'Control is one of the big attractions of living in the digital world, we only post the best pictures of ourselves enjoying the best parts of our lives. But does that mean we start to treat our lives more like a brand, to be sold to our friends and protected from anything negative? Aleks Krotoski talks to Sherry Turkle director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and the Self to ask if this could cause us problems.'

'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. -- A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken. In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone.'

'As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication – and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.' -- "...people can't get enough of each other, if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control." -- "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding – and we clean them up with technology." -- "We use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. And our flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for reflection." -- "...people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people altogether." -- "Being alone feels like a problem to be solved, and so people try to solve it by 'connecting'." -- "...if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves – so we 'connect' more and more, but in the process we set ourselves up to be isolated." -- "Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious, in order to feel alive. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

'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...' -- "...Alone Together is about human vulnerability and technological affordances. People are actually willing and wanting to substitute robots – that seem to care – for people... Nurturance is the killer app for sociable robotics. Human beings are programmed to love what we nurture." -- "'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' When we use other people in this way, you can get used to seeing them as spare parts; as ways to support our too fragile selves."

"The most destructive thing that we've allowed to have an expectation of each other is that we will instantly respond to each other ... and almost without thinking." "If you need to be constantly responding, you can only answer in little bits that really show no thought." -- "The kid comes out of the school, is desperately trying to make eye contact with the parent, and the parent is sitting there glued to the phone..." "This generation has grown up seeing technology as the competition. I don't think they're going to raise their children this way."

'To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling. The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves. This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection.'

'“A ‘place’ used to constitute a physical place and the people within it. What is a place if those present have their attention on the absent?” -- Turkle also points out that the language used in email and texts tends to be less carefully constructed because it is understood to be garbage bound – that is, it is intended to be read once and then deleted. Reading this, I see an even greater value to every academic essay and oral presentation we assign to our students. Very few arenas of digital communication demand careful thought, planning, and sustained argument. Giving students the opportunity to build these seemingly ‘old fashioned’ skills may be one of the most valuable things we have to offer them.'

"We can't get enough of each other IF we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control." -- "Things go from: I have a feeling, I want to make a call; to: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. In other words, the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it."

'Sherry Turkle discusses Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' -- "People start asking simpler questions so they can get immediate answers."

'Alone Together is the result of hundreds of interviews that Turkle has carried out over the last 15 years with a broad cross section of children, adults and old people. What Turkle finds is that, out of a sense of disappointment with each other, we’ve turned to robots as a substitute for human interaction.' -- "[The robotic moment] is the moment when we think that robots care about us. It's the moment when we ratchet up our expectations that we can put robots in the place of human beings." -- ("6 year-olds aren't disappointed, are they?") [Neglect] "There's this seduction by the robotic... Children attach to these robots and want to love them... there's a slide from better-than-nothing to better-than-everything: I want to robot dog because it's better than nothing. Then: a robot dog, it can always stay a puppy and that is kind of nice. And then only few conversations down the road: this robot will never die." -- "We've invented a form where we propose to substitute for our selves."

'We “learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity.” There is a real danger, Turkle writes, that the rise of robotic companions will lower our expectations of human relationships, that we reduce relationships and come to see this reduction as the norm. She is clearly shaken by her research and she asks us to confront the implications of this loss. Turkle’s argument is that the choice of technologically-mediated friendships enables fragile and vulnerable individuals to regulate and plan their self-presentations in the world. The screen separates the speakers, she writes, offering an “illusion of privacy” and the “chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes.” Texting, in other words, offers at least the illusion of control and protection.'

'We'd rather text than talk. It makes us feel more in control. We use digital technology to try to be efficient in our intimacies and it leaves us diminished. A mother explains that she cannot resist the "lure of the little red light" telling her that she has a new message on her BlackBerry, even when she is driving on the highway with her children in the car. We are vulnerable to the seduction of always-on/always-on-us connection. The unread message, that red light, has come to stand for our feelings of hope. That someone wants us, that something new is coming into our lives. -- Much of the reaction to Alone Together has been critical, as though I have told the world to "unplug" ... I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. This rhetoric points to a serious problem.' -- Addiction.

