Sherry Turkle Quotes

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

We ... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place,

When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude.

Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

We are shaped by our tools.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.

The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, the anxiety of always.

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

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.

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.

Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.

The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

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

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

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.

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

Professional life requires that one live with the tension of using technology and remembering to distrust it.

Underestimation has its uses.

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.

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.

As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

Anxieties migrate, proliferate.

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.

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.

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.

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

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

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

She has become part of the tribe by behaving like its members.

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.

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.

Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation.

Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!

But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. THE

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online?

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

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

If you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude.

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

Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

Enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right.

Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner.

When I interview candidates, I like to go where they live, so I can see them in their environment, not just in mind.

This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.

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.

AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

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

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And

Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs.

We are not as strong as technology's pull.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

Shakespeare might have said, we are consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.

Connectivity becomes a craving.

If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.

We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture.

The idea of the original had no place.

Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.

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.

We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.

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

The My Real Babies frightened her,

Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic; the jewel in the crown.

Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much.

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

Online life is about premeditation.

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

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