Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

I started reading this book with great excitement as I often wonder about what impact technology is having on me. The book is basically divided into two parts, one talks about human robot interaction and the other humans and net/phone interaction. The are pages after pages of descriptions of what children think of interaction with robots and there are tons of descriptions of how teenagers use Facebook and texting. I don't think the author needs to list every single interview she ever conducted to make her point. I felt terribly bored reading chapter after chapter of how teenagers use social networks and texting. I wanted to spend more time knowing what the author (an MIT psychologist with 30 years experience) thinks of these observations but there was less of that and lots of interviews. Somewhat disappointing but still a good book.

Turkle, without alarm or hysteria, paints a scholarly and lucid scenario of where we are, and how we've arrived at this place in regard to our relationship with our technological toys. Her 30+ years as an academic at MIT are wedded with the heart of a mother in an excellent discussion of the merger of the rise of sociable robots and a networked generation coming of age that is more comfortable in the virtual than the actual. She does a laudable job of bringing these two topics together. It is an excellent read and re-read. The book is loaded with quotable snippets worth repeating: "Loneliness is failed solitude."

Turtle attempts to start a dialog about the role of technology in our lives, based on her observations as a researcher at MIT for 30 years. Those observations are stunning and the implications are definitely worth an extended discussion.

Sherry brings together a scientist mind with a caring of a Mother. She is telling us to have a conversation about where the Technology is taking us.

We do not want our technological advancements to turn around and bite us. We are getting lonely because we are not facing each other and conversing. The technology is to entrancing and we are becoming weak. Our leaders cannot face us and tell us what is going on. They have to be tethered to their blackberry and have others speak for them.

We deserve more from all of the talent that has gone before. Sherry is wise and has given alot of effort and her time to expose some of the pitfalls.

A fascinating, informative, and frightening examination of our loss of honest and deep interpersonal relationships as they are subverted by and replaced with modern technology. This is a well-researched study, not pop-psychology.

Excellent research project to assess impact of technology on American culture. Provides numerous examples of how communication advances deprive humans of face time, and suggests a "hollowing out" of human intimacy as a result.

My book club found the book to be chilling but realistic. Each member had a different interpretation of what the Ms. Turkle was trying to say.

A great discussion book. Thought provoking and profound!

Alone Together was recommended to me by a colleague. It proved to be very interesting, informatinve and readable, enough so that I picked it for a study group---not a book club, but a devoted group of professional who have a stake in understanding the effects of technolgy on ourselves, our children and even our parents. I can reccomend this book to anyone who would like to know more about this central development in our culture.

This is a very important book. The older and newer generations should read this. It is a wake up call that provides the information we need to understand that we must take the technological bull "by the horns".

This book explores the effects of modern technology in terms of how we communicate and interact with one another. Explores in depth how these modern changes affect our relationships and whether it's good or bad. I found this book way too over analytical. I think it's just common sense that technology is not a replacement for relationships. It's not technology that is the problem but how people use it. Times change and we need to learn how to change with it without sacrificing personal interaction. To me, that's just common sense so I didn't really feel I needed a long book to tell me that.

ATTENTION ALL PARENTS, SENIORS, TEACHERS, CIVIC-RELIGIOUS-HEALTH LEADERS, STUDENTS, and all other guardians of learning! THIS IS A MUST READ. Another excellent book from Professor Sherry Turkle! One with vision. I remain an ardent fan of her work. She has consistently informed, enlightened, and inspired through her clear writing style and depth.

Sherry Turkle's new book is timely, provocative, research-solid, and elegantly written from mind and heart. It should be required reading for all interested in the never-ending confluence of technologies and human nature. Its humanistic undercurrent sensibly counters the far-reaching consequences of our technological imperative, and in so doing raises profound questions of identity, epistemology, and ethics.

What makes her book particularly rich is its documentation of many voices - from young children to young adults, adults to elderly - who find solace in the company of "sociable robots" to compensate for missing human interaction. Her message is resounding: Let's return to Real Life - natural, animal, and human - that is all around us. For our present and future, the stakes are indeed high.

Now, more than ever, we need to challenge the disturbing authority of the hyperreal (that dimension we tend to uncritically embrace when simulation assumes more "reality" than the real). This memorable book is a prominent and worthy voice in raising the crucial questions. Without hesitation, I recommend this book to ALL, ESPECIALLY PARENTS.

