From Andrew Keen's "PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" column on The Barnes & Noble Review
Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together, ends in mourning. In
October 2009, the author, an MIT professor of the Social Studies of Science and
Technology, went to her local synagogue for Yiskor, the special Yom Kippur
service that remembers the dead. There she heard the rabbi deliver a sermon
about the importance of talking to the deceased and communicating four messages
to them: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you."
"That is what makes us human, over time,
over distance," Turkle says of our ability to talk sincerely to other
human beings, whether they belong to our past or our present. Our "knowledge
of mortality" and our "experience of the life cycle" is conveyed
in just such simple messages: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love
you." They are the most intimate words we can say to another. Without
them, she suggests, we are machines akin to the robots in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
which imagines a future in which robots and humans are indistinguishable.
Dick's classic story was adapted
for the movies by Ridley Scott as Blade
Runner. But in this age of Facebook, Twitter and increasingly "intelligent"
robots with names like Kismet and Paro, Turkle tells us, Blade Runner has been adapted by all of us: we are being herded
toward what she ominously calls "the robotic moment", a place in
which we will rely on machines to shape our regret, gratitude, forgiveness, and
love.
"People disappoint; robots
will not" -- so she explains the great seduction of devices that behave
like human beings. Today, she warns us, we are becoming so "immersed in
technology that we ignore what we know about life." Indeed, this epochal
robotic moment may have already arrived while an increasingly wired human race
has been too busy texting, tweeting and friending to notice.
As Alone Together, based on interviews with hundreds of subjects over 15 years of research, illustrates, this ignorance about the creeping mechanical translation of our human instincts is afflicting old and young alike. When Turkle introduces 76-year old Andy to "My Real Baby", a simulated human infant, he is delighted: "Now I have something to do when I have nothing to do," Andy confesses. Seven-year-old Brooke yearns to talk to a robot called Cog so that she become the machine's dedicated tutor. And Turkle considers the robot-makers, too -- from Norbert Weiner, the inventor of cybernetics who believed it was "conceptually possible" to send a person over an electric wire, to Aaron Edsinger, the inventor of a device called "Domo" which, according to Turkle, "really can have a conversation."
But is the nature of conversation
itself being altered by its new forms?
Turkle talks to high school students who are sending 6,000 text messages
a day, thereby predicating their whole identity on electronic communications. "If
Facebook were deleted, I'd be deleted," one 16-year-old student confesses
to Turkle. Such fascination with social media is fostering what Turkle -- a
psychoanalytically trained psychologist -- calls a "hyper-otherdirectedness"
in its proponents, a "collaborative self" that no longer has the
ability to be alone and privately reflect on its emotions.
As an elegy for the death of
intimacy, Alone Together -- for all
its noble intentions -- fails, for the most part, to establish a really close
relationship with the reader, in part because of its medium. The 348-page,
richly footnoted tome has the form of
a conventional academic book, but its message belongs to a deeply layered piece
of philosophy or even fiction. So while
I loved Turkle's introduction, her conclusion, and, in particular, her deeply
moving epilogue, the rest of the occasionally repetitive and unstructured
narrative could have done with a bit more rabbi and a bit less academic
psychologist.
But that's a quibble. Alone Together is a major empirical and theoretical work that illuminates the crisis of humanity at the dawn of the digital century. Turkle has laid down a gauntlet for the rest of us to pick up. One can only hope that rabbis, novelists, and other engineers of the human soul will do so, translating Turkle's vitally important message into more urgent and intimate forms.
As the digital age sparks increasing debate about what new technologies and increased connectivity are doing to our brains, comes this chilling examination of what our iPods and iPads are doing to our relationships from MIT professor Turkle (Simulation and Its Discontents). In this third in a trilogy that explores the relationship between humans and technology, Turkle argues that people are increasingly functioning without face-to-face contact. For all the talk of convenience and connection derived from texting, e-mailing, and social networking, Turkle reaffirms that what humans still instinctively need is each other, and she encounters dissatisfaction and alienation among users: teenagers whose identities are shaped not by self-exploration but by how they are perceived by the online collective, mothers who feel texting makes communicating with their children more frequent yet less substantive, Facebook users who feel shallow status updates devalue the true intimacies of friendships. Turkle 's prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other. (Jan.)
Clinical psychologist—and sociologist of the Internet—Turkle (social studies of science & technology, MIT; Simulation and Its Discontents) presents a cautionary tale about what she calls the "robotic moment," i.e., our current state of technological connection and societal disconnection that makes us willing to consider robots for true companionship. She tells two stories—of her research observing people with interactive but still rudimentary machines like Furbies and Paros and her experiences interviewing people (including many adolescents) about their digital habits and tools (e.g., texting, IM'ing, and Facebook). Although she tries to conclude on an up note, insisting we still have time to think carefully about how we use computers and connect to one another in an always-connected world, her tales of seniors ready to accept robot companions and kids seeking attention from parents addicted to their own Blackberries make for sobering reading. VERDICT Turkle's findings are engaging and her conclusions thoughtful (she's been called "Margaret Mead in cyberspace"). Her book is best for serious readers because those seeking livelier popular science writing might find her style here a bit dry.—Sarah Statz Cords, The Reader's Advisor Online, Middleton, WI
A clinical psychologist takes a critical and sometimes disturbing look at the psycho-social dangers of mixing technology and human intimacy.