'...our uses of new technologies demean real friendships, lead us to treat others as objects, lower our expectations for real human connection, turn emotion into performance, make us confused about when we are alone and when we are together, and is creating a generation of narcissists so fragile that they need constant social reassurance. Turkle reads as diseased much that many of us see as signs of robust social health. So, for Turkle, those posting cellphone photos from the presidential inauguration were not sharing the moment with distant friends, but were pathologically escaping from the here and now. Turkle reads teens’ texting not as a sign that they’re more socially connected than ever, but as evidence of a need for constant reassurance. But, suppose human nature is more malleable than her psychological model allows. Suppose the Internet is devising a self that is social in new ways that include intimacy, but that also find real human value in thinly spread connections.'

'So how will we relate to these "alive enough" machines? "We start to consider what I call the "better than nothing" argument: that the robot would be better than nothing, which is really going down a slippery slide. Eventually, the robot starts to be seen as "better than anything." The story begins with: "Oh, a robot puppy. That will be nice because I'm allergic to dogs. So a robot would be better than not having anything." And then all of a sudden it's: "Oh, the robot puppy, you can always keep it a puppy at that cute puppy stage and it will never die and leave you alone." All of a sudden the robot puppy becomes better than any real puppy could ever be because it offers you things that living beings never could: a kind of total control, no surprises, a made-to-measure relationship where you can have things exactly as you want them." -- "If you don't know how to be alone, all you can ever be is lonely."'

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

"...differences between acting out and working through. ...using these environments to explore and work through some aspect of the self... putting different aspects of yourself out there."

'Not a few sum up their position by saying in one way or another, “The way to deal is to just be good.” But sometimes a citizenry should not “be good.” You have to leave room for this—space for dissent, real dissent. You need to leave technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us. In a democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected. My hope is that we rediscover our need for privacy. To me, opening up a conversation about rethinking the Net, privacy, and civil society is not backward-looking nostalgia in the least. It seems like part of a healthy process of democracy defining its sacred spaces.'

'[Turkle] told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we're also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. "Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that," she said. "But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control."

'Among young people especially [Sherry Turkle] found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.” -- I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.' -- I am Jack's Social Object

Turkle: "There's a kind of self-surveillance that young poeple don't think about... What is intimacy without privacy? This is really a question for this generation. -- Philosophers tell us that we become human when we’re confronted with another face, with a voice, with the inflection of a voice; these kids don’t want to see a face, they don’t want to hear a voice. They want to text. In a way we’re no longer nourished but consumed by what we’ve created. It’s not all good. I see people in retreat as much as they are in advance now that they have all this information. I see people defining a successful self as a self that can keep up with its email. -- We live in a kind of paradoxical time. We’re giving young people a very paradoxical message: The world is more and more complex; on the other hand, we’re only going to ask you a question that you can answer in two seconds. We leave ourselves less and less time for reflection because our communications media push us to quick responses."

'FB: "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites. The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there? As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. This is not empowering."'

"Simulation games are not just objects for thinking about the real world but also cause to think about how the real world itself has become a simulation game. The seduction of simulation invites several possible responses. One to accept simulations on their own terms. This might be called ’simulation resignation’. Or one can reject simulations to whatever degree is possible. This might be called ’simulation denial’. But one can imagine a third response. This would take the cultural pervasiveness of simulation as a challenge to develop a more sophisticated social criticism. This new criticism would not lump all simulations together, but would discriminate among them. It would take as its goal the development of simulations that actually help players challenge the model’s built in assumptions. This new criticism would try to use simulation as a means of consciousness-raising. [This might be called 'simulation consciousness'.]" — Simulation and its Discontents in Life on the Screen, pp 71

'Aleks examines the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and asks how they are changing our relationships.' -- Sherry Turkle: "There's a new personality type: It moves from, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call,' to, 'I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call.' There's a sense in which you almost need a sense of validation and the support of the community to feel the feeling in the first place. Bringing other people into the loop of feeling your feeling, this is very seductive."

Thoreau's formulation of a fully developed life: Live deliberately; live in your own life; live with no sense of resignation. '... on all of those dimensions, I feel that we're taking away from ourselves the things that Thoreau thought were so essential to discovering an identity. We're not deliberate; we're bombarded. We have no stillness; we have resignation -- There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.'

