The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, Sherry Turkle (2022)

The SciencesVolume 35, Issue 6 p. 36-39 Ghosts in the Machine SHERRY TURKLE, SHERRY TURKLE Sherry Turkle is a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, which is being published in November by Simon & Schuster. Copyright ©: 1995 by Sherry Turkle.Search for more papers by this author SHERRY TURKLE, SHERRY TURKLE Sherry Turkle is a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, which is being published in November by Simon & Schuster. Copyright ©: 1995 by Sherry Turkle.Search for more papers by this author First published: November‐December 1995 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2326-1951.1995.tb03214.xCitations: 3 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume35, Issue6November‐December 1995Pages 36-39 RelatedInformation

Alone Together: Why We Expect MORE From Technology and LESS From Each Other. By Sherry Turkle (2017) Third Edition. New York: Basic Books. Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Perils of the Digital Age. By Brad Smith and Carol Browne (2019). New York: Penguin Press.

The field of science and technology studies (STS) has recently formalized a performative category of scholarship called ‘making and doing’. Making and doing recognizes engaged and reflexive practices that help STS claims and ideas travel between social worlds by means other than academic publications and presentations. At this time, little attention has been paid to the historical conditions and epistemologies that helped to construct this category. While STS may appear to be merely exploiting the twenty-first century popularity of the maker movement, we have found that feminist and ethnographic approaches to science played historically significant roles in the epistemic formation and foundation of the movement itself. By tracing the influence of STS on the maker movement to late twentieth century collaborations between Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert, we aim to interfere in making and doing narratives by proposing to hold STS accountable for the socio-technical world-making in which it is implicated.

Cyberspace has called the epistemic attention of anthropologists in the middle of the 1990’s. This paper aims to characterize and discuss the trajectory put in action by it from this moment onward, focusing on Sherry Turkle work. Our article begins with some indications about the way the cyberculture studies were structured. Following, we stress the methodological bias by which the field was approached by anthropology. Finally, we offer a critical reflection about the merits and limitations of all this stage of research. Besides the pioneer article of Arturo Escobar and the focus on Sherry Turkle trajectory, we make some remarks about the contributions originated from David Haken and Christine Hine. Key words: cyberculture, virtual ethnography, Sherry Turkle.

Dynamics of Group Psychotherapy. By S. R. Slavson Edited by Mortimer Schiffer. New York: Jason Aronson. 1979. Pp 830. $30.00. - Psychoanalytic Politics. Freud's French Revolution. By Sherry Turkle. London: Burnett Books. 1979. Pp 278. £6.95. - Volume 136 Issue 6

"No one covers technology with more insight or panache than Clive Thompson. I can't imagine anyone better qualified to curate this fascinating series." ---Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail "Editor Clive Thompson suggests we are in a ‘golden age of technology journalism.' Reading this collection, one suspects he is right---it sparkles with beautifully written narratives not only about what technology can do for us but what it does to us as people, to our ways of thinking about ourselves, our relationships, and how we envisage our world." ---Sherry Turkle, Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Best of Technology Writing 2008 proves that technology writing is a bona fide literary genre with some of the most stylish, compelling, and just plain readable work in journalism today. The third volume in this annual series, The Best of Technology Writing 2008 covers a fascinating mix of topics---from a molecular gastronomist's recipe for the perfect gin and tonic; to "the Mechanism," an ancient Greek artifact that might be the world's first laptop computer; to social media, privacy, and what is possibly the biggest generation gap since rock 'n' roll. Featuring contributions from Ted Allen Michael Behar Caleb Crain Julian Dibbell Cory Doctorow David Glenn Thomas Goetz Charles Graeber Alex Hutchinson Walter Kirn Robin Mejia Emily Nussbaum Ben Paynter Jeffrey Rosen John Seabrook Cass R. Sunstein digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Part of deconstructing the real—virtual and human—machine distinctions begins with a look at their impact on identity. Despite the pervasive use of computers and the World Wide Web, there is surprisingly very little sustained analysis and theorizing on the interrelationship among identity, culture, and the virtual. Although some scholars have looked at the social and personal implications of human interaction with new media (Buckingham, 2008; Johnson, 2006; Nelson, 1987; Norman, 1988; Reeves & Nass, 1996), few are examining the impact digital online culture is having on our identity in general, and specifically on how we see ourselves and live out our lives. One of the few but most prolific and longstanding researchers in this area is Sherry Turkle, a leading scholar of human—computer relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self (ITS), which investigates the social and psychological dimensions of technological change (Turkle, 2003). Her work is unique and recognized across myriad disciplines for both its subject matter and the psychoanalytical, sociological, and ethnographic perspectives it employs, making it a logical choice as a case study for this chapter.

