 Good evening and welcome. I am the Reverend Janie Donahue. I am the Episcopal Chaplain to MIT and also the coordinator of something called the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT. The Technology and Culture Forum, or TNC, as it is affectionately known, is a program that sponsors lectures and symposia to discuss the ethical implications of scientific discoveries and technological innovation. Tonight, it is my pleasure to introduce to you David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum, the co-sponsor of tonight's event. For 10 years, David taught at Yale before coming to MIT in 1976 to teach literature, which he still does. David's course on American television was the first in the country to examine the medium as in a humanistic context. David is a founder, and for four years and for 12 years was the director of the Film and Media Studies program, which was the ancestor of today's CMS, or Comparative Media Studies. I knew it would come to me. In 2002, David was named the McVicar Faculty Fellow, which was in recognition of his contribution to undergraduate education. His recent publications include Rethinking Media and Change, Democracy and New Media, and many articles and reviews on literature and media. It is my pleasure to introduce to you David Thorburn. Thank you very much. The mic is on. Let me begin by saying that I hope this is the first of many helpful collaborations between the MIT Communications Forum and Reverend Janie's outfit, the Technology and Culture Forum. Thank you very much for that introduction, Janie. We will be following what I think of as sort of the standard communications forum format. We'll begin with a brief conversation between me and Sherry, and then we'll open it to what is always the most lively and intellectually powerful part of the almost always. And I'm counting on you to keep the level high. Almost always the most exciting part of our program is the interaction between our always lively and intellectually thoughtful audience and our speakers. So about half an hour of conversation between me and Sherry, and then we'll open it up for conversation. Let me begin by introducing Sherry, even though most of you know how luminous her credentials are. She's a Harvard product. Did her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe? I guess when Radcliffe was still Radcliffe, before it was absorbed into Harvard. Then an MA at Harvard in sociology and a joint doctorate in sociology and personal psychology from Harvard. She, as many of you must know, has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has an honorary doctor of letters degree and the president's medal from the Claremont University Center and graduate school. She served a term as Dan's professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She's been a World Economic Forum Fellow. And she is currently and has been for some time now the Abby Rockefeller Mows Professor of Social Studies and Technology in our program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She is also the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. My notes are a little jumbled as usual. She has, of course, as you all know, been a prolific and deeply influential writer on society and technology. And she's been the editor of a number of significant books, which I won't mention here, but I will mention the three fundamental books that have established her as a unique voice in discourse about technology and emerging forms of technology. First of these books published originally in 1984 is called The Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit, a 20th anniversary edition which included a new introduction and an epilogue came out in 2005 from the MIT Press. Her second foray into this field, really an expansion and enlargement of many of the preoccupations that she had articulated in The Second Self, is a book equally famous called Life on the Screen, Identity in the Age of the Internet. And the final title is the book that she's most recently published, and that has been getting so much attention, both in academic and popular circles, alone together, why we expect more from technology and less from each other. And as you can tell from that, she has a kind of genius for titles and subtitles. It's a great pleasure and privilege for me to begin this conversation with Professor Turkle. I thought we might begin, Sherry, by talking, well, I wanted to say one other thing, my own judgment about why Professor Turkle's work has been so influential. There have been, as all of us are aware, an ocean of articles and books have begun to appear, have been appearing for the last 20, 25 years about technology and emerging forms of technology. It seems, of course, this was an inevitable development given in the way technology permeates our culture. But I think that Professor Turkle has established a unique place in this discourse. It's a complicated place in part because she brings to bear on the question of technology and human relationship to technology a somewhat unique or nearly unique set of credentials. She draws on disciplines that are not usually associated with the study of technology. And in many ways remains faithful to the principles of those disciplines. She draws in a deep and central way on anthropological principles and on principles of ethnographic research. She's deeply informed about what we might call sort of theoretical psychoanalysis. Her first book, in fact, was about Jacques Lacan and French Freudianism. And she draws on her psychoanalytic and psychiatric background in nearly all of her work. What is especially distinctive, I think, about Professor Turkle's work is her consistent awareness of the intimacy with which human beings interact with technology. She is reluctant, I think, or skeptical about generalizing about technological change on some superhuman plane. What she's interested in and has insistently been concerned with is the way in which particular individuals and particular groups within society, she's been interested in the way gender is expressed and in some ways handled by, or shaped by, gender questions lie behind the architecture of certain forms of technology. And she's been interested in the differences between the way in which males and females interact with and use new technologies. What she repeatedly is concerned about is the relationship between particular individuals and the machines that increasingly surround us and permeate our lives. And the distinctive note that she strikes in each of her books, in a way, has to do with what I would call this deeply humanistic perspective on what machines mean and how the machines that we make shape our lives. There's one other aspect of this work that is especially important to someone like me, a fellow humanist at MIT. And that is that one of the implications of her work is a celebration of the importance of what are essentially humanistic perspectives in the study and understanding of technology and of technological change. So much of the discourse about technology that we read today is not grounded in that individualistic and especially humanistic perspective. And it seems to me that that's one of the really distinctive features of her career and her ongoing research. Sherry is also one of a very small number of distinguished intellectuals who have performed in the communications forum as single figures in what we call conversations. Some of these have been among our most interesting events and it's important for me to note that Sherry is the first female to do it. And we've been very jumpy about the fact that the first three conversations were with males. And I'm glad that Sherry is able to begin to balance the- I'm here as a token, actually. I'm glad that Sherry is able to balance the ledger. Otherwise not. All that stuff till now. You don't need, actually if you want, I will just describe your books and you can not. This is like author porn, just listening to this. This is enough flattery for her. Sherry, I thought we might begin by talking not directly about your arguments in your work, although I hope we'll get to that and the audience will connect with it too. But I'd like to ask you a little bit about your experience at MIT. This is a question I asked Steven Pinker when he did a conversation like this and he had some interesting things to say as well. What I'd like you to talk to us a little bit about is, first of all, your sense of MIT, the MIT culture. And in particular, your sense of whether the MIT students have changed over the course of your time here and how you regard your connection to your students. Well, I think what MIT has been for me is a home where I always feel a little bit not at home. I think that's it. When I got here, I felt like a home because right away, I came here to teach about the sociology of science. The science I'd studied was a science of mine, French psychoanalysis, and I was hired to talk about how other sciences of mine like artificial intelligence, for example, could be studied sociologically. But the day I, I wanna say the day I hit the street, the day I hit Vassar Street, the old building 20, where the department was first housed, the beginnings of the science, technology, and society program, I met people who talked about their minds as machines, who said, don't interrupt me until I clear my buffer. In other words, who really envisaged their minds as a mental space that needed to be cleared and crossed until it was open for interactive processing capacity. And I realized that I who were using all my life psychoanalytic metaphors to think about my mind were now with a group of people who had a different set of metaphors, a different way of thinking. And I was finished with studying, I'd studied French psychoanalysis and then I thought I'd study English and then I thought I'd study American in its cultural context, but I had found a new home. I'd found a new set of questions in which I felt completely at home, that is how this new kind of machine, how this new way of thinking, was changing how people thought about the self. So I felt profoundly at home and yet from day one, and I really, I met these students, they were taking the first class I taught, which was a class in which we're studying Freudian slips. And I was teaching about Freudian slips, and do you mind if I tell this to everyone? So Freud's, well, the point I wanted to make is I'll tell you about the Freudian slip, but I mean I felt profoundly at home because I knew I'd found my new intellectual discipline and yet from the very beginning, there was this sense of what anthropologist called Dépaisement, that sense of not being at home that gives you that little bit of distance that you're not at home and thus you can sort of study where you are with some distance and hopefully give some value added because you have that distance. So that's been my MIT career. And the funny story about that really first day in which I discovered my new subject, which I have to say, this tracing the story of computers and how they don't just do things for us but do things to us, really has been come, you know, it sounds presumptuous to say my life's work but it has become the work of my life since my life is not as far from over yet. I mean it has become the work of my life and in fact my life's passion. I mean I think it's very, very important. I think it's taken us to some very unexpected places. It's taken me to some very unexpected places and the story, the story that changed it all for me was I was teaching this course on Freudian slips. That's what I was hired to do. I mean think about that, it's 1977. And Freud begins his essay on slips with the following story. The chairman opens a meeting of a parliamentary session by saying, I now declare this meeting closed. And what are the reasons, asks Freud for why that might happen? So Freud goes through some possibilities. His wife is ill and he wishes that he was kind of out of there, he's afraid what will happen at the meeting and he wishes he were out of there. I mean basically all reasons that have to do with the dynamic unconscious