Sherry Turkle Quotes

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by "solving" it without addressing it.

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.

Underestimation has its uses.

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

The idea of the original had no place.

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.

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?

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

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

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

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

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

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

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.

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

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.

He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.

There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.