Reviewed by: Falling for Science: Objects in Mind Rachel Maines (bio) Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii+318. $24.95. Sherry Turkle’s collection of essays, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, opens with an introduction in which she describes her objectives for the book. “There are many paths into science,” she tells us. “This collection explores one of them, a path in which imagination is sparked by an object” (p. 3) There are two sets of short essays, both about “young people discovering objects that can ‘make a mind’: a puzzle, a toy pony, a broken radio, a set of gears, origami.” The first group of essays, contained in “Part I: MIT Students and Their Objects (1979–2007),” is by Turkle’s students or former students; Part II consists of narratives by “mentors,” whom she describes as “distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers” who relate their experiences with objects as children and young adults. In her “Epilogue: What Inspires?” (pp. 273–83), Turkle suggests that her intended readership is parents and educators, with the goal of increasing the flow of young people into science. “Too often, if we can’t formulate a test, we give up on a method or we give up on a child,” she argues. “The voices in this collection remind us that at these moments we can turn [End Page 502] directly to a child and put our deeper intelligence to work. It can be a moment when we listen, when we learn what inspires, a moment of discovery for a parent or a teacher” (p. 274). The essays are for the most part appealing and entertaining to read, but it is unclear whether they support Turkle’s hypothesis regarding objects, or her agenda for using them to draw children into science. As for the hypothesis, the authors of these brief narratives are or were either students at MIT or established scientists. They are therefore not only a self-selected sample of people already attracted to science, but authors who, with ingenuous and charming hindsight bias, now seek to explain the origins in the past of their love for science in the present. Most of us have such “creation myths” for our professional choices, but we have no way of knowing how influential the remembered episodes actually were, or even if our—and our parents’— memories of them are genuine. Turkle makes good use of the existing literature, especially works on the role of creative play in early education, such as the essays edited by John Brockman, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (2004), Jean Piaget’s works, including The Child’s Conception of the World (1960), and Friedrich Frobel’s The Education of Man (2005), in which the author describes “Frobel’s Gifts,” a set of creative toys for children. Objects in Mind’s Part II, “Mentors and Their Objects” (pp. 216–71), the narratives by established scientists, draws heavily on published autobiographical works, including Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1981), Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten: A Chemical Boyhood (2001), and Norbert Weiner’s Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964). The self-selection bias mentioned earlier raises issues not addressed in Falling for Science, particularly the number of adults who could relate “objects-to-think-with” anecdotes from their childhoods, different in no obvious way from those in Turkle’s collection who did not become scientists. This reviewer, for example, spent hours as a child building structures and designs with her grandmother’s multicolored celluloid clothespins and can still describe in detail both the pins and the lidless metal box in which they were stored. But my own “creation myth” as a historian (not a scientist) revolves around falling in love, even before I could read, with the lavishly illustrated Golden History of the World (1955). It certainly seems likely that, as Turkle suggests, children will benefit from “close encounters with rich materials” (p. 36), including books, but that these encounters will increase the proportion of them who choose to become scientists is by no means clear. Object play may be necessary, but the evidence suggests that...

The author discusses what she terms “outside the building” issues, such as climate change, pandemics, and racial/gender justice. These complex issues are “beyond the boundaries of single organizations.” As she writes, “I call this new leadership for the future ’advanced’ leadership, because of its broader scope and, at the same time, more limited formal power, which challenges leaders more than an official mandate does.” She references former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, the late leadership author Warren Bennis, and the academics Robert Putnam (famous for his book Bowling Alone), Sherry Turkle, and others. The author observes that “Innovation and change can’t follow a fixed script. The work is more like improvisational theater, which takes shape in response to observer feedback.” While it may seem that society is hopelessly divided and gridlocked, there are hopeful signs: “When more people flex their leadership muscles and find the courage to take on big problems, they exude the optimism of activism. That positive energy can be contagious and can unite us in new ways. By undertaking the daunting, yet meaningful, task of making a difference in the world, advanced leaders can transform the lives of many people—including the leaders themselves.”

