73+ Sherry Turkle Quotes On Technology, Social

Professor Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a research center that studies the psychology of people's relationships with technology. Her research focuses on how technology shapes our modern lives and how it affects our relationships with others. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sherry Turkle on technology, social, technology.

Top 10 Sherry Turkle Quotes

1. We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
2. 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.
3. The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
4. Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. We sacrifice conversation for mere connection.
5. We're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to connect, and sometimes we're too busy communicating to create. This is true for individuals and also true for organizations.
6. We expect more from technology and less from each other.
7. we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.
8. 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.
9. We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.
10. Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

Sherry Turkle Short Quotes

• If we don't teach kids how to be alone, they will end up only lonely.
• As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.
• I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.
• Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.
• We... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.
• We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.
• Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.
• We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.
• Everything that enchants may be said to deceive.
• Loneliness is failed solitude.

Sherry Turkle Quotes About Technology

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. — Sherry Turkle

People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of Wired magazine. [Then things began to change. In the early 80s,] we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy. — Sherry Turkle

These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. — Sherry Turkle

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. — Sherry Turkle

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

We are not as strong as technology's pull. — Sherry Turkle

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

I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows. — Sherry Turkle

When you're addicted to heroin, there is only one thing you can do - go off heroin. But we're not going to throw away these phones, we're not going to throw away our technology. — Sherry Turkle

There are moments of opportunity for families; moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school - a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent! — Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle Quotes About Social

Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing. — Sherry Turkle

When the social network doesn't find it convenient to have privacy, we say, "Okay, social network, you don't want privacy, maybe we won't have it either." But we did this without having the conversation. — Sherry Turkle

I apologize to all of my colleagues who've been writing up storms, but as a culture we've essentially put ourselves into a position where Mark Zuckerberg can say, "Privacy as a social norm is no longer relevant," and a lot of people don't blink an eye. — Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle Quotes About Machines

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine. — Sherry Turkle

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine. — Sherry Turkle

We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins. — Sherry Turkle

The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does. — Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle Famous Quotes And Sayings

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesnt teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation. — Sherry Turkle

Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place. — Sherry Turkle

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person. — Sherry Turkle

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy. — Sherry Turkle

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup. — Sherry Turkle

These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves. — Sherry Turkle

We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become. — Sherry Turkle

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind? — Sherry Turkle

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. — Sherry Turkle

We're in partnership with technology, influencing each other in a dance. My loyalties are to our making and shaping technology to conform to our human values; and to confronting the hard job of figuring out what those values are, and how are we're going to get technology to do that. — Sherry Turkle

One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians--threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. — Sherry Turkle

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely. — Sherry Turkle

What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face. — Sherry Turkle

What is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to a shared store of human meaning? — Sherry Turkle

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful. — Sherry Turkle

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

The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely. — Sherry Turkle

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

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

We have relationships with many different things, creatures and beings. We have relationships with cats, with dogs, with horses, and we know that there are certain things they can't do. So we'll add robots to that list, and we'll learn what they can and cannot do. No harm, no foul. — Sherry Turkle

There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking. — Sherry Turkle

We used to think, 'I have a feeling; I want to make a call.' Now our impulse is, 'I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.' — Sherry Turkle

I don't tell a story unless I have a very deep bench. If you tell an idiosyncratic story, there's no resonance. People read it and say, "I don't see anyone like that." So I tell a story only when I have many stories behind it. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

Kids have moved from, "I have a feeling, I want to make a call," to "I'd like to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, there's a continual need for validation. They're constituting a thought or feeling by sending it out for votes. That's really not where you want to be emotionally. — Sherry Turkle

Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of the people [they're] with and this other reality. — Sherry Turkle

As a therapist, I know that when you're vulnerable, the best way to move on is to admit your vulnerability, don't beat yourself up for it, and try to find a way to analyze your vulnerability. Pull up your socks and try to do better for you and your family. — Sherry Turkle

Robots want to love us because the field of artificial intelligence has programmed robots to say they want to love us. — Sherry Turkle

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

If you're happy with where the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter have taken you, I'm not the Grinch. Someone called me Sherry Turkle's "evil Luddite twin." I'm not that. I enjoy the bounties of this technology. But if you fear that your connected life is running away with you, read the book, reflect, talk to your family and friends. I think we deserve better than some of the places that we've gotten with this technology. — Sherry Turkle

It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us. — Sherry Turkle

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk. — Sherry Turkle

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. — Sherry Turkle

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

Telephone companies sell us voice plans because they know we're not going to use them. We're hiding from each other. People say that calls aren't efficient, but trying to bring efficiency into your intimacy can get you into a lot of trouble. — Sherry Turkle

Life Lessons by Sherry Turkle

1. Listening to others and understanding their perspectives can help us to grow and learn from our experiences.
2. Technology can be both a tool and a distraction, depending on how it is used.
3. Taking time to reflect on our relationships with others and ourselves can help us to become more mindful and intentional in our actions.