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

Had Sherry Turkle been born a graphic artist rather than a clinical psychologist and insightful author, she may well have created works like those of M. C. Escher, whose 2D renderings of impossible 3D worlds, while playfully and artistically reminding viewers of the dangers of eliminating a spatial dimension, also conveyed deep scientific and social commentary: the perpetual motion of the impossible waterwheel that feeds itself; the frame-cube that auto-intersects; the hands that draw each other. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle richly elaborates on this century’s enabling information technologies that squash human–human relationships into reduced-dimensional spaces, caricatures of the ways people used to relate to each other, before the Internet turned face-to-face discussions to Twitter morsels and devolved actual kisses into Facebook ‘‘likes’’. Written mostly for human–computer interaction designers, roboticists and engineers interested in understanding the social impact of their innovations, Sherry Turkle cuts a wide swath through the different technologies, from social (or ‘‘sociable’’) robotics and Internet-mediated mobile communications to computerbased avatar-inhabited environments like first-person shooter games and Second Life. Considering each medium one-by-one and the social/communication contexts they enable or impoverish separately, the 14 chapters of her book are structured around chronicles of her own professional life, mostly in Boston in the dynamic robot-, softwareand Internet-imbued environment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, and personal experiences (her mother–daughter relationships get a lot of airtime—with the author in the roles of each). She meticulously deconstructs interviews and ethnographic studies she has conducted with older, middle-aged and younger persons as they navigate the current phases of their lives: the older ones with their decades-long experiences with and biases