and the notion of ambivalence. And a student raises her hand in the back row and says, actually Professor Terkel, I'm a computer science student and I don't think you need all of that to explain what's going on. Because in a Webster's dictionary, open and closed or as far away as O and C. And apparently in a Freudian dictionary, you need all this whole rigourmal to get from, to understand the difference between the ambivalence and this whole story. But in a computer to a computer, open equals minus closed. And when you go from one to another, a bit has been dropped. There's been a power surge, no problem. That all that's happened is that there's been that power surge and the bit has been dropped. So this isn't a Freudian slip, this isn't in my mind, this is an information processing error and you don't need this whole story. And I mean, you know, I- So you said, oh, I'm sorry, you're right. Well, no, but I said to myself, I mean, you know, it's always very, you know, they say that you need to have a prepared mind to have an epiphany. I mean, I've heard this, you know. But you need to have a prepared mind that is to say you need to be interested in how models of mind affect thinking. I think I had a prepared mind. But I would have to say that that moment of really, and this was said, not with a kind of, you know, to hell with you or, but this was said in a genuine spirit of collaboration and teaching me something that I clearly didn't know about computers never having seen one. I genuinely learned about how someone steeped in thinking about mind as computers saw my problem, saw Freud's problem. And, you know, that was it. And the next day I was in the AR lab asking around, asking Michael Dertuzos in the old laboratory for computer science if I could have an office. And did he mind if I hung around? And did he mind if I interviewed all his faculty and all the students? And what I will say about MIT as a home is that Michael Dertuzos who was the, who was, who was now deceased and who I miss very much talked to me. He made a judgment as to my seriousness. He gave me an office. He gave me $10,000, which at that time nobody had ever given me a grant. I mean a grant is not something, I mean, he gave me $10,000. He set my, he said, he says, what do you need? I said, well, I'm a clinician. I'm gonna be talking to these people for hours on end. He gave me like this beautiful Freudian office suite. You know, he must have like looked and like in magazines of like how psychoanalysts set up their office. So I mean, you know, within, and you know how things happen, and you know, and when you have money in computer science, bam, bam, bam. Within a week I was set up with a brown velour couch. This is a very depressing story to me. And so I tell this story really to say that, you know, with that $10,000, I was launched with the blessing of the head of the Laboratory for Computer Science with a generosity of MIT. On a career where I began taking MIT as my subject as well as the place where I taught. And so it's been the most generous relationship to me in an institution essentially allowing, not always, I can't say everybody's always been happy with everything I've said, but basically letting me take the business of this institution, a lot of the business of this place as something that I study and sometimes critically. And that's been true until this book. Well, I think I have a good way to make a transition to a question I'd wanted to ask you. Anyway, you talked about how when you talked to Dertuzos, he asked you, how do you work? What do you do? And your first response was, well, I interview people. Let's talk a little bit about- And he bought me a couch. Well, let's talk a little bit about your methods. Sherry, your research methods. One of the most distinctive features of her work, it's partly what justified my talking about how committed she is to the human connection to computers, has to do with the way you do your research. There's an empirical dimension to your research as well as an interpretive one. I wonder if you'd talk a bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm trained as a clinical psychologist. I'm trained, and I mean, I think that David didn't want to say dillatown, so he said something about multidisciplinary, many different strands. I mean, but basically I have a degree in sociology, but not the kind of sociology where you count anything. I'm trained as a really an anthropologist sociologist. Today the kind of sociologists I studied with were really anthropologists. Victor Turner, great anthropologist. David Reisman, these were the- George Holman, these were the sociologists who were really anthropologists who had the greatest influence on me. Three great anthropologists last sociologists, three great ethnographers. And then I'm trained as a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst. And I don't practice as a psychoanalyst, but I'm trained as a listener. What I really am good at, the kind of interview I do is, uh-huh. But basically the way I do an interview is always in person. I know nothing on the internet, nothing. I don't go into virtual communities and ask people questions. I don't do anything on the telephone. I don't use Skype. I talk to people in person or I hang out in schools. I've done a lot of hanging out. For this last book I did a lot of hanging out in schools. So there's an observational dimension. Yeah, there's an observational, so I do two things. We saw each interview. Yeah, I do two things. I either go to a school and observe. That's why it's a little hard to count the number. How many people have you spoken to? What do you count, everybody in the playground? Because I sit and I observe in the playground. I sit and observe in the cafeteria. I take notes on the back of envelopes. I use those quotes. I sit and observe in playgrounds and cafeterias a lot. And then I interview people. Sometimes in school settings, the school will let me come in and I'll interview people and they'll set up a little room and let me interview in a little room. And sometimes people come to my office. For a big study I did of continuing the spirit of generosity. Cynthia Brazil, the roboticist in the media lab here, Brian Scasalotti. These are the people who worked on Kismet and Cog, robots that are now in the MIT Museum. We interviewed hundreds of children with those robots. Mitch Resnick has let me interview more people learning logo and scratch and Seymour Pappert let me interview cohorts of children learning logo. I mean these were people who were generous with their, people who were generous in letting, I've never developed a technology but I've counted on people who have developed technology to let me interview people who were using their technology and Rodney Brooks, when he found out that I was interested in studying people and robots, again, gave me a key to an office, not with as nice a couch in his AI lab. And he said, come, come study the AI lab. So again, there too, there the method was a little bit different. We introduced kids to robots. But again, the protocol was, and so here is Kismet. And there was a little bit more of a study of those hundred children who we introduced to Kismet and Cog. I described that and alone together, what we did with them, we showed them the robot, but we basically didn't wanna do too much because we were interested in what they made of an encounter with a robot. So there's been a kind of mix of a little bit of Piagetian style experiments, particularly when talking to children about what's alive and what's not alive. And some of the research does look at what children make of computational objects in terms of is it alive, is it not alive? And there, I would say there's a little bit more of an experimental feeling to it because you have to set it up, you have to show them the object. But in the studies of, in the contemporary studies of what a kid's, what is life with Facebook like? I say, hi, what's life with Facebook like? And that's pretty much the protocol. So there's both an empirical dimension, but also a deeply interpretive dimension. And a participant, and there's a part, so I'm saying there's an observational dimension, there's a somewhat of, I would wanna say a very it's a multi, you know, a lot of things are going on. There's going into schools, but they're setting up certain kinds of experiments with the robots, and then there's a lot of interviewing. All of that, I call it intimate ethnography. I wrote a book actually called The Inner History of Devices. And in this book I try to capture what it is that I do. And I call it intimate ethnography. And the reason I call it intimate ethnography is that it's ethnography, but it has much more of a kind of clinical dimension. And it's what I try to teach my students. I mean, not everybody, I don't think you need to be a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist to do what I do. In other words, I think it's a kind of listening where you're attentive to the relationship. I think you really had it right in your introduction of me, I was very moved. I mean, you're sensitive to the relationship to the object. And you're paying attention to it. And you're sensitive to what the person starts to say after the interview is over. If you read it alone together, you'll notice that when I describe the interview, I often make a point of saying that this is material that happened as the official interview was over. Here's what they start to say. I mean, there are many, most great material happens when the person is really relaxed and it's kind of, you know, the kid is, I'll tell you one of the great stories. I mean, I interviewed this guy, and I interviewed a series of young men at a school outside of Boston. And this young man has turned off all of his stuff. He's turned off his laptop. He's turned off his, he had a blackberry. He had an iPhone. I mean, he was like wired. He turned, he had all this stuff. He turned off his laptop and all this other peripherals. And plus he had an iPod in addition to all that. And he turned everything off and he spends an hour talking with me about, you know, his various experiences, the games he plays and everything. And then as he's leaving, he turns his blackberry back on. And he says, as to himself, while we were speaking, he got a hundred text messages. And he starts, and he says to me, I got a hundred text messages while we were speaking. And I say, whoa, my idea of a, that's my kind of, I say, whoa. That's an ambiguous response. