Top 100 Sherry Turkle Quotes
#1. Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.
Sherry Turkle
#2. They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.
Sherry Turkle
#3. Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.
Sherry Turkle
#4. This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.
Sherry Turkle
#5. We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.
Sherry Turkle
#6. Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.
Sherry Turkle
#7. What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.
Sherry Turkle
#8. Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.
Sherry Turkle
#9. In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions.
Sherry Turkle
#10. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#11. 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
#12. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#13. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#14. We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place,
Sherry Turkle
#15. 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?
Sherry Turkle
#16. 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 you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.
Sherry Turkle
#17. Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of people [they're] with and this 'other' reality.
Sherry Turkle
#18. Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.
Sherry Turkle
#19. To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
Sherry Turkle
#20. if your pet is a robot, it might always stay a cute puppy. By extension, if your lover were a robot, you would always be the center of its universe. A robot would not just be better than nothing or better than something, but better than anything. From
Sherry Turkle
#23. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We're aware that we're with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being.
Sherry Turkle
#24. Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.
Sherry Turkle
#25. I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.
Sherry Turkle
#26. What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face.
Sherry Turkle
#27. Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.
Sherry Turkle
#28. I said that we use digital "passbacks" to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you. Of
Sherry Turkle
#29. I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.
Sherry Turkle
#30. We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And
Sherry Turkle
#31. From watching children play with objects designed as "amusements," we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us.
Sherry Turkle
#32. But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.
Sherry Turkle
#33. The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.
Sherry Turkle
#34. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#35. The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.
Sherry Turkle
#36. We are at a moment of temptation, ready to turn to machines for companionship even as we seem pained or inconvenienced to engage with each other in settings as simple as a grocery store. We want technology to step up as we ask people to step back.
Sherry Turkle
#37. Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Sherry Turkle
#38. Zane, six, knows that AIBO doesn't have a "real brain and heart," but they are "real enough." AIBO is "kind of alive" because it can function "as if it had a brain and heart.
Sherry Turkle
#39. The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.5 Without alterity, there can be no empathy.
Sherry Turkle
#40. Despite the seriousness of our moment, I write with optimism. Once aware, we can begin to rethink our practices. When we do, conversation is there to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.
Sherry Turkle
#41. We go from curiosity to a search for communion.
Sherry Turkle
#42. Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.
Sherry Turkle
#43. The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.
Sherry Turkle
#44. Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.
Sherry Turkle
#45. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#46. Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.
Sherry Turkle
#48. The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, the anxiety of always.
Sherry Turkle
#49. if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#50. The web promises to make our world bigger. But as it works now, it also narrows our exposure to ideas. We can end up in a bubble in which we hear only the ideas we already know. Or already like.
Sherry Turkle
#51. It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'
Sherry Turkle
#52. Transparency once meant being able to "open the hood" to see how things worked. Now, with the Macintosh meaning of transparency dominant in the computer culture, it means quite the opposite: being able to use a program without knowing how it works.
Sherry Turkle
#53. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#54. Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.
Sherry Turkle
#55. We expect more from technology and less from each other.
Sherry Turkle
#56. Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
#57. We seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.
Sherry Turkle
#58. When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.
Sherry Turkle
#59. If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.
Sherry Turkle
#60. There are moments of opportunity for families; moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school - a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent!
Sherry Turkle
#61. Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.
Sherry Turkle
#62. Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.
Sherry Turkle
#63. Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.
Sherry Turkle
#64. Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs.
Sherry Turkle
#65. In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.
Sherry Turkle
#66. We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture.
Sherry Turkle
#67. Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.
Sherry Turkle
#69. It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.
Sherry Turkle
#70. The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.
Sherry Turkle
#71. One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.
Sherry Turkle
#72. Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.
Sherry Turkle
#73. When you depend on the computer to remember your past, you focused on whatever past is kept on the computer.
Sherry Turkle
#74. Intelligence once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit.
Sherry Turkle
#75. Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.
Sherry Turkle
#76. People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of 'Wired' magazine. Then things began to change. In the early '80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.
Sherry Turkle
#77. This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.
Sherry Turkle
#78. Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.
Sherry Turkle
#79. Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic; the jewel in the crown.
Sherry Turkle
#80. It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.
Sherry Turkle
#81. Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.
Sherry Turkle
#82. He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.
Sherry Turkle
#83. We have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability.
Sherry Turkle
#85. When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.
Sherry Turkle
#86. The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
Sherry Turkle
#87. These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation.
Sherry Turkle
#88. 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
#89. Professional life requires that one live with the tension of using technology and remembering to distrust it.
Sherry Turkle
#90. We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk.
Sherry Turkle
#91. Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
Sherry Turkle
#92. She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.
Sherry Turkle
#93. He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.
Sherry Turkle
#94. When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive.
Sherry Turkle
#95. Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.
Sherry Turkle
#96. 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
#97. We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.
Sherry Turkle
#99. Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much.
Sherry Turkle
#100. Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner.
Sherry Turkle
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