Sherry Turkle

About

Sherry Turkle (b. 18 June 1948) is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founder (2001) and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a centre of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Turkle has written extensively on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology. She has studied robots, digital pets and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly, alongside long-running work on mobile technologies. Profiles have appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American and Wired.

The Arc of the Work

Turkle's four decades of research are usefully read as a single changing argument, and the change is the most interesting thing about it.

The Second Self (1984) treated the computer as an "evocative object" — a thing that provokes people to think about thinking, and about what makes them different from machines. Her subjects were children reasoning about whether a toy was alive, and programmers describing their relationship to code.

Life on the Screen (1995) examined identity in MUDs and early online spaces, and read the results optimistically: multiple online personae let people cycle through aspects of the self that a single embodied life could not accommodate. Identity was "multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction."

Alone Together (2011), based on a fifteen-year research programme on relational artifacts, reversed the valence without abandoning the observations. The same capacity for connection now appears as a substitution: sociable robots offered to the elderly and the young in place of human attention, and constant connection producing a state in which people are "alone together" — present to devices, absent to the room. Her formulation is that we expect more from technology and less from each other.

Reclaiming Conversation (2015) makes the practical case that follows, arguing that open-ended, unscheduled, face-to-face talk is the setting in which empathy and self-reflection are developed, and that it is precisely what device use displaces.

Edited Collections

Turkle published a series of edited story collections with MIT Press on the relationship between things and thinking: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007), Falling For Science: Objects in Mind (2008), The Inner History of Devices (2008), and Simulation and Its Discontents (2009).

Criticism

The turn from Life on the Screen to Alone Together has drawn the objection that the later work generalises from clinical and anecdotal material to a population-level claim, and that its comparison is with an idealised past conversation that may not have existed. Turkle's response is that the method was always qualitative and that its purpose is to describe what people report about their inner lives rather than to measure incidence — a fair defence, and one that limits what the argument can be asked to prove.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Turkle is the field's longest-running longitudinal observer, and the shift in her position is itself data: it records what changed between a network of hobbyists and a commercial attention economy. Her concept of the evocative object — a thing that makes people think about what a person is — is the most useful single tool she has supplied.

Further Reading

• The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984)
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)
• Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)
• Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015)
• The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (2021)

Related Reading

• Polyphrenia
• Ambient Intimacy
• Extended Avatar
• Howard Rheingold
• A.I