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whoa. But I say it with like a lot of feeling. And he says to me, how long do I have to keep doing this? And I include this in the book. I call him Sanjay. And it was a wonderful moment. It was after the interview was over. It wasn't part of our conversation. But he was, it was like, how long, a hundred text messages, I took off an hour to have an interview with a visiting sociologist. I'm a hundred text messages late. You know, I'm down a hundred messages because I took off an hour to talk to you. I mean, basically that sense of the ramping up the volume and velocity that this 16 year old is feeling. And he just says, how long is it? You know, am I gonna be doing this all my life? You know, you would. And I said, whoa. You mentioned, you mentioned David Reisman a minute ago as one of the people who had influenced you. There's an echo of Reisman, of course, and you're in the title of your new book. I hope so. That I'm sure that many readers picked up on. You were surely conscious of the echo. That's why I said I hope so. Are you, do you actually see connections between Reisman's argument in the lonely crowd and what you say in Alone Together? Absolutely, absolutely. David Reisman to remind, probably doesn't need reminding, but to remind you. He basically made an argument about people moving from an outer directed to an inner directed. Of course, all of these are ideal types. There was no real moving. I mean, we're talking about, I mean, just wanna make it clear that I know that you know that I know that you know that these are generalizations that are, I think, useful and helpful. But he made an argument about people moving from having a kind of inner sense, an inner directed sense of self to what he felt in the 50s was a kind of compulsive looking to others to an outer directed sense of looking around you for validation. And he called that a move from inner directed to other directedness. And what I found in Alone Together, particularly for young people, was a move to a sensibility or I just, in my interviews, something was revealed that I called, I share, therefore I am. And I share, therefore I am, is a movement from, I have a feeling, I want to make a call, let's call that old school, too. I want to have a feeling I need to send a text. Now, I want to have a feeling I need to send a text is a way of thinking and I don't wanna call it pathological. I wanna say it's a style of relating where you just get used to that as you're forming an emotion, it becomes your practice to share it, to have it validated, to check it out. And I have, I mean, there are great, you know, I don't have the book with me or I'd start out, I've sort of been to somebody else maybe have it, I'm sort of, to flip around, I'm sort of trying to mentally find the interviews where one young woman says, you know, I start to call my friends, I start to, and she almost, she makes a Freudian slip, excuse me, an information processing error, she calls the phone, oh yes, she calls the phone her friend, she calls the phone her friend, she says I start to pick up my friend, I mean my phone, and in order to feel the validation, in order to feel the validation, and if I can't get that friend, I have to call another because I need to know, I found I have a book, thank you, it's really sweet. You know, in order to feel the feeling, she describes how she needs to talk to the friend, and you know, there are 20 such interviews, but there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of moments like that in the study, and I began to just get this, I share, therefore I am, which takes Reisman's ideas about other directness to a higher power, to a higher power, and more disturbingly, it takes psychoanalytic idea that someone like Heinz Kohe talks about, and talking about the narcissistic personality, and part objects, where the narcissistic personality is not somebody who's all full of themselves, it's somebody very fragile, just as Reisman's other directed person is, and the fragile self needs to use other people to buttress his or her sense of self. The narcissistic, which bears a family resemblance in a not happy way to I share, therefore I am, and I talk about the vulnerability of this particular style. First of all, it is not a good way to use other people because it's not really a full relationship with another person, because you're using that other person, it's not like person to person, full person, you know, person to person, full person relating, it's that I need you, I need you then, I need you a particular purpose, I need you to validate this feeling, it's a kind of almost instrumental use of other people, or can become that. And I found it a disturbing like motif as time went on. And this is the, you know, I don't want to say this is the dark side of Facebook, this is the, because I was not happy, for example, with the tagline that went with the advertisement for this talk. You've stolen one of my segues. Yes, this talk was advertised as my darkening view of technology, and I had deleted that, and I had said no, my evolving view, but they put it back, they advertised it. The correction was made in some places, but not in others. Some places, not in others, but you know, in so far as there is something cautionary, because I'm also very optimistic, and I'm gonna want to tell you why I'm optimistic, because I see a lot of people unhappy who feel that something's gone amiss, and who I think want to make some corrections. And by the time I finished alone together, I just felt a lot of people who basically were happy in their use of the technology, were felt that some things had gone amiss, and were ready to make some corrections. And my favorite line in my book, if an author's allowed to have a favorite line, is just because we grew up with this technology, just because we grew up with the internet, we think the internet has grown up. Just because we grew up with the internet, we think the internet has grown up. And that's a distortion of our perspective. The internet has not grown up, it is early days, there's plenty of time to make the corrections, and I want to be part of the process of being in those conversations about what those are. But in so far as this book is a more cautionary, has a more cautionary feeling about it, in so far as there is a darkening, in so far it was fair to say that there was a darkening feeling. This was the part that I found troubling. This kind of sense of not being able to, this kind of, I share therefore I am. And also, there's a great truth in psychology that if you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. If you don't teach your children how to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. And this constant connection are turning to our devices almost instinctively, that almost a panic of disconnection if we're not connecting. One line you've used in it. It worries me that we're only going to feel isolated if we're not going to learn how to have the kind of solitude that sustains us. That solitude is very important for creativity. One of your lines, Sherry, one of the most memorable things I saw quoted in one of the interviews you gave was the phrase, the line, loneliness is a failed solitude. Yes. Could you elaborate on that? Well, it's a paraphrase of if you don't, yeah, I mean, it is, that's a good one too. I mean, it's a, the book took me 15 years to write. So these, you know, yeah, I mean, I think that solitude is not a bad thing. Solitude somehow has been given a, solitude is not the same thing as loneliness. Solitude is a state, you know, and I'm not a person who likes, I'm a person who likes people very much. I like people very much. I like to be in company very much. But solitude is a creative state. You need solitude for constructive thinking. You need to be able to be in your own company and enjoy your own company. That's a state of maturity. That's a goal. And loneliness is when you can't reach that, when you fail to reach that. Now that doesn't, you know, solitude is something that we have to teach and learn how to achieve. It's a good thing. Now that's not to glamorize it or to say we all need to go off and be alone all the time. It's not sort of, I remember reading, there's an author whose name I'm forgetting, May Sarton, May, and I remember being given her books when I was way too young. And I remember thinking, what is this loneliness ecstasy? You know, all these setting the table for yourself and putting, it was all about, I remember at the time, you know, setting the table for yourself as though you're the most wonderful person in the world and I thought, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, no, no, no, you know, when I'm alone I don't want to be setting the table for myself. I don't do that, you know. But the sense of being able to enjoy and feel good, walking along the dunes in Provincetown alone is a beautiful thing. And I walk- Even without your blackberry? What? Without your, well I'm saying, the reason I use, I have a house in Provincetown and I've walked those dunes for decades. Those beautiful dunes in Provincetown and Wellfleet and Truro, and now when I walk those dunes, people are there buried in their devices. Or people used to walk those dunes with a partner or with a child. And now you have the adult with the blackberry or the iPhone, excuse me, no product placement. You know, a smartphone, Android, you know. The adult, what? The adult has the phone, the child has the phone, the adult has the phone, the other adult. I mean, the sense of place, of presence is I think something that that is something where I feel that a lot of people feel that they need to make the corrections. I think that as a culture I think that there's a growing sense that this is a place that you need to make the corrections and there's a, David warned me that he was gonna ask me that where I think I've been misunderstood. Can I just answer that question? Well, let me introduce you. Okay, give it, ask. One reason I wanna introduce it is that it's also a way of introducing you to another feature of what's distinctive about Sherry. She writes like an angel. She is really one of those rare scholars who actually writes readable prose and beautiful prose. And she had a piece in the Guardian in England, I think in response partly, surely in response partly to the reviews that she had received and the responses she had received to the new book. The book hadn't yet appeared in England and I was planning to ask her exactly the question she now wants to answer. And I thought I would ask it by quoting a little from that wonderful piece. Those of you who are interested in reading the full piece, there's a link to it on the communications forum website and you can. In it I write like an angel, apparently. And at the end of the piece she says that much of the reaction I'm quoting directly to alone together has been critical as though I have told the world to unplug, as though I have accused technology of causing a new epidemic of mental illness and as though I have said that technology is making us less human. Commentators talk as though technology and I were dating and I capriciously have decided to cheat on him. And then she goes on to say no, that's not really what is intended. What is intended, Sherry? Well, a lot of it, I was on the cover of Wired Magazine. I think I was the only, there's been some recent talk about why there have been sort of since me apparently. No, I haven't followed this very closely. But I think there haven't been, the women on the cover of Wired Magazine have not been women apparently who like have written something. I mean, there haven't been after me a long line of women on the cover of Wired Magazine who were there as women who have like written something or invented something or done something. So I mean, apparently there are other sorts of women on the cover of Wired Magazine, but not, but they're as illustrative of something. So I'm very, but there was a really kind of a lot of articles recently about what's with, since Sherry Turkle was with the women on the cover of Wired Magazine. So I'm not sure what the other women, what category they were in. But I mean, maybe they were models or illustrating something. But after this placement, after life on the screen for being on the cover, which put me on the cover of Wired Magazine, this book was reviewed by an editor of Wired Magazine in a way that basically said, she was on the cover of Wired Magazine. What's with this? You lost, maybe they'll kill the issue. Like what's with this? Really, like how could she once have been on the cover of Wired Magazine? And what's with this? If people didn't like Facebook, they wouldn't be on Facebook. And it had, and it began, it was one in then a series of reviews that essentially had that structure. Like how could somebody who liked technology that much? Like, not like it. As though this was about liking technology. So I wrote this, so The Guardian asked me to write a sort of response to this review, and to which I made the point that first of all, something happened. And I will tell you what happened that darkened my mood. Two things, actually two things happened. That darkened my mood. So let me just write down. I promise to tell the two things that happened. And then I want to make one more point before I tell you the two things that happened because actually something happened. It wasn't as though I sort of was going around the world thinking, God, if only I could write a book and not get on the cover of Wired Magazine this time. I mean, I loved being on the cover of Wired Magazine. I mean, I really liked it a lot, particularly being at MIT. People walk