Sherry Turkle Quote on Connection: Expecting More from Technology

We expect more from technology and less from each other. — Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (2011)

Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) is one of the defining books of the digital age. The sentence — which gives the book its subtitle — states its thesis in a single line: we have begun to ask machines for what only people can give, and to accept from machines less than we owe each other.

Context

Turkle, a psychologist and sociologist at MIT, had studied the human-technology relationship for three decades, beginning with The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1995). Alone Together was written in the moment when social media and mobile devices were becoming ubiquitous, and it draws on hundreds of interviews with children, adolescents, and adults. Turkle describes two kinds of "robotic moment": the moment when people — especially the elderly and the lonely — are willing to accept a robot companion as adequate company, and the moment when people prefer the mediated presence of the screen to the risky, demanding presence of other people.

The book's structure mirrors this double shift: first, sociable robots, and then, networked life. In both domains Turkle observes the same dynamic: new technologies offer the promise of connection without vulnerability, company without the effort of friendship, and control without the mess of intimacy. What begins as a convenience becomes a norm, and the norm quietly redefines what we count as connection, conversation, and care.

Meaning

The sentence means that our expectations have migrated. We expect technology to provide what we once expected from people: attention, response, comfort, even love. We expect our devices to remember us, to reach out, to be always available — and they are. But the relationship is asymmetrical: machines give us the appearance of care without the demands of care. Meanwhile, our expectations of each other have correspondingly thinned — we accept that friends are busy, that conversation is intermittent, that connection is maintained by likes and pings rather than by presence.

Turkle's point is not simply that technology is bad. It is that the design of the technology and the habits we build around it reshape what we consider normal. When children grow up treating a screen as a companion, and when adults prefer texting to talking because talking is "too risky," the very capacity for empathic connection is put at risk. Turkle coins the term "alone together" to describe the paradox of networked life: we are never fully alone, because the connection is always available; and never truly together, because the connection is always mediated and always partial.

The deeper meaning is a warning about substitution. A chatbot that simulates sympathy, a robot that performs companionship, a network that delivers "connection" as a service — these meet a real need, but they meet it by simplifying it. They train us to expect less from the hard, slow, uncertain work of being with other people. The expectation that technology will compensate for the failures of human relationship is, in Turkle's account, itself a form of loss.

Philosophical Significance

The sentence anchors Turkle's digital humanism: a position that neither celebrates nor condemns technology but asks what it does to our capacities for attention, empathy, solitude, and conversation. Against both techno-utopianism and techno-pessimism, Turkle insists that the question is not whether the machines are good or bad, but whether we are becoming less able to do the things that make life with others meaningful.

The philosophical stakes are ethical and anthropological. If we define connection as data exchange and care as responsiveness, we have changed the meaning of being human. Turkle draws on the tradition of thinking about dialogue and presence — from Martin Buber's I-Thou to Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the face — to argue that genuine connection requires the risk of exposure to another who is not under our control. A machine that is designed never to challenge us, never to disappoint us, cannot teach us the patience and generosity that friendship requires.

Critics have charged that Turkle overstates the decline, that digital relationships can supplement and even deepen face-to-face bonds, and that "expecting more from technology" is not always a loss but sometimes an extension of care across distance. The sentence, however, remains a precise diagnostic instrument: it gives us a criterion for evaluating every new technology. Does this device increase our expectations of each other, or does it quietly lower them? The answer, Turkle suggests, is rarely what the marketing promises. We expect more from technology and less from each other — and the balance, she argues, is one we should choose deliberately rather than drift into.

Sources

• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.