Alone Together: Technology and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude

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Author

Sherry Turkle, born 1948, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She holds a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Basic Books, New York, 2011. 360 pages. A paperback edition with a new introduction followed in 2012, and a second edition with an updated introduction in 2017.

The book completes a trilogy begun with The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) and continued in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995). Turkle draws on fifteen years of fieldwork and several hundred interviews, with children and elderly people for the first half and adolescents and adults for the second.

Description

Part One: The robotic moment. Turkle studies people interacting with sociable robots: Tamagotchi, Furby, AIBO, My Real Baby, Kismet, Cog, and Paro, the therapeutic robot seal used in eldercare. Her finding is that people extend attachment to these objects readily, and that the objects need not be convincing to receive it. What matters is that the robot performs the appearance of caring and the person supplies the rest.

Her concern is not that machines will deceive people. It is that people are willing, and in some cases relieved, to accept a performance of care in place of care. She reports elderly nursing home residents confiding in Paro and describes the arrangement as a substitution that satisfies the institution more than the resident.

Part Two: Networked life. The second half turns to mobile phones, texting, and social media. Turkle argues that constant connection produces a specific kind of isolation, that people come to prefer texting to talking because it can be edited, and that the ability to revise a self-presentation before sending it removes the risk that makes conversation valuable. She reports adolescents who describe phone calls as intrusive and adults who conduct meetings while attending to devices.

Two ideas from the book have had the widest use. The first is that people expect more from technology and less from each other. The second is that solitude has become difficult to distinguish from loneliness, and that the capacity to be alone is a prerequisite for being with other people rather than an alternative to it.

Relevance

Turkle conducts long interviews and reports what people say about their own attachments, which places the book on the emic side of the distinction, and much of its force comes from the gap between what her subjects say they want and what they describe doing.

The robot material also documents something specific: how little fidelity is required for attachment to occur. A Furby does not pass any test of intelligence, and children in Turkle's study still resisted holding it upside down because they believed it would be distressed. This is directly relevant to the design of any object that presents a face, a voice, or an apparent state.

The book marks a reversal in Turkle's own position. Life on the Screen treated networked identity as an opportunity for productive experiment. Alone Together treats the same phenomenon as a loss, and Turkle addresses the change explicitly rather than quietly.

Criticism

The interviews are selected rather than sampled, the conclusions are drawn from cases chosen for their resonance, and there is no quantitative work supporting the claim that connection has increased at the expense of relationships. Readers who want the argument tested rather than illustrated do not find it here.

The book measures the present against an idealized past, and that the unmediated conversation it treats as the baseline was never as available or as good as the comparison requires. Critics including Nathan Jurgenson have objected to the underlying framing that online and offline are separable domains, arguing that Turkle's contrast between real and virtual reproduces a distinction that does not hold in practice.

Turkle addressed some of these responses in Reclaiming Conversation (2015), which restates the argument with more attention to remedies.

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