'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."

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born." -– Nikola Tesla, quoted in Thomas P. Hughes’s American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm

'The numbers in Peopleware come from DeMarco and Lister's Coding War Games, a series of competitions to complete given coding and testing tasks in minimal time and with minimal defects. The Games have consistently confirmed various known facts of the software game. For instance, the best coders outperform [...] ten-to-one, but their pay seems only weakly linked to their performance. But DeMarco and Lister also found that the best-performing coders had larger, quieter, more private workspaces. It is for this one empirical finding that Peopleware is best known. Around their Coding Wars data, DeMarco and Lister assembled a theory: that managers should help programmers, designers, writers and other brainworkers to reach a state that psychologists call "flow"...'

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

'Taking walks is the entry drug into the quiet, solitary heaven of idleness. For modern Americans, idleness is a shameful, private indulgence. If they attempt it in public, they are stricken by social anxiety. They seem to fear that the slow, solitary, and obviously purposeless amble that marks “taking a walk” signals social incompetence or a life unacceptably adrift. If a shopping bag, gym bag, friend or dog cannot be manufactured, nominal non-idleness must be signaled through an ostentatious “I have friends” phone call, or email-checking. If all else fails, hands must be placed defiantly in pockets, to signal a brazen challenge to anyone who dares look askance at you, “Yeah, I’m takin’ a walk! You got a problem with that?” In America, visible idleness is a luxury for the homeless, the delinquent and immigrants. The defiantly tautological protest, “I have a life,” is quintessentially American. The American life does not exist until it is filled up.'

'Loneliness is the most obvious risk of aloneness. The very idea of solitude may evoke deep childhood fears of abandonment and neglect, and cause some people to rush toward connectedness. Computer life is an attempt to solve the problem of alonetime and social needs. In a culture that no longer provides wilderness or stretches of solitary time, the computer is the one machine that seemingly offers it all: stimulation, knowledge, news, alonetime, relationships, and even sex. One might say it has universal appeal. However, if we are not aware of why computer technology is attracting us, we cannot use it to our best advantage. The question is, are we routinely using the computer and television to find alonetime without really realizing our unfulfilled alone need? Or are we becoming incapable of living in the moment except in technological time-outs like the computer? -- Life's creative solutions require alonetime. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems.'

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.'

'... solitude is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. ...the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. ...we no longer believe in the solitary mind. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. -- The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.'

'...80 percent of the hikikomori are male, some as young as 13 or 14 and some who live in their rooms for 15 years or more. As a hikikomori ages, the odds that he'll re-enter the world decline. Indeed, some experts predict that most hikikomori who are withdrawn for a year or more may never fully recover. That means that even if they emerge from their rooms, they either won't get a full-time job or won't be involved in a long-term relationship. And some will never leave home. In many cases, their parents are now approaching retirement, and once they die, the fate of the shut-ins - whose social and work skills, if they ever existed, will have atrophied - is an open question. -- "We used to believe everyone was equal," said Noki Futagami... "But the gap is growing. I suspect there will be a bipolarization of this society. There will be the group of people who can be in the global world. And then there will be others, like the hikikomori. The ones who cannot be in that world."'

'Constant connection makes us chronically impatient. We come to expect everything to happen at the touch of a button – and get angry when it doesn't. As the actress Carrie Fisher once quipped, these days "even instant gratification takes too long." The other day, my neighbour, a multitasking marketing executive, lost her BlackBerry; or thought she did. It turned out that her five year old daughter had hidden it. "I thought it would get you to listen to me when I talk," explained the little girl. Overdosing on mobile communication can also mess up the relationship we have with ourselves. Human beings need moments of silence and solitude: to rest and recharge, to think deeply and creatively, to look inside and confront the big questions, 'Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is the meaning of life?'. That isn't likely to happen when your mind is constantly wondering if you have new email or if it's time for a fresh tweet.' -- Interesting comment on fear of uncertainty (untether)

"On one level, people have understood the power and importance of silence for a long time. It's why we go to the woods, or the ocean, or up on mountainsides to renew ourselves. And why we take up meditation, or spend time in quiet cathedrals. But even the most majestic mountainside loses a large piece of its power to inspire if it has to compete with a cell phone, text reply, or other efforts to stay connected elsewhere at the same time. Or even to record the moment, instead of simply being in it. We also have an ingrained habit of constant connection that makes disconnecting more difficult. And potentially more painful. Where there's a will there's a way, of course. Which is what makes me suspect that at least part of the constant connectivity movement and technology stems from an inherent desire, within many of us, to have all that distraction. We are not, as a species, hard-wired for solitude. We're social animals, made to exist in tribes and packs. And yet ..."