'We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right. Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are. -- I think when you have a generation that doesn't see simulation as second best, doesn't know what's behind simulation and the programming that goes into simulation, but just takes simulation at interface value, you really have a set up for a very problematic political, among other things, set of issues. ...things are built out of simple programs to more complex programs, and these programs are cultural creations, cultural constructions... Education has dropped that out of the curriculum. -- We're becoming quite intolerant of letting each other think complicated things.'

'THE INTERNET DISCONNECT -- You feel in a zone that is private and ephemeral. But the Internet is public and forever. -- The psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson argued that adolescents needed an experience of "moratorium," a time and space for relatively consequence-free experimentation. They need to fall in and out of love with people and ideas. I have argued that the Internet provides such spaces and is thus a rich ground for working through identity. But over time, it has become clear that the idea of the moratorium space does not easily mesh with a life that generates its own electronic shadow. Over time, many find a way to ignore or deny the shadow. For teenagers, the need for a moratorium space is so compelling that they will recreate it as fiction. And indeed, leaving an electronic trace can come to seem so natural that the shadow seems to disappear. We want to forget that we have become the instruments of our own surveillance.'

'Filmmaker Ben Gonyo has been hard at work for the last year and a half crafting a show all about gamers. Finally a show focused on players. Sign our petitions as we gear up to pitch G4, MTV, Spike, HBO, Hulu and a slew of others' -- BUMP

'Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia. For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded. What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: "It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it's alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it's alive enough to be tortured." We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us.'

Sherry Turkle: '“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be. Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind. “If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”'

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

'This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. “You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics. There is a danger that we’ll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions," says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to “live” forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. “Roboticists have come to speak of ‘I Thou’ relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers.”

"Is the real self always the naturally occurring one? If a patient on the antidepressant medication Prozac tells his therapist he feels more like himself with the drug than without it, what does this do to our standard notions of a real a self? Where does the medication end and the person begin?"

'... three major themes that emerged from our study of first encounters: Children display #perseverance in their efforts to communicate with the robots, including finding ways to explain and excuse the robots' failures to communicate with them, perseverance that expresses a range of personal styles. A similar range of styles marks children's ways of #anthropomorphizing the robots. For the most part, children come to see the robots as ‚"sort of alive" because they feel in a social relationship with them and use a range of strategies to overcome disappointments and system failures. Finally, children's stake in preserving a sense of relationship is so strong that they actively resist any #demystification of the robots. With few exceptions, children were uninterested to the point of unwilling to understand the robots in terms of underlying mechanism. Once defined as social, any lack of particular competencies is treated as an unfortunate disability for which the robot deserves empathy."

'There are some people who use the Net to act out. That is, they use this new medium to express the unresolved conflicts in their lives, to run the "old tapes" in unproductive ways. But there are people who are able to use this medium to work through issues, who are able to use the Net to effect change in their lives. In the best cases, looking at one's life on screen causes one to reflect on the self and on what one seems to desire, what seems to be missing, what seems to be gratifying. Of course, in some cases, what people experience in the on-line world is disquieting or disturbing. but here again, the most constructive response is to use this experience as grist for the mill for thinking about the rest of one's life.'

'The new generation of "sociable" or "relational" robots has been built to engage us, creature to creature. They can recognize faces, learn the names of individuals, make eye contact, all things that push our simple Darwinian buttons. When an entity does these things, we are toast; we believe there is a sentient creature before us.' -- 'Q: Have we gone too far in our devotion? A: 'I call it technological promiscuity. We are prone to attaching to technologies even if there is no authenticity in the forthcoming "relationship". From there, it is a small step to wanting the object to care for you in return. So we have to exercise our critical faculties. We have to ask about our human purposes. The first thing designers as well as consumers should think about is the human purposes being served by the design. It is more crucial now than ever before to consider how to respect, not exploit, our human vulnerabilities–particularly the emotional programming of our animal past and present.'

