Sherry Turkle Books

For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening--that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices.We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines. In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an "intimate ethnography" that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: "This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope." Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: "What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?"The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer. In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan ("Tokyo sat trapped inside it"); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.

Argues that today's digital culture is undermining relationships, creativity, and productivity, and pushes for the return of face-to-face interaction among people

"MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together , Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work In this vivid and poignant narrative, Sherry Turkle ties together her coming-of-age story and her groundbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in post-war Brooklyn in a house filled with mysteries, Turkle searched for clues. She mastered the codes that governed her secretive mother's world. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father. And never to use his name, her name. Empathy was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity propelled her to the thresholds of defining cultural moments that became life-lessons: she practiced friendship at Harvard/Radcliffe at the cusp of co-education during the antiwar movement, mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and faced the extent of her ambition while fighting for her place in the academy as a woman at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a masterclass in finding meaning through life's work."-- Provided by publisher

"MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together , Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work In this vivid and poignant narrative, Sherry Turkle ties together her coming-of-age story and her groundbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in post-war Brooklyn in a house filled with mysteries, Turkle searched for clues. She mastered the codes that governed her secretive mother's world. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father. And never to use his name, her name. Empathy was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity propelled her to the thresholds of defining cultural moments that became life-lessons: she practiced friendship at Harvard/Radcliffe at the cusp of co-education during the antiwar movement, mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and faced the extent of her ambition while fighting for her place in the academy as a woman at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a masterclass in finding meaning through life's work."-- Provided by publisher

Exploring the impact of online life, this book delves into how computers challenge and reshape our fundamental notions of identity. It examines the interplay between technology and self-perception, revealing new ways of understanding ourselves in a digital age. Through insightful analysis, it highlights the transformative effects of the internet on personal and societal concepts of selfhood.

How the simulation and visualization technologies so pervasive in science, engineering, and design have changed our way of seeing the world.

Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a new solitude.

Argues that social-networking sites, companion robots and other technology are fueling disturbing levels of isolation and are causing humans to mistake digital communication for actual human connection. By the author of Simulations and Its Discontents.