerabilities rather than our needs. Needs imply that we must have something. The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less vulnerable, more evolved. We are not stuck. To move forward together—as generations together— we are called upon to embrace the complexity of our situation. We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to dimin- ish us. The prospect of loving, or being loved by, a machine changes what love can be. We know that the young are tempted. They have been brought up to be. Those who have known lifetimes of love can surely offer them more. When we are at our best, thinking about technology brings us back to questions about what really matters. When I recently travelled to a memorial service for a close friend, the program, on heavy cream-colored card stock, listed the afternoon’s speakers, told who would play what music, and displayed photo- graphs of my friend as a young woman and in her prime. Several around me used the program’s stiff, protective wings to hide their cell phones as they sent text messages during the service. One of the texting mourners, a woman in her late sixties, came over to chat with me after the service. Matter-of-factly, she offered, “I couldn’t stand to sit that long without getting on my phone.” The point of the service was to take a moment. This woman had been schooled by a technology she’d had for less than a decade to find this close to impossible.32 Later, 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:25 PM Page 296

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I discussed the texting with some close friends. Several shrugged. One said, “What are you going to do?” A shrug is appropriate for a stalemate. That’s not where we are. It is too early to have reached such an impasse. Rather, I believe we have reached a point of inﬂection, where we can see the costs and start to take action. We will begin with very simple things. Some will seem like just reclaiming good manners. Talk to colleagues down the hall, no cell phones at dinner, on the playground, in the car, or in company. There will be more complicated things: to name only one, nascent efforts to reclaim privacy would be supported across the generations. And compassion is due to those of us—and there are many of us—who are so dependent on our devices that we cannot sit still for a funeral service or a lecture or a play. We now know that our brains are rewired every time we use a phone to search or surf or multitask.33 As we try to reclaim our concentration, we are literally at war with ourselves. Yet, no matter how difficult, it is time to look again toward the virtues of solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment. We have agreed to an experiment in which we are the human subjects. Actually, we have agreed to a series of experiments: robots for children and the elderly, technologies that denigrate and deny privacy, seductive simulations that propose themselves as places to live.34 We deserve better. When we remind ourselves that it is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we shall have better.