"Young scientists are encouraged by a personal experience with an object they an understand and with which they can tinker. Playing with objects inn their own way leads children to build a personal scientific style. There has been no simple migration to a new digital world. Children grow up in many worlds–they are seduced by the virtual but always brought back to the physical, to the analog, and, of course, to nature. ...from the periodic table of the elements (because it offers an image of perfect and reassuring organization) to LEGO blocks (because they offer a way to create perfect and reassuring symmetries) can become points of entry to larger transformative experiences of understanding and confidence very often at the point they are shared."

"Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

"We construct our objects and our objects construct use." -- "Online experiences of playing multiple aspects of self are resonant with theories that imagine the self as a multiple and fragmented, or as a society of selves."-- "Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with thich people can become actively involved. They tend to be theories that can be 'played' with. So one way to examine the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with, objects that can help theory move beyond intellectual circles. For Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried ideas... today computational experiences carry ideas."

"... computational objects do not simply do things for us, they do things to us as people, to our ways of being [in] the world, to our ways of seeing ourselves an others. Increasingly, technology also puts itself into a position to do things with us, particularly with the introduction of 'relational artifacts,' here defined as technologies that have 'states of mind' and where encounters with them are enriched through understanding these inner states. In the case of relational artifacts for children and the elderly, nurturance is the new 'killer app.' We attach to what we nurture. How will interacting with relational artifacts affect people's way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special?"

"to solve her mysteries, Nancy Drew was called upon to decode an object. Nancy's deft intellect would unravel [metaphorical secrets] after days of turning the object over and over in her mind. I searched my neighborhood for mysterious objects to decode. My grandmother, grandfather, and aunt would sometimes come into the kitchen to watch me at my investigations. At the time I didn't know what I was looking for. I think they did. I'm looking, without awareness, for the one who is missing. I'm looking for a trace of my father. If there is a sense of vocation to become attentive to the detail of other people's narratives, mine was born in the smell and feel of the memory closet. That is where I determined that I would solve mysteries, that I would use objects as my clues to the heart of the matter. That is where I decided that when objects could not tell a full story, I would find a person willing to talk to me before a voice was silenced before someone was forever cut out of the picture.'

"Psychopharmacology, genetic engineering, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and robotics are among the technologies now raising fundamental questions about selfhood, subjectivity, relationships, development, and what is means to be human. An unstated question lies behind much of our current preoccupation with the future of technology. The question is not what will technology be like in the future, but rather, what will we be like, what are we becoming as we forge increasingly intimate relationships with our machines?"

"From the earliest stages of life, we have a profound need to connect. Infants experience themselves as if the objects in the world are pat of them and they are part of the objects in the world. These objects, such as Linus's baby blanket or a teddy bear, are perceived as being imbued with the self. A computer, too, can evoke in its users a sense of connection and personality." -- "Toys like the Tamagotchi ask for nurturance. By doing so, they push a profound button is us. As a species, we're programmed to attach to the things that we take care of and that blossom under our care."

"... children and seniors develop philosophical positions that are inseparable from their emotional needs. Affect and cognition wok together in the subjective response to relational technologies." -- "Orelia wants the kind of love that only a living creature can provide. She fears the ability of any creature to behave 'as if' it could love. She denied a chilly emotional reality by attributing qualities of intuition, transparency and connectedness to all people and animals. A philosophical position about robots is linked to an experience of the machine-like qualities of which people are capable, a good example of the interdependence of philosophical position and psychological motivation." -- "Relational artifacts, as objects between the living and not living, may have some special. As one nursing home resident said about Paro: 'I don't care if he is real or not. I love him."

"What is the power of objects to move us, to forge important new ideas or to link us to other people?" -- "In the cyborg world, we move beyond objects as tools or prosthetics to become one with them. The natural and the artificial no longer find themselves in opposition. As we live with implanted computational materials, we come to be on a different footing with computers. Since we started to share other people's tissue and genetic material, we have increasingly been on a different footing with the bodies of others. As we live with objects that challenge the boundaries between the born and the created, between humans and everything else, we will need to tell ourselves different stories."

"understanding the assumptions that underlie simulation is a key element of political power. People who understand the distortions imposed by simulations are in a position to call for more direct economic and political feedback, new kinds of representation, more channels of information. They demand greater transparency in their simulations (particularly the ones we use to make real-life decisions) make their underlying models more accessible. We come to written text with centuries-long habits of readership. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: Who wrote these words, what is their message, why were they written, how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central goal for computer education must now be to teach students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit. The specific questions may be different but the intent is the same: to develop habits or readership appropriate to a culture of simulation."