I would reccomend this book as there are very valuable insights on some of the detriental aspects of mobile phone and social media adoption.
As described in the title I htnk many people will find themselves flipping through the back to back anecdotes/ research studies.

Although only having skimmed the book I was quite surprised that the word "pornography" or "erotic" do not even merit a reference in the index of the book. How is it possible to write a 380 page book on technology and social relations without a mention of perhaps one of the driving forces today of the internet. It's even more puzzling that someone who proudly invokes psychoanalytic ideas and therapy has simply left out this important development (as have all reviewers of the book to my knowledge). The impact that pornography is having on relationships and expectations regarding sex of all age groups is too important to leave out of a book called "Alone Together". If I were a psychoanalyst , which I am not, I might ask why was this left out? Was it simply "forgotten" repressed, a "Freudian lapse" or a strategic marketing decision? The book may merit many of the outstanding reviews received here, but I can't take a book about the subject of the impact of technology on people's experience of intimacy seriously when it leaves out "the elephant in the room".

Although only having skimmed the book I was quite surprised that the word "pornography" or "erotic" do not even merit a reference in the index of the book. How is it possible to write a 380 page book on technology and social relations without a mention of perhaps one of the driving forces today of the internet. It's even more puzzling that someone who proudly invokes psychoanalytic ideas and therapy has simply left out this important development (as have all reviewers of the book to my knowledge). The impact that pornography is having on relationships and expectations regarding sex of all age groups is too important to leave out of a book called "Alone Together". If I were a psychoanalyst , which I am not, I might ask why was this left out? Was it simply "forgotten" repressed, a "Freudian lapse" or a strategic marketing decision? The book may merit many of the outstanding reviews received here, but I can't take a book about the subject of the impact of technology on people's experience of intimacy seriously when it leaves out "the elephant in the room".

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist who joined the MIT faculty 30 years ago to study computer culture. She came to the position with a background in people and no background in or understanding of computers or technology. For thirty years she has been studying and observing people, particularly students and young people, as they relate to, adapt to, experiment with, use and incorporate computer technology and social media in their everyday lives.

"Alone Together" is a 300-page report of her observations presented in laborious (and repetitive) detail. It is honest and straightforward, contains valuable anecdotes and insights, but could have been written in 30 pages instead of 300. The thesis of "Alone Together" is that as we continue to expect more from technology, we expect less from each other. An alternate title for the text would have been "The Robotic Moment", for what seems to tie all the anecdotes in 300+ pages together for Ms. Turkle personally is her impression that the segment of society that she has been studying for 30 years has reached a point in its accommodation of computers and digital technology where it is on the threshold of being willing to accept robots as caring (dare we say loving?) partners and companions. No surprise, I suppose, in light of the fact that her home base for the past 30 years has been on the doorstep of MIT's Media Lab. She opens the book with this concern, weaves it through 300+ pages of observations, and closes with the same concern.

Which is not to say that she doesn't report on other things, including the short attention spans of young people, their preference for texting rather than talking, and her observations about the functionality, function and psychological impact of social media sites on the web. Just that her report reads like you might expect an academic report to read, as a collection of observations devoid of any direction, conclusions or recommendations until the last paragraph on the last page of the last chapter, where she concludes that "we have reached a point of inflection, where we can see the costs and start to take action."

Her recommendation and advice in this concluding paragraph is that we need to begin to throttle or scale back our headlong dive into the pool of electronic connectedness by adopting rules of behavior like "no cell phones at dinner, on the playground, in the car, or in company." It is Ms. Turkle's assertion that "our brains are rewired every time we use a phone to surf or search or multitask", and that "it is time to look again toward the virtues of solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment."

I don't disagree with Ms. Turkle's remarks about the virtues of solitude, deliberateness and living fully in the moment, or with her recommendations about limiting use of cell phones. I just don't think we needed 300 pages of anecdotes to get to this conclusion.

I loved the quick mailing of this course required book. My daughter had the opportunity to get ahead prior the first day of class. Pleased with the condition of the book and the outstanding shipping and handling!!!

MIT's Dr. Sherry Turkle's ALONE TOGETHER (Basic Books, 2010) is must reading for anyone who has a cell phone; and a must MUST if you also have a child.

This talented MIT professor again provides superbly stimulating food for thought about the social / psychological dimensions of where our chaotic technology consumption may be taking us. My own clinical research and preparing my book (Kids, Parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Families, MyDigitalFamily.org) led me to discover Dr. Turkle, and I found her to be one of the most important and sensible scholars in the human / technology space. I found the book excellent, at times dense, and always a page turner.