"I have this sense that experiences need to be shared in a much more mediated way to register to myself as having happened. ...since online sharing has become a way of translating my own experiences to myself, without that process readily available to me, I felt dulled at times, alienated from myself to a degree. All of this is to say that I think that the internet has suddenly brought us a much denser experience of interpersonal relationships and sociality that forces us to reshape the way we think of ourselves, as being potentially social at basically all times. We are perpetually present everywhere, with a ubiquity wireless connectivity supplies. The result of this thick intimacy, this perpetual sociality, is that we may have much more difficulty achieving harmony with the natural world, where presence is momentary and fragile, and sociality is limited to the distance our voices can travel." -- Data or it didn't happen.

'... please don't confuse what I have to say for that tired Luddite screed about how technology is ruining us. It isn't. Except it just might. Because of technology, we never have to be alone anymore. And that's the problem. It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts. "We've gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams," says Dalton Conley. "It's very hard for people to unplug and be alone -- and be with the one data stream of their mind." What's fueling this? Conley says it's anxiety borne out of a deep-seated fear that we're being left out of something, somewhere, and that we may lose out on advancement in our work, social, or family lives if we truly check out. "The anxiety of being alone drives this behavior to constantly respond and Twitter and text, but the very act of doing it creates the anxiety."' -- On Aloneness vs Loneliness (Video inside)

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

'The BBC reports on a cyber cafe outside Tokyo that has a dark room divided into tiny cubicles where 60 people "who rarely emerge" live. These folks are called cyber drifters and "they have just enough money to stay off the streets." It costs $500 a month to live in one of these "coffin-size booths," which have no natural light or fresh air. "In Tokyo it doesn't get any cheaper than that, or more claustrophobic." The owner of the cyber cafe is making a tidy sum off the rent: 60 X $500 = $30,000' -- 'His only window on the world is his computer screen.' -- Video inside

"Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren’t, it can begin to feel like a slight. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone."

'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.”

"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."

Maggie Jackson: "We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli. Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking. ...stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering." -- *gulps*

"What does the contemporary self want? It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone." -- *sigh*

"You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You're in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It's a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your "wife" and you earn double the points for every step you take. If you're like most people, you'll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness. At least I won't be alone. Somebody loves me. Ha-ha-ha... Then -- thwack -- she dies."

'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?"'

Leave me the hell alone! I'm happy how I am. Are you?

"The reason we single-player fans love world-games like Fable II is precisely because there are no other "real" people around. Because really, who needs people? People suck. I'm joking, of course — but only a bit. The truth is that, in online multiplayer worlds, dealing with the delightfully unpredictable behavior of "real" people can be an absolute chore. Teammates fail to show up for a raid, or they leave everyone waiting for an hour, or they log out in the middle of battle and leave you gored by a howling mob. Some of my favorite moments were between battles, when I'd roam through a desolate stretch of forest at night, looking at the shadows and ancient ruins. Hell, I just enjoyed the peace and quiet! I don't get enough of that in my real life. That's why people loved Myst so much back in the day: The game was completely deserted — not a single other person alive — so you were literally alone for hours with nothing but your meditative thoughts."

"Ten years ago we made a conscious effort to connect. Today, if you’re an urban dweller in a city like London, New York or like me, living here in Tokyo you probably make a conscious effort to disconnect."

"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." -- !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.

"Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly." -- My name is Adam and I'm an introvert.

"World-canceling features such as a door or noise-reducing headphones. These features are a nuisance to significant others interested in communication." - Hehe