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Description
Consider Facebook—it’s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.
In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.
About the Author
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She is frequently interviewed in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, on NBC News, and more. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Praise For
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
New York Times Book Review
“[Turkle] summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence…fascinating, readable.”
Wall Street Journal
“What [Turkle] brings to the topic that is new is more than a decade of interviews with teens and college students in which she plumbs the psychological effect of our brave new devices on the generation that seems most comfortable with them.”
Newsweek.com
“A fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology.”
Natural History Magazine
“A fascinating, insightful and disquieting “intimate ethnography” of our digital, robotic moment in history.”
American Prospect
“Turkle is a gifted and imaginative writer…[who] pushes interesting arguments with an engaging style.”
Jill Conway, President emerita, Smith College, and author of The Road from Coorain
“Based on an ambitious research program, and written in a clear and beguiling style, this book which will captivate both scholar and general reader and it will be a landmark in the study of the impact of social media.”
Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory
“Sherry Turkle is the Margaret Mead of digital culture. Parents and teachers: If you want to understand (and support) your children as they navigate the emotional undercurrents in today’s technological world, this is the book you need to read. Every chapter is full of great insights and great writing.”
Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants“No one has a better handle on how we are using material technology to transform our immaterial ‘self’ than Sherry Turkle. She is our techno-Freud, illuminating our inner transformation long before we are able see it. This immensely satisfying book is a deep journey to our future selves.”
Douglas Rushkoff, author of&n