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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Hardcover – January 11, 2011
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In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateJanuary 11, 2011
- Grade level11 and up
- Reading age13 years and up
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100465010210
- ISBN-13978-0465010219
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
Review
“Sherry Turkle is the Margaret Mead of digital culture. Parents and teachers: If you want to understand (and support) your children as they navigate the emotional undercurrents in today’s technological world, this is the book you need to read. Every chapter is full of great insights and great writing.”
Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants“No one has a better handle on how we are using material technology to transform our immaterial ‘self’ than Sherry Turkle. She is our techno-Freud, illuminating our inner transformation long before we are able see it. This immensely satisfying book is a deep journey to our future selves.”
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed“Alone Together is a deep yet accessible, bold yet gentle, frightening yet reassuring account of how people continue to find one another in an increasingly mediated landscape. If the net and humanity could have a couples therapist, it would be Sherry Turkle.” Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
New York Times Book Review
“[Turkle] summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence…fascinating, readable.”
“What [Turkle] brings to the topic that is new is more than a decade of interviews with teens and college students in which she plumbs the psychological effect of our brave new devices on the generation that seems most comfortable with them.”
Newsweek.com
“A fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology.”
Natural History Magazine
“A fascinating, insightful and disquieting “intimate ethnography” of our digital, robotic moment in history.”
American Prospect
“Turkle is a gifted and imaginative writer…[who] pushes interesting arguments with an engaging style.”
Jill Conway, President emerita, Smith College, and author of The Road from Coorain
“Based on an ambitious research program, and written in a clear and beguiling style, this book which will captivate both scholar and general reader and it will be a landmark in the study of the impact of social media.”
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books; 1st edition (January 11, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0465010210
- ISBN-13 : 978-0465010219
- Reading age : 13 years and up
- Grade level : 11 and up
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #270,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
SHERRY TURKLE, a social scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, has been studying people’s relationships with technology since the early personal computer movement in the late 1970s. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the best-selling author of six books and three edited collections, including four landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle has edited three books on our lives with objects, Evocative Objects, Falling For Science, and The Inner History of Devices. They explore how our relationships with the object world have significant implications for work, education, and intimacy. In Simulation and its Discontents, Turkle explores the costs, intellectual, personal, and political of living so much of our lives in artificial worlds.
Her most recent book, The Empathy Diaries (Penguin Press, March 2021) turns her method of “intimate ethnography,” on her own life, examining the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped her into the woman and researcher she became, making the point that her emotional and intellectual became one, that her career, as she put it, became “lit from within.” It appeared to critical acclaim. Dwight Garner in The New York Times called it a "beautiful book. . . an instant classic of the genre."
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I am reminded of when I arrived in Germany as a foreign exchange student in 1978, Before I left, I could not find my destination, Göttingen, on any map that I owned or could find in the local library. Furthermore, my correspondence with the university was entirely in German, a language that I had studied but not yet mastered. When my flight arrived in Frankfurt, I was entirely at the mercy of the stationmaster to get on the right train to reach my destination. Today, answers to all such travel questions can be found on any smart phone; one need not be fluent in German to understand them fully; and, anywhere along the way, you can call your parents (or kids) to help sort everything out. Talk about a reduction in uncertainty!
The effect of changes in technology on us as individuals and on today’s culture is the subject of Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together. Turkle explores the immediacy of technology in part one—The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies—and the immensity of technology in part two—Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes (vii). While these parts could easily have been themes in separate books, Turkle’s interest in the changing perceptions of intimacy and solitude clearly binds them together. Alone Together is part of a trilogy (The Second Self, Alone Together, and Life on the Screen; 4) focused on the cultural effect of technology.
Turkle’s 14 chapters are equally divided between analysis of the individual response to robots—
1. Nearest Neighbors
2. Alive Enough
3. True Companions
4. Enchantment
5. Complexities
6. Love’s Labor Lost
7. Communion
—and the response to life tethered to cell and computer networks—
8. Always On
9. Growing Up Tethered
10. No Need to Call
11. Reduction and Betrayal
12. True Confessions
13. Anxiety
14. The Nostalgia of the Young (vii-viii).
Repeatedly, I found Turkle anticipating my anxieties about technology and offering a balanced assessment. She writes:
“we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place” (295)
In other words, technology is a tool that can be used for either good or evil.