We all should now be concerned about being in a 'robot moment.' Cybercrime, sexting, gaming, cyberbullying, multitasking, endless power struggles with our teens, and other sensational happenings that are capturing our attention are but tips of an iceberg.

Uncannily, even super-rational MIT scholars, despite their traditional impatience with how others anthropomorphize and project feelings onto their machines, now themselves develop feelings about robots, as if they were in a relationship with a living creature. This is BIG: Just because we have been anticipating them for centuries (at least since the 270 A.D. Golem), let us not be too casual now that they are actually here.

Down closer to earth, in our everyday lives, we too have become insidiously tethered and 'addicted'. Dr. Turkle suggests that, like the youngsters and oldsters she has studied, we are all vulnerable to becoming attached to robots, in our present case to the many disembodied robots that run our interactive devices. Dr. Turkle also reminds us that ever-more fully embodied robots, are already on their way.

We are now discovering that, given free rein, even as we intend them to improve our connections with one another, and to many extents they do, using these tools often actually fragments communication and can be harmful to us. It is also often easier to anonymously mistreat each other and ourselves. Our beloved devices filter too much out, and their use is dumbing down our kids and weakening our family lives. In addition, we now seem so attached to the devices themselves that we are scaring ourselves by just how out of control we can be.

We are still attached to people, but are increasingly interacting via the mediation of disembodied robots. Sadly, we end up treating each other shabbily as these devices also lead us to willingly chop up and squeeze the richness of our nuanced and felt human connections with each other into small, thin, narrow-bandwidth data trickles. Then we feel desperately compelled to keep this thin channel open. No, wonder -- it's hard to feel a good hug through a straw.

So what now?

Dr. Turkle's are necessary brilliant first steps, but the progress of science is careful when it comes to creating certainty. Adopting major new technologies (bronze tools, printing press, cotton gin, automobile, TV, atomic fusion, etc.) does inevitably change each new user, families, society, and the very course of history. Maybe what is new today is that the rapidity of change is itself so stressful. Now we even have a front row seat in real time. So maybe we can now hope to influence the course of this IT revolution directly, when it is still young.

People have always been social creatures who have needed each other. Humans have always been plugged in -- connected to one another through our senses and minds and bodies -- with what resemble broadband 'social synapses', hard-wired into us from birth. Making possible our survival as a species, these deep channels carry a wealth of highly choreographed uniquely human information among us.

Children always have and always will need good family relationships, values, education, and parents' full love and presence to develop into human creatures with healthy brains and minds. Children are programmed to form broad-band social synapses, primarily with parents, that feed them the rich data that organizes and shapes their brains and fullest humanness. We do not know how their development is ultimately affected by increasing interactions with robots or through narrow-bandwidth devices.

IMHO, it is HOW we use technology that counts. So let's start building on Dr. Turkle's and other scientists' findings and manage our technology consumption more thoughtfully, especially when it comes to children. The time has come for us to stop merely reacting with fear and mistrust of technology. We need comprehensive, sensible, practical approaches based on a sound vision of where to go from here. Such a framework needs to be credible, practical, pro-social, developmentally-oriented and family-centered. Let us take charge and make sure we, not the media or the devices, give ultimate form to our social synapses, especially when it comes to our kids.

Parents: change your mindset. Sometimes parents need to paddle the family canoe against the stream of popular culture, which, after all, often seeks the lowest common denominator. After over a decade of Wild-West digital social experimentation and youth media consumption chaos, it is now time for parents to become empowered and educated and use new tools to manage the digital lives of children.

I suggest beginning in early life to make the correct use of technology part of family life, not the other way around, if you want your babies to use it correctly when they become teens. Treat devices as appliances, like blenders. Harvest the best interactive digital resources and present them to kids as their personalized balanced Media Plan containing age-appropriate Growth Opportunities for Family Relationships, Values Education, Education Enrichment, Socialization, and Entertainment and your full presence. Plan media consumption as you do meals and hygiene.

Decide that no interactive digital device, whether embodied or disembodied, belongs in the home where you are raising budding humans unless it enhances family life and child development. Carve out tech-free times and places: keep the robots out of reach and turned off regularly in your home, borrowing from the traditional practice of reserving the Sabbath for restorative spirituality and reflection and affirmation of our anchors in faith, values, family, and community.

And please, please, do not rush yet to put embodied robots into kids' cribs or playpens.