along on the street and they'd be going like this to me all the time. It was really wonderful. Okay. So it was not my goal to have, you know, and if you're watching Wired Magazine, it's really not too late, you know, if you're fine. So some readings of my book, and I think it's the author's fault when a book is misread, I think it's got to also be partly the author's fault. So I take responsibility for this. That there are these happy people with technology, all of us who enjoy Facebook and who really like being online and stuff like that. And then Sherry Turkle found the thousand or so malcontents. And she tells their story. And it's not an uninteresting story and she's not a foolish person. She's a clever person and it's an interesting story. But there are those, there's kind of the story of most of us who are, you know, who are kind of, and then there are these stories of these people who have some problems. And that really isn't the case. And I think that I didn't, I'm sure I say it in the book and I, you know, I mean, I'm sure I say it, I'm sure I say it twice, but that really is a misreading of what I found. I love my gadgets, I love my textings, I love my emailings. I mean, I just, I went to a reunion of my fifth grade class from PS216 Brooklyn. And, you know, I go to Harvard reunions from all that Harvard stuff that David was telling you about. But Harvard always has reunions. PS216 in Brooklyn has never had a fifth grade reunion before Facebook. I mean, this is wonderful. This is anybody here from PS216 Brooklyn who missed the fifth grade reunion? I mean, these are the, and what about Egypt? I mean, hello, I mean, this is fantastic. But that doesn't mean that those of us who are enjoying these bounties are not also aware that we go out to dinner and everybody has a cell phone on the table and takes calls during dinner. My friends are academics, so I'm allowed to tease them. I say, what, epistemological emergencies? I mean, you know, I, you know, that there's a scene. There's a scene. Is there any other kind? Yeah. There's a scene in my, there's a scene in my book about a funeral with texting at this funeral. And I, there's a, there's a methodological rule I should have said, you know, I teach my, I teach my students in qualitative methods. Don't put it in your paper. Don't put it in your book. If you've seen one example of it, it will not resonate. It doesn't belong. If I reported on a funeral when there was texting, there's a lot of texting at funerals. You should read my email. You wrote about the texting at funerals. I now have so many examples of texting at Shiva. You know, Shiva's this Jewish ceremony. People texting at Thanksgiving dinners, texting at, I mean, birthday parties for 15 year olds. At the point in a birthday party for 15 year olds when everybody wants to go home. And it used to be that the 15 year olds had to stay there. And somehow at the end of the party, they were closer to being 16 because they got through it at that hard part. And now when that hard part comes, they take out their phones and they go on Facebook and they've left the party. So what's the problem is that we have taken, we have a technology that allows us to be elsewhere. And we have turned out to be vulnerable to this affordance of the technology. I think in terms of technological affordance and human vulnerability, it gives us a kind of control. We don't want to be on the phone, the sphere of telephone calls. We rather text than talk. Phone companies try to sell you voice minutes because they know you won't use them because people don't want to talk on the phone. It feels there's too much exposure. Both teenagers and adults in business and in personal life, people want to text. They don't want to talk. They don't want to open themselves up that way. So there are these bunch of things that are happening to the people who are happiest and most content and most okay with this technology. And I'm trying to report that part of the story that is not part of the triumphalist narrative. But I am reporting a story that's everybody's story. And I think that that is the piece that I, as a writer, now a generous reading of the book would say, no, you made that clear. But I don't think clear enough because I think that there's been so much misunderstanding of that that I just think as a writer not clear enough. Well, there's a tendency in the culture to try to fit discourse about technology into one of two boxes, a pro or a con box. And I think more balanced kinds of accounts of the consequences of technology are often misunderstood or simplified because of that. It's much easier for the newspapers and even for Wired Magazine to say, okay, there are supporters and enemies. Yes, that too, that too. I mean, I think the truth lies someplace in me. I think that that's true. And that's the position that I take, what David just said is the position that I take in this Guardian piece that's on the website. I say, you know, what is this? We're four against technology, what's the point here? But is there time to say the two things that happened? Two things happened after I finished Life on the Screen. So I finished the book in 1995, it came out in 1995, which means I finished the book in 1994 and a half. And I came back to MIT, not that I'd ever left, but I came back emotionally because when you're finishing a book, you're in this kind of book bubble. And I kind of emotionally returned and I saw two things that I'd never seen before. That I decided that I was gonna be doing a lot of other things, as David pointed out, I did a series of books on our intimate relationships with objects. I did four books on kind of objects to think with things and thinking and wrote this book on inner history of devices. There was a book called Evocative Objects. And I mean, I wrote a book about what objects bring scientists into science called Falling for Science. I mean, I did this kind of object series. But all the while, I was working on Alone Together because I wanted to tell the story of two, I wanted to tell two stories, but I didn't wanna tell the stories of early adopters. The first five years of mobile phones or the first five years. But the two stories I wanted to tell were of sociable robotics and mobile technology. And here were the two things that had changed, that I saw essentially in 1995. The first thing I saw in 1995 had to do with mobile technology. That when I wrote so positively about, in life on the screen, about experimenting with online, the thing that got me on the cover of Wired was I wrote very positively about the early virtual worlds, about going on there as a sort of experimenting with identity, about all those experimenting with aspects of self that you wouldn't have a chance to experiment with in the physical real. Call me not prescient. Call me not prescient. But my image was- Not prescient. Not prescient. You'd wake up in the morning, you'd have your breakfast with your family. You'd go to your computer, you'd go online and have your identity experimentation. You'd have lunch with your friends. You'd go back online at work. And I definitely had this thing about cycling through different windows on the screen. I saw that and reality was just one more window. I mean, I invented this whole language for talking about the multiplicity of worlds. But essentially I saw you based in the physical real and having these experiences online that you would bring into and that would enrich and you would use as kind of grist for the mill. I mean, the therapist in me saw them as grist for the mill in enhancing your experience of your life. And I came back to MIT and I met a group of young men. At that time it was only young men, there were no young women who were called the cyborgs. Does anybody know who they were? Steve Mann, Thad Starner. So these guys and at the time there were guys and there were some women added. They wore computer back on backpacks. They had like little antenna. They had glasses like goggles that were their screens. They had keyboards in their pockets. They wore the web on their bodies. They were online all the time in the primitive web. They were always online. They called themselves cyborgs. They felt this experience, they felt these, they felt the web and these computers as part of their bodies. Some people thought they were disabled. They were constantly being offered seats, you know. They were deeply moving and affecting group. And I saw them and I realized that that was the future. And I had completely missed, I mean, but they had no more than what you, I mean, in the front row, someone is taking notes, not texting, but he has an iPhone, he has a smartphone and he has a smartphone and a tablet. He has the point, he has a, I mean, what the cyborgs had, what I'm trying to say very simply, is nothing more than what we're all carrying around and what you've all very thoughtfully silenced for the purpose of listening to David and myself. In other words, they had nothing more than what we all have today that we're carrying around on our bodies. We have the web on us all the time. At any point we can check out, be someplace else, they had nothing more than what those 15-year-olds have who at the birthday party when something's hard goes someplace else. And I saw them and I knew that no matter how many people were saying I'd written this classic in a very, very important, and I don't want to, it's not to take away my achievement or say it isn't a very interesting book, but I'd missed something really important about what this was gonna mean for us. And I determined that I was now gonna follow the story of mobile connectivity out. And I wasn't gonna, and I was gonna do it for like 15, I didn't think it would be 15 actually, I thought it'd be like 12 years. And the second thing I saw, and I made the connection right away, because what really makes me, the only thing that really makes me angry is when people say, oh, she sort of wrote two books that had nothing to do with each other and she put them together. Cause half of the book is about sociable robots. And I see a very profound, so the second thing I saw, the second thing of the two things that happened that has a darker side is that same year, I came back to MIT and it came back again from the bubble of the book to MIT and there was a conference going on, an artificial life conference. And Christopher Langton was one of the great figures and early figures in artificial life and he and I were at this conference and he said, you know, I'm dying to see Rodney Brooks' new robot cog, have you heard about it? And I said, yeah, I've heard about it, but I've never seen it, I'd love to see it. So we go over to Rodney Brooks' lab and there's this cog, which is now in the MIT Museum and all cog could do, and I'm gonna use you as the example, is look you in the eye, know that you're a person, not an object, so focus on you, track your motion, eye motion, no, that was pretty much it. I mean, you know, recognize that you're a human because humans move with a regular motion and objects move with linear motion. And then it was programmed to like know red so that if you were wearing red, it would pay more attention to you or maybe some days it would be green, but basically, and make eye contact, I'm sorry, I missed the most important, make eye contact. So I was there with Christopher Langton and I began and the robot did this to me and your toast, if a robot does that to you, because you feel, you believe, that something that does those things is sentient and you start to believe that it cares about you. And I start to compete with Christopher Langton for this robot. For the attention of the robot. For the attention of the robot. Now I know that Cog knows nothing, but I start to compete with Christopher Langton for the attention of this robot. And I saw psychological, I mean, I had worked with Joseph Weisenbaum, I knew that I had saw him go through the torments of the damned about what the Eliza program, that early doctor program that pretended to be a psychotherapist. I had seen him go through the torments of the damned that people