Sherry Turkle Quotes

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

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

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

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

When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?

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

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

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

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

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

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

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities.

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

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

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

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.