Quotes from Sherry Turkle

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

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.

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

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don't always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it's up to us to promote "unitasking.

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

I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the better idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other's breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

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

The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, "Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?" The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.

Anxieties migrate, proliferate.

craves control more than sociability. She will email a "Sorry" instead of delivering a face-to-face apology; at work, as in her personal life, when she faces a difficult conversation, she makes every effort to sidestep it with an email.

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

If I developed empathy, at first, it wasn't so much a way to find connection as a survival strategy. My parents gave me burdens in childhood that I honed into gifts.

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

Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: "Language . . . has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

When habitual structures dissolve, so do boundaries between people.

When individuals meet transformative technology, that technology can change their inner life and relationships.

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.

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction.

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

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.

Use concrete events to think about large ideas. Use large ideas to think about concrete events.

Again, technology makes us forget what we know about life. We become enchanted by technology's promises because we have so many problems we would like technology to solve.

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