'What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is he real me?' -- 'Computing would offer [Turkle] endless moments of sweet epiphany when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for terms of Lacan's manifesto: computing is constructed as a set of languages; language (the relationship of terms to each other) is the structure that forms computing; the boundaries between data and execution are blurred; and so forth. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism–decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)–is rendered clear at last.'

'We are ill prepare for the new psychological world we are creating. We make objects that are emotionally powerful; at the same time, we say things such as "technology is just a tool" that deny the power our creations both on us as individuals and on our culture. I find it amazing how in less than one generation people have gotten used to the idea of giving their children Ritalin–not because the childen are hyperactive but because it will enhance their performance in school. who are you, anyway–your unmedicated self or your Ritalin self? for a lot of people, it has become unproblematic that their self is their self with Ritalin or their self with the addiction of a Web connection as an extension of mind. As one student with a wearable computer with a 24-hour Internet connection put it, "I become my computer. It's not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I'm a better person."'

'... no matter how attentive its owner, Tamagotchis either died or sprouted wings after a couple of weeks or so, often prompting gloom and guilt. Furbys evoked similar emotions. "I would rush over to the house with a new Furby, and every single time, the child showed no interest in the new one." Ms Audley recalled. "They gave lots of indications that they felt betrayed, taken in and fooled. It had revealed its nature as a machine and they felt embarrassed and angry. They were totally unwilling to invest that kind of emotional relationship in an object again." -- And what about creatures that seem to be alive but immortal? Professor Turkle said one woman told her hat Aibo was better than a real dog because it would not die suddenly and plunge its owner into grief. The comment startled Professor Turkle... "The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents potentially dramatic changes in our psychology."

'... we "project ourselves into our own drama, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star... computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual."' -- '... once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, bot on and off the screen?'

"For some advocates of computers in education, programming encourages children to think like epistemologists and psychologists because it raised questions about procedural thinking and encouraged reflection on one's own style of learning. In my own research I found that for some people, understanding how a computer worked supported the belief that you could understand how other things worked as well–in the social as well as in the technical world. The transparent understanding of a computer could become a metaphor for political empowerment. What dominates [now] is simulation and presentation as its own powerful idea. the computing that children are most immersed in has moved from programming and the aesthetic of the algorithm to software that socialises users into the culture of simulation."

'"The transition is from objects-to-think with to objects-to-nurture. The new hook for these kids, and not just for kids, is nurturance instead of control and mastery." -- "I am trying in one way or another to get people to look at the subjective side of technology. My focus is on the individual experience, on the construction of identity and the way technology is used in the construction of identity." -- Turkle describes how people visit chat rooms and other kinds of multiuser domains to explore facets of their personalities–and how they integrate what they learn into "RL,"or "Real Life." (Turkle herself prefers the acronym "ROL," or "Rest of Life.")'

'"This is more real than my real life." says a character who turns out to be a man playing a woman who pretending to be a man. In this game the rules of social interaction are built not received. Traditional role playing prompts reflection on personal and interpersonal issues, but in games that take place in ongoing virtual societies such as MUDs, the focus is on larger social and cultural themes as well. The networked computer serves as an "evocative object" for thinking about community. Additionally, people playing in the MUDs struggle towards a new, still tentative discourse about the nature of a social world that is populated both by people and by programs. In this, life in the MUD may serve as a harbinger of what is to come in the social spaces that we still contrast with the virtual by calling the "real."'

"We relate to [computational objects] as psychological machines, not only because so many of these new objects might be said to have primitive psychologies, but because they cause us to reflect upon our own." -- 'In some ways, Case's description of his inner world of actors who address him are capable of taking over negotiations is reminiscent of the language of people with MPD. But the contrast is significant: Case's inner actors are not split off from each other or his sense of "himself." He experiences himself very much as a collective self, not feeling that he must goad or repress this or that aspect of himself into conformity. He is at ease, cycling through from Katherine Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart. To use [Philip] Bromberg's language, online life has helped Case learn how to "stand in spaces between selves" and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and still feel a unity.'

