Quotes by Sherry Turkle

When Thoreau considered where I live and what I live for, he tied together location and values. Where we live doesnt 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?

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We cant get enough of each other we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We cant get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: its like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

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

From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.

When one becomes accustomed to companionship without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

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

Once we become tethered to the network, we really dont need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and Ill show you someone who is looking for a person and cant find one.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

Human relationships are rich and theyre messy and theyre 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.

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.

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

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

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?

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.