attributed more to that little program than, and I taught with him and I would say, Joe, Joe, relax. People are just using it as a, as a kind of Rorschach to project their own feelings. It's not, and here I was many years later chilled by my own response to this sociable robot, which was being, which in Japan, this kind of robot is being developed, as an elder care bot, as a nanny bot, as a teacher bot, as a, as a love you bot, as a, as a pornographic, I shouldn't say porn, as a companion bot, there's a book by David Levy called Love and Sex with Robots that predicts that we'll be, they know that these robots will be there to make love with you if you're lonely, to have sex with you as better than humans in some ways because they'll be, they'll never get heavy. I'll let you read his book, I don't, I don't wanna, David Levy, I mean, I have a relationship with this book because he dedicates the book in part to me and to my research subjects because he thinks that, that hackers who I describe will be happier with these robots, which, you know, we got into a big, and alone together I get into this whole discussion with David Levy about sort of how dare he dedicate his book to, to my hackers, you know, to my, how much he has misunderstood what I've said about MIT students that he should think that they deserve robots, I mean, you know, but the point is, I was chilled by these two developments and by the cog, I was so chilled that I stopped them, I stopped a life on the screen in press and you know how much publishers love that and I included in galleys, I think it was, it was later than galleys and those days I had something after galleys called page proofs and I actually inserted the story of the cog into life on the screen because I was so disturbed by it, I wanted to make sure that some darkness, you know, got into that book, which nobody noticed apparently, but I basically set out then to study these two stories together, which I see as extremely linked because they have to do with why we expect more from technology and less from each other and that's the theme, you know, that's the theme of this book. When I was preparing for this, I read and reread a lot of Sherry's work and one thing I thought we might do is I made up a list of sort of keywords, I wanna end our conversation fairly quickly and open it to all of you, I hope you'll be thinking about questions, but so I think I'll reduce the number of keywords I want you to talk about, but one that I'd like to mention because it establishes, it'll give you an opportunity to talk more fully about the continuities across the books, it's true I think that the first two books are broadly optimistic and the second book is more skeptical, but that doesn't mean at all that there are an intimate connections and that there isn't a continuity and one way to get at the continuity is to ask you about certain terms that you've devised that have actually, for many people working in the study of the effects of computational technology on human experience have borrowed and one of the terms is the now famous term relational object, relational artifacts. Is it famous? I think so, well I've certainly seen it used by other people besides you. It's good. It seemed to me that if you talk a bit about what you mean more fully by relational artifacts it will help explain why there's a connection between among all three of the books in some ways. Right, well, in fact, evocative objects is the word that truly unites the three books and relational artifacts is a word that I try to delimit to the artifacts like cog. Now I may have used it before but I more recently have tried to use the term relational artifacts to mean artifacts that make you want to love them. Well discuss both then. Yes, that's why I want to talk about both because it may be when you're developing terms you somehow you get a good idea and you use it and then later you say, no, no, really I should have used it. I'm sorry I used it then. So the phrase, what really links the book together is the notion of evocative objects which I use on the first page of the second self which is the first book to talk about the wild child of Avéron, the boy who was found in the woods and who's adopted by the doctor. And the question is what makes him an evocative object is because in thinking about the wild child of Avéron, is there what's nature, what's culture, will he learn, what's innate? You think about human nature when you think about the wild child. And I make the argument that the computer is like the wild child for our time. That the computer, in thinking about the computer, and I make this argument in 1984, the computer is the evocative object for our time and thinking about the computer, are we programmed, what is free will, what is program, what is, that we're thinking about ourselves by thinking through the computer's nature. And that's why I say in 1984, although I began the book in 1978, I'm telling you, as I hit MIT, I began that, I sort of arrived at MIT and then I sort of began that book. From the minute I hit MIT, the computer was my evocative object for thinking about thinking. And that theme of the computer as evocative object is what then carried through in life on the screen. The internet was the evocative object for thinking about identity, the new virtual world with evocative objects or new ways of thinking about identity. And then in our world today, for me, sociable robots and kind of connectivity are the new evocative objects for thinking about what kind of social relationships, what kind of solitude and what kind of intimacy are we gonna have? I mean, is it intimacy if you give an 84-year-old woman a robot that encourages her to tell her life's story and she starts to talk about the death of her son in a rock, you know, a death of a grandchild in a rock and the death of her spouse and the robot is encouraging her to talk about that, to make meaning of her life with a creature that has no understanding of meaning. And I think not. And I think that that object then becomes an evocative object for thinking about what meaning is, which I think is the question that digital culture poses for us now is what is human meaning. So that is how I see the thread going through. Relational artifacts is a phrase that I now try to use to talk about these objects that make the eye contact, that look you in the eye and track your movement and in various ways encourage you to think that they understand meaning. Now, I love robots that help the elderly live longer in their home, they've fallen on the floor, that the robot not only helps them get up, but calls 911 or call, every kind of robot that's assistive, that's cleans your floor, your dishes, your helps you if you're a NASA astronaut. I mean, it goes into jungles or into places where there might be landmines or helps you go into places where there might be bombs and saves people's lives. Very pro-robot here. This is not about do I like robots. This is about do I like robots that try to chat with you about things that robots don't know about. It's a kind of render unto Caesar argument. And that is the kind of robot where I say a lot of them are on the drawing boards. A lot of them are being, the argument is that there are no people for these jobs, robo teachers, robo nannies, robo elder care bots. And the argument always is the first slide and all these robo conferences I go to, the conference is called Caring Machines. And the question is who's doing the caring? I mean, the first part of a loan together is about this topic before I get to the connectivity. These machines don't care. And I call it love is labor lost. I mean, to me, this is what we owe each other. This is our human compact with each other. This is not to be delegated to machines. And this is very controversial. There are a lot of people who disagree with me and I'm sure some people in this audience will disagree with me. And I look forward to that conversation because what I want this book to accomplish is to start that conversation because when this robot arrives on the market is not the time to have that conversation because it will be marketed in a seductive way. It will be testimonials from doctors. And I mean, the time to have this conversation about what we want from sociable robotics is now. It's a complicated conversation because what if I tell you this robot gives solace to the family? I'm a very honest ethnographer. One thing about being an empiricist, as you point out, is I report my data. I report data. The son of somebody who's playing with one of these robots says, you know, I leave my mother in a nursing home facing a wall. It makes me sick. I leave her looking at a television. I don't feel so bad. I still don't feel great. I leave her playing with your robot. She's engaged. I don't feel so bad. I like it. I report this. But if this robot doesn't understand a word this woman is saying to her, she deserves a person. She's talking about the death of her husband to this robot. Sherry, one of the- So you get my- To continue this, and this will be my last intervention except to moderate a conversation unless you run out of questions, in which case I will pepper her with new questions. But in terms of this, Sherry, one of the things that shows up in your writing in various places is a distinction or a dichotomy that you develop between your idea of what simulation is as against authenticity. Yes. And I think this has some connection to what you're saying about the robots. And I wonder if you could, by using those terms, elaborate a little bit further, there's a sense in which the robot is simulating a response, that it's not a real response, not an authentic response. You seem especially preoccupied by this distinction. I'm very preoccupied with this. But the reason I ask about it is that it's certainly possible to recognize that an awful lot of what you might identify as authentic interaction is really not so. That is to say, we project our feelings on other people just as we do on robots. So that the classic example might be the Freudian therapist who never says anything, but nods his head and clears his throat and says, and if you ask him a question or her a question, the response is, well, what do you think about that? I could certainly imagine a robot performing those functions. So in other words, I think the distinction between machine simulation and human indifference or in an exchange between two people for one of the two to imagine that she's making much more contact with her interlocutor than she is, doesn't strike me as being that different from the imperfect and not fully human interaction between a human being and a machine. So in other words, I'm wondering whether that distinction is as decisive as you seem to imagine it is. Okay, this is my answer. Well, it's not fair. You've written out your answer. This is one of the best, in interviewing people about this question, this is one of the best responses pro-robot, I mean, not interviewing people, in talking with roboticists about this question, this is one of the best, why you should be playing the role usually played by a roboticist, I don't know, but David is a man of many parts. So this argument that people are simulating it to is a very, that we're all simulating and acting for each other. Stephen Colbert did this. I was on Stephen Colbert, he gave me the same thing, that we're all acting for each other all the time, that we're never, you know, that authenticity is, we're all just playing game, keep quoted Shakespeare, somebody who said that, and we're all just putting on faces for each other and what's the big production here. And this is my response, which I did by telling a story, but of course I put it in the conclusion and I deeply identify with the story. And you know, it's really not for me to say what my opinion is in a certain sense. I mean, I'm trained as a psychoanalyst, it's all about meaning to me, to talk about the meaning of a life, if you go to somebody who knows about the meaning of a life. To discuss the death of a child, if you go to somebody who is born and dies, who understands