39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Sherry Turkle
Turkle is the author of the book, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, and a clinical psychologist. She has spent decades interviewing people about their relationships with technology for her first two books, The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1995). For this book, she interviewed hundreds of people, from adults to young children, to give anecdotal context to support her points.
Audrey
Audrey is a 16-year-old who talks about her Facebook profile as her “internet twin” and her avatar. She prefers texting to talking on the phone. Her parents are divorced, and she carries messages between them. She tries out different personalities for her Facebook profile and says that her online avatars boost her confidence. She also has a number of different avatars on Italian MySpace (to talk to different Italian guys from her semester abroad) and on various online games. She dislikes how ephemeral texting is but likes how safe it is.
Joel
Joel is a 26-year-old who plays Second Life. In real life he leads a software design team at a biotech firm. In Second Life, he is a pint-size elephant named Rashi who builds beautiful sculptures and organizes building projects in the virtual world. Joel’s avatar is a more assertive, aspirational version of himself and “faces the same challenges as he does in the physical real” (214).
Julia
Julia is a 16-year-old who texts often and feels anxious if she doesn’t get a response within an hour. She is estranged from her father and is traumatized because a school policy prevented her from contacting her mother on September 11. Turkle observes that Julia needs to be connected to feel like herself.
Aaron Edsinger
Edsinger is the designer of Domo, which is an improvement on previous social robots, Kismet and Cog, and is designed to provide household help to the elderly. As a programmer, Edsinger exploits what they call the “ELIZA effect, that desire to cover for a robot in order to make it seem more competent than it actually is” (131). He says he experiences Domo as “almost alive—almost uncomfortably so” (131).
Pia Lindman
Lindman is a performance artist who, in the fall of 2005, comes to MIT after a project on grief, where she sketched photographs of grieving people from the New York Times and acted them out. Seeking other ways to explore the “connection between embodiment and emotion” (134),she teams up with Edsinger, taping interactions between him and Domo, and then acts them out. She finds she is unable to authentically act out the part of the robot without “imagining it wanting Edsinger’s reaction,” leading her to “a crisis about what is authentic and real emotion” (137).
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