'The boy's experience of early separation and loss is traumatic. It leads to a strong desire to control his environment. Male separation from others is about differentiation but also autonomy, 'the wish to gain control over the sources and object of pleasure in order to shore up possibilities for happiness against the risk of disappointment and loss' (Gilligan 1982, 46) Women grow up differently... women look look to affection, relationships, responsibility and caring for a community of others... Carol Gilligan talks about 'the hierarchy and the web' as metaphors to describe the different ways in which men and women see their worlds. Men see a hierarchy of autonomous positions. Women see a web of interconnections between people. Men want to be alone at the top; they fear being too far out on the edge. Men can be with the computer and still be alone, separate and autonomous. When women perceive this technology as demanding separation, it is experienced as alien and dangerous.'

'We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.' -- '"Being put on pause" is how one of my students describes the feeling of walking down the street with a friend who has just taken a call on his cell. "I mean I can't go anywhere; I can't just pull out some work. I've just been stopped in midsentence and am expected to remember, to hold the thread of conversation until he wants to pick it up again."

"Eliza had a strong emotional effect on many who used it. Weizenbaum was surprised that his students were eager to chat with the program and some even wanted to be alone with it. What made Eliza a valued interlocutor? What matters were so private that they could only be discussed with a machine? Eliza not only revealed people's willingness to talk to computers but their reluctance to talk to other people. Students' trust in Eliza did not speak to what they thought Eliza would understand but their lack of trust in the people who would understand. Relational artifacts have become evocative objects, object that clarify our relationships to the world and ourselves. People who meet these objects feel a desire to nurture them. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. People begin to care for these objects and want the objects to care about them."

"Despite their differences, psychoanalysis and AI have always shared theoretical affinities –among these, the challenge to the idea of the autonomous, intentional actor, the need for self-reference in theory building, and the need for objects such as censors to deal with internal conflict. The strength and the weakness of object theories are the same in both psychoanalysis and AI: the strength is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated object may be too powerful: they explain the mind by postulating many minds within it."

"'The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit' argues that the computer was more than a tool. but was a part of our social and psychological lives. That is what Turkle does: She sees an object, and by studying how people relate to that object, she defines new questions of the self."

"Given the opportunity, children will make intimate connections, connections they must construct on their own. But at a time when science education is in crisis, many of us discourage the object passions of children, perhaps out of fear that they will become "trapped," learning to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This should not give objects a bad name. They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves. They are points of entry to transformative experiences, experiences that often emerge as they are shared."

'"It helps young people avoid conversation," said Turkle. "People text because it's easy and also because it allows you to not do the sometimes very hard work of confronting something difficult. You avoid conversations and you avoid looking someone in the eye and seeing that you hurt them, you avoid developing some of the very small but precious signals." She added that a lack of interpersonal interaction can have the unintended consequence of making people seem tactless.'

'That is what Turkle does: She sees an object, and by studying how people relate to that object, she defines new questions of self. "We think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with."'

'Paro (a robotic seal-like creative) is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is treated. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." and then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself. The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computation objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. They are potent objects-to-think-with for asking the questions, posed by all machines that tether us to new socialities: "What is an authentic relationship with a machine?" "What are machines doing to our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship?"'

'"The goal of healthy personality development is not to become a One, not to become a unitary core, it's to have a flexible ability to negotiate the many - cycle through multiple identities. A lot was done in my mother's generation to keep experiences at home and at work, motherhood and social life - to keep it easy for you to seem to be one person. Around women you couldn't use certain language, for example. And for men too: you were boss at work, you were boss at home. When you came home, you weren't supposed to be sensitive and nurturing with your child. People's life experiences encouraged them to think of themselves as a One." Men's lives, especially, have been socially constructed along unitary lines, which, she speculates, may be why so many of them are having a hard time just now. But women today... cycle through these different roles, and we're trained to keep them a little bit separate, but not so separate that you can't negotiate them.'

