Sherry Turkle Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return home to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices.

Sherry Turkle
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.

Sherry Turkle
Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.

Sherry Turkle
Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.

Sherry Turkle
We seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

Sherry Turkle
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.

Sherry Turkle
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.

Sherry Turkle
Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.

Sherry Turkle
People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

Sherry Turkle
Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

Sherry Turkle
If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

Sherry Turkle
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

Sherry Turkle
My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude - the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.

Sherry Turkle
The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

Sherry Turkle