Home > Work > Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
81 " But this is not a book about robots. Rather, it is about how we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. "
― Sherry Turkle , Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
82 " As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. "
83 " Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind? "
84 " The new technologies allow us to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. "
85 " We are psychologically programmed not only to nurture what we love but to love what we nurture. "
86 " Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes. "
87 " AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility. "
88 " Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance. "
89 " We are shaped by our tools. "
90 " Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.2 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”3 In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by. "
91 " A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet. "
92 " It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions. "
93 " Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other. "
94 " Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences. "
95 " The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case. "
96 " In the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature. "
97 " Wilson’s way of keeping in mind the dual aspects of the Furby’s nature seems to me a philosophical version of multitasking, so central to our twentieth-century attentional ecology. His attitude is pragmatic. If something that seems to have a self is before him, he deals with the aspect of self he finds most relevant to the context. "
98 " This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all. "
99 " Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke. "
100 " Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself. "