'Turkle's study of Lacan was preparing her for a future she couldn't anticipate: a future represented by computing. Computing would offer her endless moments of sweet epiphany, when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism - decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages) - is rendered clear at last. How would Lacan, who never, so far as Turkle knows, had anything to do with computers, feel about computing now? "I think he'd have been very excited by the idea of this new space for the weaving of the symbolic order, as he called it. The Web is a very Lacanian idea - chains, knots, weaving, tissues of meaning, people building meaning out of linking and association, not linearly but associatively - these are all his metaphors."'

"[I discovered] someone online called Dr. Sherry, who advertised herself as a cyberpsychologist who was doing interviews and studying people in this virtual environment. And I hadn't created Dr. Sherry. This was a character created by other people. And the question was, what is my relationship with this character created by other people who had in a sense used my name as a trademark? Or a mnemonic, a kind of cultural mnemonic for being a cybershrink, in brief? I think that each of us is a persona. Each of us has spent a lifetime creating a persona. And how do we really feel about its potential appropriation in virtual space by other people? There was no intent to hurt me. And as a matter of fact it turned out the intent was to flatter me, by taking my name in a kind of virtual appropriation, as though I were a trademark for Cybershrink. I think those kinds of questions about your identity and how much you can protect it are going to become very salient."

“For kids [the mobile phone] has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object.” MS. TURKLE, the M.I.T. professor, says cellphones offer another way for the Facebook generation to share every life experience the second it unfolds. “There is a slippage from ‘I have a feeling I want to make a call’ to ‘I need to make a call,’ ” she said. “You don’t get to have a feeling before sharing that feeling anymore.”'

'Today, Turkle says, students are considered computer literate if they can use software programs but need not understand how those tools work or what their underlying assumptions are. That shift troubles her. We live in a world where economic and political decisions are increasingly based on simulation, she insists, and empowered citizens need to understand the nature of the simulation. "That's my creed, that the purpose of the virtual world is to reinforce, politically and psychologically, the good we can do in the real world."'

"During the visit, Becca brought her own evocative object into the kitchen: a patchwork quilt made by her paternal grandmother, who died in July. It carries a triptych of meanings: it is a transitional object (a substitute for a person, using the old Freudian terminology) as well as an object of mourning and memory (a memento of a person who has died) and, finally, an object of history and exchange; in other words, a gift."

"What has struck me is that so [much] of what is being said is in the nature of support rather than information, perhaps because people don't know what information will be useful," says Turkle, who founded the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. "More dire news? Job losses? This is out there, but there is a parallel track on which people are just trying to help each other out."

Q: So social skills acquired online are applicable in RL? -- A: Yes, because in virtual communities people are interacting with other people. That's why I don't get upset that people, even children, are spending a lot of time online. They may be working through important personal issues in the safety of life on the screen. they may come out the other side having had some experience they're able to use to make their lives more fulfilling. It is also possible they are not. I think of this as the "Cyrano effect." Rostand's character created a text-based virtual reality, the world of his letters, to express himself to the woman he loved. But he never really came to believe that he was the man who she was in love with. Sometimes people have trouble bringing their experience of the virtual into other aspects of their lives."

"People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation."

'There is a behavioral connection between the unconsciously “for show” lives of those living in glass condos and the consciously “for show” lives of those spending more and more of their time online, where domestic activities are recorded in achingly specific detail. The result is a cultural confusion about private and public.' --- Sherry Turkle: “There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude. Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide? That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”

'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects ... play ... on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'

Sherry Turkle: "When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place."

"I end Life on the Screen by calling into question the notion that we are at the end of the Freudian century. For me this challenge is deeply felt. Some say we are moving from a psychoanalytic culture to a computer culture, but the reality is more complex. The people who do best in this brave new world, the people who make the most of their lives on the screen, of having multiple identities on the Internet, are the ones who approach technology in a spirit of profound self-reflection."

"... children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to nurture, that might nurture them. How are we going to feel when our computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what interests me now."

'For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?'

"... technology needs time to develop as a medium that enhances the experience of people... my grandparents used the telephone for emergencies and my parents used it to do routine business... I used it as an extension of my social and emotional communication."

"... women who experiment with playing men routinely comment on how little help they are offered... [they] may go on to reflect on how "help" has shaped them: has its availability made them more likely to see themselves as people who needed it?"