that notion. To discuss weather patterns, I think a robot is good. You know, I mean, there are things to talk to a robot about. I'm not anti-robot. It really, my problem is with certain kinds of relationships that have to do with human meaning, I say go to a human meaning specialist. That essentially is my argument. So to answer your question, as I was working on this book, I discussed its themes with a former colleague, Richard, who's been left severely disabled by an automobile accident. He's now confined to a wheelchair in his home and needs nearly full-time nursing care. Richard is interested in robots being developed to provide practical help and companionship to people in his situation. But his reaction to the idea is complex. He begins by saying, show me a person in my situation who was looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who was looking for a person and can't find one. But then he makes the best possible case for robotic helpers when he turns the conversation to human cruelty. And David didn't go that far. He just went to human faking it. But Richard goes to human cruelty. And he says, some of the aides and nurses at the rehab center, because he's just been released from many, many months at a rehab center, hurt you, he meant hurt me, because they are unskilled. And some hurt you because they mean to. I had both. One of them, she pulled me by the hair. One dragged me by my tubes. A robot would never do that, he says. And then he adds, but you know, in the end, that person who dragged me by my tubes had a story. I could find out about it. She had a story. For Richard, being with a person, even an unpleasant, sadistic person makes him feel that he is still alive. It signifies that his way of being in the world has a certain dignity, even if his activities are radically curtailed. For him, dignity requires a feeling of authenticity, a sense of being connected to the human narrative. It helps sustain him. Although he would not want his life endangered, he prefers the sadist to the robot. Might not be my choice. It might not be, no, I'm saying, this is an interview with a real person. It might not be many people's choice. But it's not, it is a human position. And maybe his interview takes it, like I say, to the sadist, it's an extreme. But the fact that sometimes you're with somebody who's pretending to listen to you and really not, still there'll be that spark, that moment, that chance that you are actually with someone who has the capacity to reach for you. With the robot, there is no such, you never will get that chance. Well, wait until the singularity of the robot is gone. That's another question. We're turning the, it's the audience's turn, I hope you'll come up with questions. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you very much. There are microphones here, please come and ask questions. It would be helpful if you identified yourself because you're immortalized on audio and videotape. Sure, my name is Stephen Cass. I'm actually with technology review down the way. So the background to this question very briefly are these seal robots I've seen recently, which is for the ideas to give them to Alzheimer's patients and, but they act like a pet. And so this leads me to thinking that we already have a technology for companionship for elderly people. They're called pets. So people often treat their pets as almost their family members. They have meaningful conversation with them. Yet that pet has no more understanding of what it is to lose a husband than a robot. Would you consider their interactions with pets to be invalid? Where does it lie in that kind of gray scale? And how does that apply to a robot that doesn't try to pretend to be a person but maybe tries to be a sympathetic pet like these seal robots for Alzheimer's patients? Well, actually, I write about the seal robots. The seal robots are the subject of quite a bit of a loan together. They're called paros. And again, generosity, the inventor of paro gave me quite a few paros and I brought them into nursing homes. So a lot of a loan together is about these seal robot paros. You know, pets are complicated creatures. They do, they are alive. Want to stand up so I can see you? They are alive. They are alive. They do no pain. They do have bodies. They do smell us. They're sentient. They're sentient. They have an experience of being in the world and of knowing that we exist. Now, I don't want to say that the telling long stories to them are things that they understand but the relationship of pets and their owners is a complex, is a very complex relationship that is a relationship with a creature of, but that has both life and sentience. So not to elevate the pets to what they're not, but they're not robots. They're not robots. I'm short. This works. My name is Helen. Thank you so much for your work and just the humanity that you exude which I feel like we're losing track on. My question and concern is based on recent research that regular consistent use of computer technology, specifically emails and Google searches, things like that are fostering a widening experience of addictive mind, the changing of the mind into an addicted quality. And I have this very deep concern that we are being forced for the first time in history to have an addiction, a gambling kind of an addiction. And I'm really concerned about that and I'm somebody who doesn't use computers very much for that reason. I try to protect myself so I can have a consciousness that isn't numbed out and degraded. And I just wondered if you can offer any thoughts on that, whether you see that as happening and if you have any thoughts on what we might be able to do to stop it. Well, I have very strong thoughts about using, I'm very sympathetic with the use of the phrase addiction to talk about what's happening. First of all, we get a dopamine squirt every time. In other words, we get neurochemically, we didn't know this a while ago, but we know it now, we get rewarded neurochemically for every new search, for every new multitask, even as our, even as our, what's it called? Our, not our behavior, our, the quality of our work degrades in every task we multitask. So here you are, doing 10 different things or five, feeling like a master, a mistress of the universe, feeling better for every extra thing you do and doing worse and worse at everything you're doing. And that's the experience of multitasking. I mean, you know, I mean, I mean, I have moments when I have, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the address book open and I'm swiping, even just silly things like swiping addresses from, you know, emails into the address book and feeling, I don't know, just feeling and everything, I'm doing everything worse and worse, you know, but I'm feeling great, you know. So even when you're doing like little dumb things, you can, you feel yourself just getting great and then you're, oh my God, and Google and, and the, the, we are being rewarded for every new search our brain interprets as seeking behavior and there's certainly are people who have written books on this phenomenon. The problem with calling this addiction is that if you, no matter how apt the metaphor, and I don't want to disagree with you or all the other people, the trouble with getting into this addiction language, no matter how apt the metaphor, is that there's only one thing to do if you're addicted to something, which is to go cold turkey on the substance. I mean, Charlie Sheen, God bless him, has one path ahead, which is to get off the tiger's blood or whatever it is, whatever it is that he's using and to try another way. I mean, addiction has one cure. There's no other path. We are not going to give up the internet, mobile devices, laptops, a wired world. We have to learn through, you know, the psychoanalytic ethos is that you make mistakes, you repair, you move forward. You make mistakes, I'm steeped in this ethos. It's fundamentally my training, my belief. You make a full start, you repair, you, you, you, it's a tragic view. I mean, it's a, but it is, I think, more appropriate. You make the corrections. And I think that that is the point, you know, that we're at. We're going to make the corrections. So it will start in the family. I think it will start with small things. I think we'll stop texting at meals. I think we'll stop texting when we're with each other in company. I mean, I see Karen Brennan is here, who's a teaching fellow in a class that teach with Mitch Resnick. I mean, who's, who was inventing as part of a cohort of students, inventing the future for how to use these technologies more appropriately and more thrillingly in education. Not everything is just, you know, mindless, you know, mindless searching for no reason at all. And that's where I'm putting my money is just, and my hope is being part of a conversation where we really begin with humanistic values to say, what do we want this technology to do? What do we want? What I'm against, and I'm, you know, Kevin Kelly is a great friend and a very, very smart man, but he calls his book, What Technology Wants? And hey, what do I want? What do you want? I mean, I, you know, I, technology is a very, very powerful force. It has it, but ultimately my position is really one of the humanists that you, you know, you take account of what its affordances are and what you're vulnerable to, but you, you enter into a conversation with it where, you know, we're, we're more than just passive. And the internet, you know, how we use this technology, again, just because we grew up with the internet does not mean that the internet has all grown up. So that's my, you know, I know it's a, you know, it's not a program, but it's a, it's a way to begin. Thank you. Hi, my name's Steve. You mentioned about self as sharing. And I was recently at a conference where one of the members of Facebook's futurist team or whatever, the people who were deciding what they want Facebook to be, is, and he got up and said that his idea and what Facebook is very much committed to is a future where you never even have to make a decision ever again. You are walking down the street and you, there's a movie theater in front of you. And rather than actually having to decide what movie you want to see, you just put on your little magical Facebook goggles and it tells you what movies your friends have seen. And you're saved the effort of actually having an opinion by just going with kind of the crowd mentality. And he was extremely excited about this. I mean, to him, this was the holy grail. I was, wanted to crawl under my seat and quiver in a fetal position. You said that you have, I mean, you've been observing people using the internet for the last 20, 30 years. Could you say something about the, about the evolution you have seen in the attitudes of young people towards the internet? Because you've mentioned kind of the beginning point and the end point. How do you see the relationship of people and the external world, the choices they make, the way they define their life, evolving and changing over the course of the same time period? Well, towards I share, therefore I am. In other words, I mean, if I had been to that conference, I would have, that would have been good. I would have written an op-ed. I mean, this is, I'm seeing an evolution and I write about it towards a sensibility that would hear that and could potentially say, way cool. And you, the fact that you shivered and the fact that maybe I wanna go home and try to find out who said it and write something brilliantly and what, like an angel. You know, that's because I come from a sensibility where the loss of individual choice and individual thinking is dangerous. Because I see a volatile, I see a volatile combination, a kind of perfect storm of looking for validation and never separating from parents that I think is a dangerous opening towards being ready to hear authoritarian voices. And that is really, you know, a deep concern. Cause it's one thing, I mean, what is this? You know, you'll know what movie, I mean, what is that to know really what, to go to the movie