Quotes from Sherry Turkle

people teaches children how to be in a relationship, beginning with the ability to have a conversation.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke.

Loneliness is painful, emotionally and even physically, born from a "want of intimacy" when we need it most, in early childhood. Solitude—the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone—is built from successful human connection at just that time.

Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself.

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.

Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

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

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

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

Research tells us that being comfortable with our vulnerabilities is central to our happiness, our creativity, and even our productivity.

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

Teenagers make it clear that games, worlds, and social networking (on the surface, rather different) have much in common. They all ask you to compose and project an identity.

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.

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

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

Online life is about premeditation.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

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

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

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

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

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?

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.