Alone Together: Why We've Started Expecting More from Technology and Less from Each Other

"This is a book of repentance," Sherry Turkle has said of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. "I have been studying computers and people for thirty years. I didn't see several important things. I got some important things wrong."

"Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere. In a surprising twist, relentless connection leads to a new solitude."

Sherry Turkle is Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A licensed clinical psychologist, Sherry is the author of several books including The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Alone Together completes a trilogy.

McNally: You studied sociology and personality psychology. How is it that you began to focus on the relationships between humans and technology?

Turkle: I took a job at MIT. Coming out of Harvard trained as a clinician and a social scientist, MIT seemed a perfect place to look at some new kinds of ideas about the mind that were based on computation.

McNally: What year?

Turkle: This was '76, '77. There had long been artificial intelligence and ideas about computers, but for the first time people had home computers or at work had experiences with computers that made those ideas more compelling, more real. They were no longer abstract.

Psychoanalytic ideas had at first been for experts, and then all of a sudden people analyzed each other's dreams, psychoanalytic ideas helped you raise children; you talked about them with your friends. How does something like that happen? I set out to study that same kind of movement of ideas about computers from seminar rooms into the popular culture.

But as I was studying this fairly academic problem, something dramatic happened. In my first couple of weeks at MIT, I noticed the intensity of people's relationships with their computers.

McNally: You'd never seen that before?

Turkle: No. At Harvard, I hadn't seen people with computers. When I wanted to run data, I had a friend who did that kind of thing. People used to go to the computer building to put in their punch cards or whatever they did in the computer building. I never saw people in relationship to this technology, I saw people using it to do instrumental things.

McNally: So it was partly the fact that you ventured into a place where folks were ahead of the curve?

Turkle: Yes. These were people who were actually working with, in, and on these computers. The first generation of personal computers was starting to come outcomputers that you could build from kitsthe Altairthe first generation of TRS80 home computers.

When I saw people with computers, it really hit me

McNally: You mean how people were with computers?

Turkle: People say, "Oh, it's just like your stereo or your car." No, I'd seen people with their cars and their stereos; it was not like that. I think it's because the computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.

I called my first book on this question, The Second Self. I took that name from a 13 year-old girl who had a little personal computer on which she programmed. She said, "When you program a computer, you take a little piece of your mind and you put it in the computer's mind, and you come to see it differently." It was that mind-to-mind connection with the technology that fascinated me.

McNally: In Cambridge in '73 or '74, I I made a friendship with someone who told me he was working in an MIT lab inputting digital information and creating images on the screen that had never existed as physical reality, not even as a drawing. That day I knew something really new was happening.