Quotes from Sherry Turkle

In all of these cases, we use technology to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

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

We are shaped by our tools.

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

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

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

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.

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

It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions.

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.

As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human.

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.

Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.

We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)

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

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.

In the classic children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes "real" because of a child's love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature.

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

Wilson's way of keeping in mind the dual aspects of the Furby's nature seems to me a philosophical version of multitasking, so central to our twentieth-century attentional ecology. His attitude is pragmatic. If something that seems to have a self is before him, he deals with the aspect of self he finds most relevant to the context.

The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects—treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps.

It is easier to face an emergency than to have those difficult conversations. When we go into crisis mode, we give ourselves permission to defer the kinds of conversations that politics requires. And right now, our politics requires conversations, too long deferred, about being a self and a citizen in the world of big data.

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. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely

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

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