- Dr. Eitan Schwarz has been privileged to know families and kids intimately through long portions of their lifecycle journeys, including all the peak experiences and deep valleys, during his nearly 40 years of child and adult psychiatry practice. In
Kids, Parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Familiesand [...], Dr. S empowers, educates, and gives the right tools to parents wanting to raise kids with healthy minds and brains in today's digital world.

I was pretty excited to read "Alone Together", but it took me a bit longer to get through than I thought it was going to. For me, the whole first half of the book is just redundant. After interviewing child after child after child about how they think and feel about robots, I was beginning to get a bit bored. It's just short quote after short quote from the children about how they love Furbies, My Real Baby, and other robotic toys. It's mixed in with how the elderly feel about robots, and how they will become more involved in our society in the future, but I just didn't find so much speculating that interesting. I get the point she's trying to make about how future generations may not as clearly see the distinction between "real" and "non real" life forms, but the way she went about it felt too drawn out.

The second half though, I feel is much more relevant and interesting. You see people on their cell phones everywhere all the time, and know that people are getting hooked on the virtual world. It's interesting to read what effect it is having on us and our culture to shy away from real conversations and instead rely on text messages to feel connected.

I would give the first half about a 5 out of 10 as quite a few sections drag, and the second half about an 8. Worth a read, but was a bit disappointed.

Interesting to see how technology has changed us, not unlike the train or the car, and she describes this very well, as a researcher. But so, um, go have coffee with a friend. Turn off your phone for a day. Rent a cabin in the woods for a week, if you can afford such luxuries. The most insulting thing about this book and the many like it, is that the parents quote this and punish their children by taking away their gadgets or refuse them in the first place, and they are all on Facebook telling us about this. It's infuriating/

As a college freshman who loves technology, this book really opened my eyes to the technologically evolving society in which we live. It really allowed me to understand and recognize the role.technology plays in our lives. Turkle offers unbiased analyses of the intriguing and sometimes disturbing technological advances of my generation. I definitely recommend it.

" We seem determined to give human qualities to objects and are content to treat each other as things. " In my opinion; this scenario will lead to increasing problems with human communication and have worldwide implications for global problem solving.

Books about technology gets dated fast, and this being written 5 years ago, it might not be relevant anymore. If you're looking for philosophical arguments on tech vs humans, online publications like medium, quartz, techcrunch, pandodaily and even the NYT might be more suited to this fast developing sector.

Considering the author's academic background, I was hoping to get balanced and developed insights on virtual pets, robots, and the generation that grew up as "digital natives." Unfortunately, it talks at length about the downsides of technological advancement (anxiety, stress, disconnectivity, etc). I'm sure there must be positive outcomes of growing up in a generation that's had ipads since birth. What other skills have they developed now that so much information is on demand, and they can customize their learning to their own pace? Or what about parents who play video games with their children? How does that affect their bonding experience? It reads too much of a person from another generation wistful of the next missing out on experiences they've had (which happens to every generation, no?). I also agree with another commenter that the book is too long and too slow moving.

The only insight I found of value was that humans only need to be prompted by a "take care of me" message from a virtual pet/robot, and a very innate emotion is triggered.

Several years have passed since professor Sherry Turkle wrote this compelling piece, but the arguments remain as apt as ever. As the cover of the depressing yet fascinating book reads, modern society pushes regular people to expect less and less from each other while relying more and more on technology. The siren song of 'multitasking', a trait that never quite works as well as its cracked up to be, causes individuals to compromise important communication that truly requires their full attention. Different ways of conveying information are in no way equivalent, and a culture that relies primarily on simple text and picture messages loses a gigantic amount that only face-to-face speaking can convey.

The book's discussion of advances in robotics can get genuinely disturbing. Young children and struggling elderly people alike both face unfair demands in a hyper-consumerist American that often socially casts them both aside. Are they to be left with only robots as their companions? Is the choice between a machine and its simulated emotions or nothing, living an empty life with severe loneliness? Turkle asks these painful questions, but solid answers prove elusive. The book, overall, is not only interesting but raises fundamentally vital issues.

I recall seeing the author on Colbert when this book came out and thought enough of the idea to buy. Well that was a mistake, this book seems to be written for parents or older people who don't understand what "those darn young people are doing on those phones" If you are over the age of 40, this book will really help you understand how technology is integrated into our lives. Being that you are 40, don't understand technology or are from a 3rd world country.