Turkle (Social Studies of Science and Technology/MIT; Simulation and Its Discontents, 2009, etc.) paints a bleak picture of a robotically enhanced future in which humans become increasingly emotionally dependent on technology. As this dependency on technology for meaningful social interaction increases, writes the author, the more humans will lose their ability to have authentic and meaningful relationships with one another. Turkle begins her study with possibly the creepiest findings from her fieldwork: the ongoing development and acceptance of "sex robots," and the zeal of the scientific community's crackpots who'd like to exalt robots to equal relational status with human beings. Essentially this means programming robots as not only a sexual supplement to humans' sex lives but also as an actual surrogate for an intimate bedfellow. From there, the author's examples of a society gone technologically wild can only seem tame: children getting robotic pets and cell phones before they hit puberty; insecure teens seeking a new self through avatars and virtual-reality games; young Facebookers afraid of the permanency and nakedness of their information on the Internet. Turkle advances the notion that Internet-based social networking and communication via texting and e-mail can only lead to alienation and awkwardness when facing inevitable person-to-person confrontations. But the author is careful not to blame technology and its handlers for corrupting the easily corruptible. Many of the technological slaves that Turkle profiles are—one hopes—exceptional examples. The author seems confident that human instinct will eventually intervene and prompt us into evasive action as soon as technology begins to increasingly dominate our lives. This cautious optimism is admirable, but it can't quite brighten the dystopic pallor the book ultimately casts on the future of human relationships.
Despite the dry, clinical writing, Turkle provides potentially valuable social research.
…perceptive…[Turkle] has spent decades examining how people interact with computers and other devices…and by situating her findings in historical perspective, she is able to lend contextual ballast to her case studies.
—The New York Times
"Nobody has ever articulated so passionately and intelligently what we're doing to ourselves by substituting technologically mediated social interaction.... Equipped with penetrating intelligence and a sense of humor, Turkle surveys the front lines of the social-digital transformation."—Lev Grossman, TIME
"Vivid, even lurid, in its depictions of where we are headed... [an] engrossing study."—Washington Post
"In this beautifully written, provocative and worrying book, Turkle, a professor at MIT, a clinical psychologist and, perhaps, the world's leading expert on the social and psychological effects of technology, argues that internet use has as much power to isolate and destroy relationships as it has to bring us together."
—Financial Times
"A fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology."—Newsweek.com
"[Turkle] summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence...fascinating, readable."—New York Times Book Review
"Important.... Admirably personal.... [Turkle's] book will spark useful debate."—Boston Globe
"Turkle is a sensitive interviewer and an elegant writer."—Slate.com
"Savvy and insightful."
—New York Times
"What [Turkle] brings to the topic that is new is more than a decade of interviews with teens and college students in which she plumbs the psychological effect of our brave new devices on the generation that seems most comfortable with them."
—Wall Street Journal
"Amidst the deluge of propaganda, technophilia and idolatry that masquerades as objective assessment of digital culture, Turkle offers us galoshes and a sump pump.... [S]he gives a clear-eyed, reflective and wise assessment of what we gain and lose in the current configurations of digital culture."
—Christian Century
"Readers will find this book a useful resource as they begin conversations about how to negotiate and critically engage the technology that suffuses our lives."—National Catholic Reporter
"Turkle is a gifted and imaginative writer... [who] pushes interesting arguments with an engaging style."—American Prospect
"Disturbing. Compelling. Powerful."—Seattle Times
"Turkle's prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other."
—Publishers Weekly
"The picture that arises from [Alone Together] is not particularly comforting but it is always compelling and helps explain many behaviors one sees at play in society at large these days, especially among the young."—Jewish Exponent
"Highly recommended."
—Choice
"Turkle's emphasis on personal stories from computer gadgetry's front lines keeps her prose engaging and her message to the human species-to restrain ourselves from becoming technology's willing slaves instead of its guiding masters-loud and clear."—Booklist
"Alone Together... is packed with creative observations on our machine-mediated lives and what this all means for intimacy, solitude, and being connected."
—Spirituality and Practice
"Turkle is too smart and hard-working to see technology solely as a cause of social or psychological disorders: this is not the book to read for shallow complaints that young people don't care about privacy or for scare stories about internet addiction."
—ZDNet UK
"Compelling."—Library Hot blog
"Clear-eyed, even-keeled."—Touch Points blog
"Alone Together is a mighty fine layperson's introduction to where we are as a technological and social media society."—BlogCritics.org
"[Turkle's] decades of teaching technology and daily living add authority to her fine survey!"—Bookwatch
"Turkle is clearly passionate in describing what she sees as the looming social isolation being wrought by the new technology.... Alone Together does offer a needed counter to the wholesale adoption of the social media and social robot."—PsyCritiques
"Alone Together stands as an entirely accessible, tantalizingly thought-provoking read.... Books like this and researchers like Turkle lending their expertise to the debate are absolute necessities."—Online Education Database
Laural Merlington proves her worth in narrating Turkle’s book as she delivers the voices of the elderly, children, and robots in addition to her narrative voice. The book discusses the problematic relationship contemporary culture has with its technology as many of us choose to opt in for interactions via technological interface and opt out of direct personal interactions. The research presented will lead listeners to rethink their relationships with computers and, one hopes, with humans. Merlington serves as an excellent narrator with a matter-of-fact tone and a keen sense for when to use a deliberate pace. As the book’s content ranges from detailed philosophical concepts to children’s exuberant remarks about robotic toys, Merlington keeps a fine balance that will engage listeners. L.E. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
