Sherry Turkle Quotes

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by "solving" it without addressing it.

The idea of the original had no place.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely

When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities.

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

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.

Underestimation has its uses.

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.

When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

Online life is about premeditation.

As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as 'whole person conversation'—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.

If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.