that your friends saw? What about if the popular movies become manipulated to be movies of... Cute robots having human reactions to things that someone wants you to have that reaction to. I mean, but I, I mean, I guess, I mean, you know, really to go, to really go darkening, to go very darkening. This is, I mean, this is actually a, I mean, I'm a very political person and this is a truly political concern that you have, if you don't have, you know, independent critical judgment, you know, and it's not to glamorize that or to say, oh my God, 25 years ago, that's what we had. Everybody had independent critical judgment was 25 years ago. I mean, I'm not that kind of romantic and I remember 25 years ago and it was, a lot of people didn't have independent critical judgment, but the idea of glorifying, never having to make a choice again, of glorifying, as Mark Zuckerberg does, that privacy is no longer, and this is a direct quote, you know, maybe missing, you know, privacy is no longer a relevant part of the social discourse, is no longer part of, and I think that was the quote, to glorify that as a desired outcome. I mean, privacy might not be convenient for the social network, but to say that privacy is no longer relevant to the social discourse, you know, privacy is very relevant to intimacy, privacy is very relevant to democracy. These are things that people need to be thinking about and I'm concerned about anything that takes as its agenda undermining it, and I worry if people are being prepared to not get chills. Forgive me for a quick footnote, but you know, it's very important to make a distinction between human stupidity and folly and what's inherent in technology. These are ridiculous remarks, but they have nothing really to do with technology itself. It's not inherent in the technology to tell you not to make choices. No, no, no, this is a technology. It's very important not to confuse the abuse of technology or particular systems that are designed by fools or by people who are greedy to make money with things that are inherent in the technology itself. I mean, there's an awful, and we also need to remember that virtually every new technology has been assaulted as an addictive danger. I remember in my youth, the incredible debates that went on about television that were very similar. They said it was addictive. They said people zunked out in front of it. They said after people watch television they wouldn't be able to add, subtract, or write that they would become more violent. None of those predictions actually worked out. A television, that didn't mean that television was a noble technology either. I mean, all technologies embody both the best and the worst of human beings, and I think that we need some kind of balance to recognize that. But it is concerning. It is concerning that, it is concerning when the stated goals of an organization as important as Facebook is, has privacy being irrelevant? Of course, and the threat to privacy is a deep and powerful one, but it may be much more deeply embedded in the architecture of the internet and in the behavior of corporations than it is, or the government in forms of surveillance than it is because of Facebook. There's a whole political dimension to the dangers of technology that Sherry's work doesn't directly discuss, and it's important not to confuse Sherry's skepticism and I think profoundly helpful reservations about the way we use and abuse technology with those kinds of surveillance problems or the political issues that are embedded in it. Although, what I would say about my work is that I study the sensibilities that are either ready to challenge, that are either ready to get chills or who say, and the problem is, not recognizing that there's a problem. And I tell a story in the book of my grandmother taking me to the mailboxes. My mom was divorced and we lived with my grandparents and my grandmother took me to the mailboxes every morning and the mail was delivered several times a day, as I remember my youth. I mean, this is so you can imagine. But in New York, the mail was delivered at least twice a day and the morning mail came and we went down to- In that noble pre-technological era. Right, and we went down for the morning mail and she pointed the mailboxes and she said in the old country, the government used the mail to spy on its citizens and in America, it's a federal offense. It's a federal offense for anybody to open up these mailboxes and that's why we're here and that's what makes this country great. And so she linked, in my mind, privacy, civil liberties, American-ness, citizenship through this artifact of the mail and privacy. And alone together I talk about how to talk to my daughter, who's now 19, about those issues when she has an app on her iPhone that shows her where all her friends are. Neighborhood, like little dots, like in Hogwarts, you know, the Marauders map, the little dots moving around, you know, the little dots are moving around and really the teenagers I interview in this book, I say over and over again, they have no idea if their mail is being read. They don't know who can look at their Facebook. They basically say, they ask me, they ask their parents, do you know who can look at my Facebook? Can the school look at my Facebook? Can the police? They say, I know the college is looking at my Facebook, how do they do that? They have basically no sense of what it means or if it means or can you have, can they open my email? Can Google open my email? Is my Gmail private? They have no sense of privacy at all. And what kind of sensibility that grows up? It's not that they don't care about privacy. Do not confuse being willing to put up pictures of you partying, uploading pictures of you partying will have no sense of wanting privacy. When these kids upload their pictures, that does not mean that they don't care about privacy. That's a different thing. But I worry about they're not having these core experiences that make them understand the connection between intimacy and privacy and democracy and privacy and to have people who they see as America's new elite talking this way about the lack of necessity for individual judgment and the lack of necessity for privacy. Anyway, so I think it's related. Of course, I don't discuss the privacy policy and the politics of privacy policy, but I do discuss the inner politics of a generation that's not willing to make, doesn't know how to make these distinctions, yeah. Which side do we start? We're over here now, you're next. Hi, so I'm gonna ask a question you probably get a lot, but hopefully with a different spin on it. So I'm wondering how to make these type of corrections, but instead of in a general just sort of, oh, what do we do, what technologies or where do we start? And so far I have teach people to be alone and no texting at meals. So. Other than teach people to be alone and no texting at meals? Yeah, or elaborate on those. But what are like the, do you fix email, do we fix texting, do we do it all at once? If you were to have a startup tomorrow to fix one of these, which one would you fix? A technological startup, yeah. I don't really think that I would use, I don't really, I'm not a specialist in using technology to fix this technology. I think that where I would put and where I'm starting to do volunteers and going on boards and I'm willing to work with anybody who's, send me an email if you have something you want me to do is I'm starting to really get very active in privacy. I think that the kind of nobody knows, nobody wants to know, it's all in the gray area, who knows, and you talk to people about how to, you know, how to make things more private and more transparent, oh, technologically it's so hard, we can't do it, I don't know, yada, yada, yada. I think that there's going to be a, you know, that we're coming to a time when that simply is not an appropriate answer. So I'm very interested in privacy. I think privacy is something that a democracy simply cannot just kind of keep going on the way we're going on now with a privacy policy that is. And there is a sort of significant political movement to protect privacy and many of the people who are active in it are also computer specialists. Yes, so I mean, I think privacy is something where I think they're starting to be, you know, increasing activity. And I think that appropriate use of computers and education. I think that this is something that I'm very, very interested in. I think that this notion that, again, the notion that there aren't enough people for these jobs that can throw a lot of technology at people is just going to help somehow magically. And it's not interesting. It's mind-numbing in most cases. PowerPoint is the most widely used piece of educational software, K through 12. I mean- That's a misnomer. Serious, what? That's a misnomer. Well, no, but that is, that is. I mean, when I go to schools and I, you know, I go to schools not to help people with their technology. I go to schools to interview kids. And I'm saying, oh, so what are you using? PowerPoint. All right, that's their idea of, you know. So I would say that those are two places to start. And then also I think that for parents, take a walk with your child without your device. Seriously, go to the corner, model for your child, that you're able to leave the house without your phone. There's a lot in my book about 9-11. Surprisingly, I didn't go out to interview about 9-11. I wasn't like, oh, you know, what's the connection of 9-11? But if you talk to kids about their cell phones, they'll start to talk about 9-11. Because this was a time when they felt alone, they felt abandoned. They were being taught by baby boomer teachers whose idea of what you do in emergency is put people in the basement and hide them under desks the way we were taught to do when we were growing up. They couldn't talk to their mothers. There was no telephone and coming out of it and their parents couldn't reach them either. And the 9-11 experience is crucial to the readiness of Americans to give their telephones to their eight year olds in case there's an emergency and to their then eight year olds desire to have cell phones so they could always call their mothers. So I'm not making a deterministic argument here that, you know, if it wasn't for 9-11, we wouldn't have adopted cell technology. I'm saying that it's a piece of this very complicated puzzle of why we're all poised for emergency and what, you know, and what that really is about. What is the emergency that we're all poised for? So, I mean, I think that there's all, but you know what? Time to model behavior in our cities and on my dunes and the Cape take, let's just try to take a walk with our children where they see us without our phones. And a shout out to the guys, because I see some young men here who, you know, look as though they could have, you know, be fathers or about to be fathers or have sons or shout out to the dads. There's a big difference between sitting next to your son and this is a very gender comment, but mostly the people who are complaining are young men. Sitting next, they are nostalgic about sitting next to their fathers on Sunday, watching Sunday sports. With the father maybe having a newspaper or a book and bonding with mostly its sons. Now the father is there with his blackberry in what the sons call the blackberry zone. And those conversations aren't happening in the same way as when the father was somehow there available. And this is mostly about fathers and sons. You know, girls have, young women have a different stories about their moms. So really, this is, you know, special shout out to the dads about Sunday sports. I hope that helps. Thank you. I tell you, it's baby steps in the beginning. Walking, candy stores, Sunday sports. Steve Helfer, a librarian retired. You know, I think most of this conversation, which I find very interesting and I've heard you speak on the radio and was very excited, has been about technology's effect on us, which of course is very important. But I think there's something missing. There was a cover of Wired recently, which