Sherry Turkle Quotes - Page 2

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

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

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.

Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.

This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.

From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

We have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep -- it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." For Kafka, "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked." For Thomas Mann, "Solitude gives birth the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry." For Picasso, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

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.

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness.

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

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?