(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 —KevinKelly,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 alone together 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.” —RosabeThMossKanTeR, 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 —MiTchelResnicK, 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.” —JillKeRconway, 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.” —DouglasRushKoff, 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.” —howaRDgaRDneR, 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 Copyright © 2011 by Sherry Turkle Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 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. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. 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 vii 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page viii 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 “in- telligent” 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 scien- tists debated whether machines of the future would have their smarts pro- grammed 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 psychoana- lytic 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,” ix 0465010219-Turkle_Layout 1 11/1/10 12:24 PM Page x x Alone Together were starting to be used to think about politics, education, social life, and—most central to the analogy with psychoanalysis—about the self.