Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age - Softcover

Turkle, Sherry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143109790 ISBN 13: 9780143109792

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Synopsis

WHY TECHNOLOGY IS UNDERMINING OUR CREATIVITY, AND HOW FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION CAN HELP US GET IT BACK

An engaging look at how we have taken flight from conversation due to social media, texting and email, and how it's damaging our relationships, creativity and productivity.

Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don't have to look, listen or reveal ourselves.

We are becoming addicted to connection over conversation, and this fact is stopping us from engaging in real debate, sharing our real opinions and reacting to our family, friends, partners and colleagues in a way that either encourages necessary conflict, or diffuses it. We are shying away from the real politics of the public square and heading for a subdued, online version of ourselves.

Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools and the workplace, Turkle argues in RECLAIMING CONVERSATION that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human - and humanising - thing that we do.

About this title

Review

"Sherry Turkle is a singular voice in the discourse around technology." --Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times

"This is her third book on the subject. Her general thesis (that human values and humane activities are threatened by our gadgets) is consistent. What changes is the focus. This time she finds that it is real face-to-face conversation that is vanishing like mist on the bright morning of Silicon Valley's ascendancy." --The Times

About the Author

Sherry Turkle has spent the last 30 years studying the psychology of people's relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the author five books and three edited collections, including a trilogy of three landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self (MIT Press, 2005), Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and most recently, Alone Together (MIT Press, 2011). A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, she is a featured media commentator. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0143109790
• ISBN 13: 9780143109792
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448