Sherry Turkle Quotes

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

~ Sherry Turkle

Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.

~ Sherry Turkle

From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.

~ Sherry Turkle

Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic, the jewel in the crown.

~ Sherry Turkle

When one becomes accustomed to companionship without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

~ Sherry Turkle

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

~ Sherry Turkle

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

~ Sherry Turkle

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

~ Sherry Turkle

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

~ Sherry Turkle

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

~ Sherry Turkle

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.

~ Sherry Turkle

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply be good. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

~ Sherry Turkle

Rapture is costly, it usually means you are overlooking consequences.

~ Sherry Turkle

One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.

~ Sherry Turkle

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

~ Sherry Turkle

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

~ Sherry Turkle

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

~ Sherry Turkle

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

~ Sherry Turkle

In games, he feels that he is creating something new. But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.

~ Sherry Turkle

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.

~ Sherry Turkle

If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.

~ Sherry Turkle

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.

~ Sherry Turkle

The idea of the original had no place.

~ Sherry Turkle

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

~ Sherry Turkle

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

~ Sherry Turkle

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

~ Sherry Turkle

Online life is about premeditation.

~ Sherry Turkle

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

~ Sherry Turkle

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

~ Sherry Turkle

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

~ Sherry Turkle

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

~ Sherry Turkle

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

~ Sherry Turkle

Connectivity becomes a craving.

~ Sherry Turkle

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

~ Sherry Turkle

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as 'whole person conversation'—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.

~ Sherry Turkle

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

~ Sherry Turkle

Shakespeare might have said, we are consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

~ Sherry Turkle

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.

~ Sherry Turkle

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

~ Sherry Turkle

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.

~ Sherry Turkle