Book Review: Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle, and We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter, by Celeste Headlee

The metaverse is equivocal. It is a science-fictional concept from the past; it is the present’s rough implementations; and it is the Promised Cyberland, expected to manifest some time in the future. The metaverse first emerged as a techno-capitalist network in a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Our article thus marks the metaverse’s thirtieth anniversary. We revisit Stephenson’s original concept plus three sophisticated antecedents from 1972 to 1984: Jean Baudrillard’s simulation, Sherry Turkle’s networked identities, and Jacques Lacan’s schema of suggestible consumers hooked up to a Matrix-like capitalist network. We gauge the relevance of these three antecedents following Meta’s recent promise to deliver a metaverse for the mainstream and the emergence of blockchain-oriented metaverse projects. We examine empirical data from 2021 and 2022, sourced from journalistic and social media (BuzzSumo, Google Trends, Reddit, and Twitter) as well as the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This latest chapter of the metaverse’s convoluted history reveals a focus not on virtual reality goggles but rather on techno-capitalist notions like digital wallets, crypto-assets, and targeted advertisements. The metaverse’s wallet-holders collect status symbols like limited-edition profile pictures, fashion items for avatars, tradable pets and companions, and real estate. Motivated by the metaverse’s sophisticated antecedents and our empirical findings, we propose a subtle conceptual re-orientation that respects the metaverse’s equivocal nature and rejects sanitised solutionism. Do not let the phantasmagorical goggles distract you too much: Big Meta is watching you, and it expects you to become a wallet-holder. Blockchain proponents want this as well.

Introduction. The purpose of the paper is to test the hypothesis about the entry into the social interactions of actors of a special kind - devices with artificial intelligence. The author proposes to discuss a hypothesis about the emergence of a new species of a subject of artificial nature. The concept is based on the concepts developed by the author of a technosubject and a new kind of subjectivity. The character of a new type of interaction agent is analyzed, its varieties are revealed. Methodology and sources . When identifying signs of similarity between human and machine subjectivity, the author proceeds from interpretations of the subject and subjectivity in the works of G. Tononi, M. DeLanda, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, S. Beskaravayny. The sources are the studies of T. Walsh, R. Brooks, D. Jordan, D. Markoff, R. Jonck, R. Kurzweil, A. Greenfield, K. Kelly, Sh. Turkle. The results of experiments on the construction of the social community of robots at the Kurchatov Institute and the Institute of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, the results of sociological studies of the nature of human relationships with robots carried out by Sherry Turkle from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are taken into account. Results and discussion . It is proved that human interaction with a techno-subject forms a special type of sociality - a hybrid society. The mechanism and features of social interactions in a hybrid type of society are revealed. The specificity of inter-actions arising between a person and various types of techno-subject is revealed. The process of the occurrence and occurrence of human anthropomorphic reactions to the activity of robots is analyzed. There is a transition from copying anthropomorphic features to devices with artificial intelligence to the formation of their subjectivity. The options for constructing human relationships with robots are considered. Conclusion. The conclusion is drawn that there is a high degree of likelihood of an increase in the future conflict between the two lines of improvement of androids based on the creation of a universal humanoid intelligence: strengthening or replacing a person. An alternative possibility of the third direction is considered: harmonization of relations between participants in a hybrid society.

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a tool, but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. Technology, she writes, catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture--to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners--people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think--about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.) Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms--how this happens, and what it means for all of us--is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.

In Sherry Turkle’s (2006, p. 220) words: ‘We are witnessing a new form of sociality in which the isolation of our physical bodies does not indicate our state of connectedness but may be its precondition.’ In this sense, the human rights site ‘Crisis in Darfur’, brought to you by Google Earth (GE) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) documents an earth haunted by real people, both viewers and the viewed. States of embodiment involved in our actual cognitive and physical manipulations of personal computer technologies usually, in Turkle’s sense, also involve our physical isolation from those we connect with via these technologies. This chapter investigates ways in which we nevertheless make connections with the people represented on our Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs) despite this physical isolation via our connections with the websites in which these representations are found together with our subsequent connections to those who create these websites and the potential links between them. In the broader context of documentary discourse, I am investigating and speculating here on some of the ways in which web documentaries might be situated within the web itself.

This chapter provides a context for the subsequent case study chapters by discussing the study of computer-mediated communication. Pioneers in this field include Howard Rheingold (1993), Susan Herring (1994) and Sherry Turkle (1995). The more linguistic/semiotic aspects of this research have covered such topics as:KeywordsWorld WideOnline CommunicationBulletin BoardOnline InteractionInternet PornographyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.