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Alone Together Hardcover – 3 Feb 2011

4.2 out of 5 stars 19 customer reviews

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books (3 Feb. 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0465010210
  • ISBN-13: 978-0465010219
  • Product Dimensions: 15.6 x 3 x 23.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 60,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

New York Times Book Review
“[Turkle] summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence…fascinating, readable.”

Wall Street Journal
“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.”

Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory
“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
“Sherry Turkle has observed more widely and thought more deeply about human-computer relations than any other scholar. Her book is essential reading for all who hope to understand our changing relation to technology.”

Publishers Weekly
“Turkle’s prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and author of Evolve!, Confidence, and SuperCorp
Alone Together is a brilliant, profound, stirring, and often disturbing portrait of the future by America’s leading expert on how computers affect us as humans. She reveals the secrets of ‘Walden 2.0’ and tells us that we deserve better than caring robots. Grab this book, then turn off your smart phones and absorb Sherry Turkle’s powerful message.”
 
National Catholic Reporter
“Readers will find this book a useful resource as they begin conversations about how to negotiate and critically engage the technology that suffuses our lives.”

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.


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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
'Alone Together' is the third volume in a trilogy produced over three decades by Sherry Turkle, a psychoanalyst based at MIT, the preceding volumes being 'The Second Self' (1984) and 'Life on the Screen' (1995). I read each one soon after publication and found them engrossing, thought-provoking and well-illustrated with illuminating case-studies and insightful observations. The current volume is in two parts: the first develops themes from 'The Second Self' (here related to `sociable robots'), the second from 'Life on the Screen' (which focused on the construction of identities online). Because of the limitations of space, my comments here focus on Part Two. Whereas the earlier volumes were relatively upbeat about the implications of new technologies, the tone of the current volume feels markedly more jaundiced, alerting us to some potential social costs of `social media'.

Provocatively, the main refrain is that in an online culture we are always connected (Turkle says `tethered'), but are rarely (meaningfully) connecting. Although (somewhat ironically) one may hear the same sentiment in a current commercial for a well-known matchmaking website, Turkle's nuanced stance `is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least'; indeed, she remains `cautiously optimistic'. This is a seriously reflective work well-informed by extensive ethnographic studies. The focus on authenticity and intimacy recalls the concerns voiced by Socrates in Plato's 'Phaedrus' about an earlier technological development--publishing one's ideas in written form--in particular the fear that communication at a distance would undermine genuine (face-to-face) human discourse. This has been a recurrent anxiety throughout the history of communication technologies.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Turkle's excellent book attempts to balance the flow of enthusiasm for digital technology and techno-boosterism of sci-fi style futures by examining how humans as social actors engage with technology. It is a forlorn hope that some symmetry could be achieved with the raging determinism of the technology corporates with their blythe dismissal of most of Turkle's objections, but this joins a growing list of critical works about the ethics and implications of technology as determined by technologists. It certainly seems clear from this book that creative, empathetic, intelligent and enquiring minds are developing the very technologies that will reduce these qualities in the rest of us.

In effect, this is two books. The first half deals with the kind of interactive robotics that can be introduced precisely because of our neglect of one another: comfort robots for the elderly and interactive ones for kids. The stories that emerge from Turkle's observations of interactions between people and machines in this context are unquestionably disturbing. The common justification is that, given most people working in old age or child care don't bring their human qualities to bear in their work, so what if a robot replaces them? So, here we have the best minds of the age working in well funded labs to design robots that will release us from our obligations towards one another. Robots, Turkle warns, will turn out even better than humans as they won't ever let us down, and the idea clearly alarms her.

The second section is about how the always-on network has altered our perception of social engagement with one another.
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Format: Paperback
I really wanted to like this book. Honestly I did, it deals with a fascinating topic. Sadly however, I found this far too anecdotal, repetitive and bias. Her point felt laboured, the anti-technology rhetoric was tiring and she seldom gets into any great depth on an issue. I felt she was able to point out a fairly evident phenomenon such as people texting more and calling less but failed to deeply analyse it beyond showing the angst and frustrations it brought teenagers. I do believe "we are all cyborgs now", as a young person I can see our behaviour is changing, our generation is different, this book just never really showed me the fundamental psychological changes that are occuring or where they will lead, beyond the somewhat ludicrous suggestion that we will all want to marry robots in 2020.

Although her anecdotal evidence is considerable, I seldom found it convincing as an argument for anything in a general sense. What's more, many of the problems she pointed to, weren't shown to be explicitly caused or exacerbated by our connectivity or technology. The teenagers she interviews sound like stereotypical teenagers, with stereotypical problems about identity, sex, image etc. She doesn't show that facebook is the problem, rather than just a new way to express and work with their problems. For example she quotes "Adam", an addicted video gamer, who admits he doesn't really like his job. Without doubt he is a sad example of addiction and the power of very clever video designers, but to me the example says more about Adam, and the problems with his real life, than the omnipotent pervasive technology. In another age perhaps he would have been an alcoholic, a drug user, or a problem gambler.
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