Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Turkle, Sherry

ISBN 10: 0465010210 / ISBN 13: 9780465010219

Published by Basic Books (edition 1st edition), 2011

With dust jacket. It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience. Seller Inventory # 0465010210-11-1-29

Synopsis:

Facebook. Twitter. Second Life. "Smart" phones. Robot pets. Robot lovers. Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for. Now the question is what we don't use them for. Now, through technology, we create, navigate and carry out our emotional lives. We shape our buildings, Winston Churchill argued, then they shape us. The same is true of our digital technologies. Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we face a moment of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we conduct "risk free" affairs on Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on a Facebook wall with authentic communication. And now, we are promised "sociable robots" that will marry companionship with convenience. Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere. We begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. We may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist, relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Alone Together is the result of MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle's nearly fifteen-year exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, it describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude. It is a story of emotional dislocation, of risks taken unknowingly. But it is also a story of hope, for even in the places where digital saturation is greatest, there are people - especially the young - who are asking the hard questions about costs, about checks and balances, about returning to what is most sustaining about direct human connection. At the threshold of what Turkle calls "the robotic moment", our devices prompt us to recall that we have human purposes and, perhaps, to rediscover what they are.

About the Author: Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist. She is the author or The Second Self and Life on the Screen. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from ...
Publisher: Basic Books (edition 1st edition)
Publication Date: 2011
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: 1st edition.