Turkle’s focus on the individual response to technology is no accident. Turkle describes herself as: “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.”[1] Her background as a psychologist shows through clearly in her choice of topics to discuss and in her extensive use of case studies to authenticate her points. An economist or sociologist might easily have focused more on questions of productivity and institutional change, but Turkle never goes there. Here the focus is on responses by individuals to technology—no military drones, no self-driving cars, no targeted advertising, no robotic assembly lines, no wiz bang. Turkle’s perspective is reflective, fresh. Her special concern is for children.
Let me focus a minute on Turkle’s two parts: robotics and networking.
Robotics. As a member of the MIT faculty, Turkle has special access to the MIT robotics lab where her work focuses on social robots, especially robotic toys like Tamagotchi, Furbi, Merlin, My Real Baby, Cog, Kismit, and so on. Turkle writes:
“Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” (1)
Unlike Barbie, who invites you to project your issues and emotions on the doll in a kind of Rorshach test, these toys interact, talk, and appear to learn with you—what Turkle describes as a “new psychology of engagement” (38). In other words, the relationship possible with these robots is much more complex than with traditional toys. For example, citing Baird, she asks:
“How long can you hold the object [a toy, an animal, or a robot] upside down before your emotions make you turn it back?” (45)
With a toy, no one cares if you abuse it; with a gerbil, abuse is seen as cruel and is discouraged by most adults; but with a robot, like Furby, that complains, how do you respond—do you feel an ethical dilemma? Why? Turkle observes: “We are at the point of seeing digital objects as both creatures and machines.” (46)
As part of her research, Turkle would lend these robotic toys to children and adults and then return after two weeks to interview them about their experiences and retrieve the toys. Frequently, the interviews would be postponed as the recipients—even the adults—did not want to give up the toys. Occasionally, this issue posed embarrassment, such as when a grandmother obviously preferred a robot, such as My Real Baby, to spending time with their own grandchildren (118). This happened so often that Turkle stopped trying to retrieve the robots after the interviews.
Networking. The immensity of telephone and computer networks. Not only do we have the ability to contact anyone, anywhere on earth; we never really leave home. Turkle writes:
“When I grew up the idea of ‘global village’ was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete. Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home.” (156)
This level of connectedness poses a challenge for adolescents who have a developmental need to separate themselves from their parents (174).
Especially in American culture, individual autonomy is a cultural icon. In my own experience as a foreign student, the current level of connection made possible through cell phones and the internet was unthinkable. During my year in Germany, for example, telephone calls were so expensive that my gift for Christmas from my host family was a call home. My remoteness during the year disrupted a number of relationships, particularly with my parents [2], but I was well-prepared for this separation having worked summers as a camp counselor in high school and attended college out of state. By contrast, my own kids have had cell phones since high school and are seldom out of touch with their mother for more than a few days.
Turkle talks about kids using texting to validate emotions even before they are fully aware of them. In effect, they poll their friends on how they should feel about things or test out emotions before fully investing in them (175-177). She writes:
“in the psychoanalytical tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use.” (177)
So here we have a niche for technology—to insulate people from the push and pull of normal, complex human interaction. What is perhaps surprising is that kids that text constantly are often texting their own parents (178)—which suggests the need for a mature and informed parenting style.
Wow. I never felt like a fully trained parent—how about you?
Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together is hugely interesting, informative, and accessible read. College professors looking for insight in discussing the role of technology should consider this book. I would certainly consider reading the other books in this trilogy.
[1] [...]
[2] At one point the year after I returned home I visited relatives and attended a dinner party. No one felt comfortable talking with me. Finally, I learned why—my farm relatives could not imagine that a world traveler, such as myself, would find talking to them interesting to speak with. Once we got over that point, things picked up and returned to a more normal interaction.
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 Families and [...], 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.