Top 100 Turkle Quotes
#1. If you subscribe to Sherry Turkle's argument that the prevalence of text-based communications is leading to a decline in face-to-face conversations and the skills to conduct them, the shift makes total sense.
Aziz Ansari
#2. Space is infinite. To the mind that means freedom, liberation.' So wrote Arisko, our greatest turkle philosopher, in his most famous work, 'Thoughts In A Bathtub'," said Dottia, dreamily, in an inspired state.
Philip Dodd
#3. The MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who has devoted her career to studying and writing about the impact of digital technology on our lives, once wrote that sociable technology always disappoints, because it promises what it cannot deliver. "It promises friendship but can only deliver performance,
David Sax
#4. The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, the anxiety of always.
Sherry Turkle
#5. My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.
Sherry Turkle
#7. Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.
Sherry Turkle
#8. People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#9. As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.
Sherry Turkle
#10. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet
Sherry Turkle
#11. It used to be that we imagined our mobile phones were there so that we could talk to each other. Now we want our mobile phones to talk to us.
Sherry Turkle
#12. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.
Sherry Turkle
#13. In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as "sort of" alive - a
Sherry Turkle
#14. Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.
Sherry Turkle
#15. 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
#16. She has become part of the tribe by behaving like its members.
Sherry Turkle
#17. Mobile technology is here to stay, along with all the wonders it brings. Yet it is time for us to consider how it may get in the way of other things we hold dear - and how once we recognize this, we can take action: We can both redesign technology and change how we bring it into our lives. A
Sherry Turkle
#18. 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
#19. The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.
Sherry Turkle
#20. Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.
Sherry Turkle
#21. We go from curiosity to a search for communion.
Sherry Turkle
#22. For one woman, a college sophomore, "It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person." For a senior man, "If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.
Sherry Turkle
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Sherry Turkle
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.
Sherry Turkle
#30. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#31. 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
#32. Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it's like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: I think the way we're going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they're with is there, you don't get the feeling of real connection. You just have information.
Sherry Turkle
#33. Shakespeare might have said, we are consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
#34. Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.
Sherry Turkle
#35. When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.
Sherry Turkle
#36. We seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.
Sherry Turkle
#37. Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
#38. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#39. Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.
Sherry Turkle
#40. It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.
Sherry Turkle
#41. We expect more from technology and less from each other.
Sherry Turkle
#42. Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.
Sherry Turkle
#43. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#44. 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
#45. Enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right.
Sherry Turkle
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#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. This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now.
Sherry Turkle
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of people [they're] with and this 'other' reality.
Sherry Turkle
#55. Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.
Sherry Turkle
#56. The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.
Sherry Turkle
#57. 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
#58. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#59. 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
#60. We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place,
Sherry Turkle
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
Sherry Turkle
#66. 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
#67. The new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.
Sherry Turkle
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.
Sherry Turkle
#71. This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.
Sherry Turkle
#72. Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.
Sherry Turkle
#73. They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.
Sherry Turkle
#74. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.
Sherry Turkle
#75. Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.
Sherry Turkle
#76. If you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude.
Sherry Turkle
#77. We ... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.
Sherry Turkle
#78. The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.
Sherry Turkle
#79. 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
#80. Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.
Sherry Turkle
#81. The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.
Sherry Turkle
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And
Sherry Turkle
#85. 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
#86. He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.
Sherry Turkle
#87. 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
#88. 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.
Sherry Turkle
#89. 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
#90. Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.
Sherry Turkle
#91. 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
#92. I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.
Sherry Turkle
#94. In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online?
Sherry Turkle
#95. Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.
Sherry Turkle
#96. This distinctive confusion: these days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart.
Sherry Turkle
#97. 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
#100. 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
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