Sherry Turkle

Biography

Sherry Turkle was born in 1948 in New York City. She studied social studies at Radcliffe College and then sociology and psychology at Harvard, where she earned her doctorate. A decisive influence was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whom she studied in France; her first book, Psychoanalytic Politics (1978), examined the French psychoanalytic movement and its intellectual politics. This training gave Turkle an enduring method: the close, clinical attention to how people actually experience the machines and systems that structure their lives.

In the late 1970s Turkle began studying the emerging culture of personal computing, first at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then as a professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, where she has taught for four decades. She was one of the first researchers to treat computers and mobile devices not as tools but as "evocative objects" that shape identity, intimacy, and selfhood. Her books trace a single arc: from the computer as a mirror of the mind (The Second Self, 1984), through the multiply realized selves of online life (Life on the Screen, 1995), to the growing isolation of a hyperconnected age (Alone Together, 2011, and Reclaiming Conversation, 2015). She has received numerous honors, including an MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she is a leading public voice of digital humanism.

Key Ideas

Evocative Objects and the Tethered Self

Turkle's method is to ask people what their devices mean to them. She found that computers, robots, and phones function as "evocative objects" — things that provoke reflection about the self, relationships, and what it means to be alive. Her central diagnosis of the mobile age is the "tethered self": we are never alone, never unconnected, never fully present anywhere, because we are always attached to a device that can summon us elsewhere. The tether offers security but exacts a price: it weakens the capacity for solitude, for waiting, for the unmediated encounter with other people.

Alone Together: The Paradox of Connection

The title of Turkle's most famous book names the paradox of contemporary life: "alone together." We are more connected than ever and more isolated than ever, because connectivity substitutes for relationship. Texting instead of talking, curating instead of conversing, we come to expect more from technology and less from each other. Turkle shows, through hundreds of interviews, how the "Goldilocks effect" — connection at just the right distance, controllable and disposable — becomes the preferred mode of intimacy, and how this preference atrophies the skills of empathy, negotiation, and presence that full conversation requires.

The Robotic Moment

A central theme of Alone Together is the "robotic moment": the point at which people, especially the lonely and the elderly, are willing to treat sociable robots — Paro the seal, AIBO the dog, Kismet the expressive head — as companions, even knowing that these machines cannot love or understand them. Turkle argues that this willingness reveals a crisis in human relationships: we are so afraid of being let down by people that we prefer the undemanding attentions of machines. She rejects the claim that "something is better than nothing," insisting that simulated relationship changes our expectations of real relationship, and that the question of what we owe to robots is really the question of what we are willing to become.

Reclaiming Conversation

Turkle's response is a program of what she calls "reclaiming conversation." Face-to-face talk, she argues, is not a nostalgia item but a basic human skill — the place where empathy is built, where children learn to read faces, where disagreement is practiced, and where solitude and presence are balanced. Her later work shows how the decline of conversation correlates with measurable declines in empathy among the young, and she urges deliberate practices of digital moderation: devices away from the table, attention granted to the person in the room, and a renewed valorization of boredom and silence. Conversation, for Turkle, is a moral as well as a social good.

Identity and the Evocative Object

Turkle's method of "evocative objects" treats things — computers, phones, robots — as mirrors that provoke self-reflection. Since The Second Self, she has shown how people use machines to think about what is special about being human: children ask whether computers are alive, adults ask whether their phones make them more or less themselves. The device becomes an occasion for identity work, a partner in the ongoing construction of the self. In the networked age, this means that identity is increasingly performed for an audience: the self is curated, presented, and validated online, and the gap between the performed self and the felt self becomes a source of anxiety. Turkle's clinical attention to these dynamics — inherited from her psychoanalytic training — gives her work its distinctive method: not statistics but close, patient listening to what people say about their lives with machines.

Major Works

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) was the first major study of how personal computers changed identity and thought. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) explored online identity and the "multiplicity" of self. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) is her best-known work, diagnosing the robotic moment and the paradox of connection. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015) set out her practical and ethical program for restoring face-to-face dialogue.

Legacy

Turkle is the most influential psychologist of the digital age, and her interview-based method has set the standard for qualitative research on technology and culture. Her concepts — the tethered self, evocative objects, the robotic moment, alone together — are now part of the common vocabulary of digital studies, and her work has shaped everything from design ethics to debates about children and screens to the philosophy of human-robot interaction.

Critics have sometimes accused her of nostalgia or of overstating the decline of conversation, and defenders of robotics have challenged her skepticism about machine companionship. But her core finding — that people's own accounts of their digital lives reveal a pervasive unease, a hunger for presence amid plenty of connection — has proved robust across two decades of research. Her work remains the conscience of the philosophy of technology in its digital-humanist register.

Sources

• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
• MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, "Sherry Turkle."
• Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.