discussed suicides in China over persons who were working in factories, making, cleaning the screens for our smartphones. And, you know, there is a lot of conflict minerals being used in our devices. And then of course, on 60 minutes, it was said that we throw away 130,000 computers a day. A lot of these end up in China, where people disassemble them and become very sick from the heavy metals. So we're talking about the effect on us, but can you say a few words about the effect on other peoples in the world who build our computers and upon the environment? I think you've just done it so eloquently. I mean, I, you know, I think you've just done it so eloquently. It's a very helpful comment. It's a reminder of how fantastically complex a discussion of this sort is and why it's important to recognize how the kinds of behavioral issues that Sherry has pointed to are significant, but only a part of a much vaster picture, in especially in which the political and moral implications of technological use need to be confronted. And I think you're, I mean, the third world's relation to the production of computer technology and smartphones for the wealthy is a critically important. I think David's pointed out the larger political context in women. There have been two sort of themes that have come out that show the, I mean, my work is, you know, I love my work, but I'm modest about its scope. It's a, it's an inner history. My work is an inner history of digital, of contemporary digital culture. That's what I'm aiming at. And the comment that David made about politics just a while ago and privacy and your work and some of the other comments open up to the much broader context. I applaud you, Rays, for raising this issue. Thank you. Hi, I'm Danielle and I'm staff here at MIT. And you touched on this and it goes back to human capacity and also the phrase, I share, therefore I am. And what I heard in the sequences, I share my feelings validated, therefore I am. And I have a question about in the absence of validation. One, is there an inherent assumption in that phrase that there's validation. And then if a person shares and the feeling isn't validated, I could think of three things that could happen. So validation saying I'm sorry or another outcome might be, you shouldn't feel that way, which I understand to be not validating the person's feeling or to instead of another response being let's solve the problem. So in the absence of validation, so when there's no I'm sorry. The question is, if a person shares and there's no validation, can they be? Well, if a person is fragile enough, I mean, it depends, you know, I'm not looking, my study is not a study of, it's neither a philosophical study. Can there be, can you have being without validating? It's not, it's not a William Jamesian kind of thing. Nor is it a study of psychopathology. So I would almost say I excluded from my work. I would definitely say I excluded from my work. I'm trying to think if there are any, I'm sure there are some exceptions with people who I included who were very vulnerable and who might be on the border. But I wasn't looking for trouble. In other words, I wasn't looking for people who you would classify as narcissistic personalities. So my examples of people who were showing the fragility and looking for validation are kind of normal teenagers. I mean, that was the point I was making before. I'm kind of looking at people who were kind of, who were good to go and who were using this style. So my point is more that if 15 years ago, an MIT freshman had come to my office and either practicing as a clinician or even in my capacity as a kind faculty member, but let's say in my listening with my clinical ear and had said to me, I'm calling home 10 times a day. I would have been thinking separation issues, definitely. You hear now somebody's texting home 10 times a day and that is now close to one of the possible norms for a freshman in college. But just because, and I mince my words in the book, I mean, I choose them so carefully, I can barely, the sentence becomes tormented. Just, and here he mince them here. Just because something becomes close to the norm, and this is, I'm trying to answer your question here, does not mean that it doesn't carry the shadow of the issue that once made us worry about it. So the person who needs to check in 10 times a day no longer saying, whoa, I'm checking in 10 times a day. I'm texting, 6,000 texts a month. Whoa, I'm doing a lot of checking in. I mean, what is all this checking in? What do I think? Because they're now in the norm. It's now up to 10,000 texts a month and you're not doing anything particularly unusual. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't carry the, like as Freud has this wonderful phrase, the shadow of the object falls on the ego. I mean, it means that the shadow of the issue of separation and of autonomy still falls on the person who needs that much validation. So I guess that's how I'm responding to what the, is that, does that respond to the concern that I hear in your question? If the person is fragile enough, there's no such thing as not getting validation. They have to keep going until they get validation or they don't feel as though there's anybody home. Okay. Thank you. Hi, I'm Flourish Clink and I'm a lecturer here at MIT. One of the threads that has run through this talk, which I thought is really interesting is this generational thread. And this runs through many discussions of technology I noticed and I really appreciate some of the ways that you've touched on it because I feel like you've been talking about this issue of generations without denying agency to teens or without saying, oh well, this just happened. You know, like parents just sort of had kids and then the kids went to ride because of technology. I guess I would like to ask you to elaborate a little bit on that because I'm about Mark Zuckerberg's age and I teach MIT. We're not holding that particular thing against you. Unless you want, you never have to make a decision again. Well, I don't want that. And what's interesting to me, I don't want that. Okay, then you can finish your question. But what's interesting to me is that I teach MIT undergraduates in intro to media studies. And we have this turn off all of your technology for a day project. And what's really interesting to me is that all of the undergraduates pretty much that I've ever taught in three semesters so far teaching this class, teeing for this class and then teaching has been, they hate technology. They're so happy to turn it off. They really think it's poisoning their lives. And much more than I do myself, actually, even as a person who spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff. So I guess I'm just curious. You're buying my book. I'm so I'm just curious about, you know, I'd like you to sort of elaborate a little more about this and about especially sort of the relationship between parents and their adult or soon-to-be-adult children and how to sort of negotiate this without taking anybody's agency away and having a real conversation. Well, too many, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Parents. Sorry, sorry. First of all, on the question of this is why, this last thing about why am I optimistic in this darkening story where not only I'm worried about, now you've learned that not only am I worried about narcissistic personality disorder, I'm also worried about fascism and authoritarianism. I mean, the list of things that make me anxious or you know, it's like, so, but in the midst of all of these anxieties, my optimism comes from the young people who are from that guy who I call Sanjay who's saying how long do I have to do this? And from the many students who I report in this book who are basically saying I, this is too much. This is too much. Now I find that I can only do work, like work, work if I do my emails in the morning and at night. And I'm willing, I welcome your emails because that is my medium. I don't, but I need, but I find. But she only reads them between three and four a.m. But I actually put a lot of time in on my emails, but I can't do it all day during the day. I don't want to be interrupted during my day before Karen put me on tweet deck. I don't want to be hearing from all of you all day. I want to be hearing, I want to be hearing from the world in between when I'm actually thinking, working, and I mean my sensibility needs, my sensibility needs that kind of old fashioned time. So what I found is that a lot, so that's me, but a lot of the kids that I was interviewing were not me. I mean they were used to this kind of always on, always on, always on, but they had a different problem. They were getting off Facebook because they were exhausted by the performance aspect of it. They talked about performance anxiety that they were always being, always on, always trying to remember, you know, always, they say things like, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to, I have to always be, you know, putting on a good face. I don't even want to say that my dog died is one of the great quotes, you know. I don't, my cat died, I don't want to put it on Facebook, I don't want to have anything negative out there. I want people to like me, I want them to like me. So, I mean, there's a sense of always when one guy says, I don't know whether I should say on my Facebook that I like Harry Potter, it might make me look nerdy, or it may be look sexy because I'm the kind of guy who's so in touch with his child side and so relaxed that I can say something like that. Do you think it makes me look sexy or nerdy? You know, you know, this handsome 18 year old man, I mean, you know, all of this constant performance. So, I see a lot of people, a lot of kids, you know, who now, you know, 18, 19, 20, who just want to, who are ready, who are not like me willing to wake up at five o'clock in the morning, do email from five to nine and from, you know, David's getting answers from me at three o'clock in the morning and you know, who are not willing to do that, but who are just saying, you know, I'm ready to do something else. So, I think that my optimism comes from many people's sense that things have gone amiss and also on the corporate side, on the industry side, the, you know, that up to 90% of people's time is spent communicating with each other, is starting to get, you know, productivity, it starts to be kind of an issue. I mean, you know, are we too busy communicating to work, to create, to innovate? You know, what percentage of that communication is really productivity? And these are questions that I think, you know, people in law, people in finance, people in industry are really starting to ask themselves in a very serious way. These are serious questions. We're communicating, but we're not necessarily connecting on the things that matter. So I, the only thing I wanna say specifically about it, I mean, I made a list of, you know, the many, many parts of your question, parents and children, one of the, you know, if a qualitative methodologist says she has a finding, pay attention, because I never say I have a finding, but I have one important finding, I have several important, but that means that something surprised me so much that I'm willing to say I have a finding, and it's not a language that people like me use. I expected to find teenagers driving their parents crazy, and I found parents modeling the very behavior. Thank you. That's right. I found parents modeling the behavior that they then criticize in their children. It's the parents who are texting during breakfast, it is the parents who are texting during dinner, it's the parents who are texting when they're driving, it is the parents who are, this is the big, I mean, I told you about the parents who are texting during Sunday sports, the dads in particular, it is the, but it's the moms, mostly the moms during school pickup, and this is something you've heard if you've been listening to me on the radio, and you've heard me tell this story, because it, you know, there's like a shout out to all the moms who are dragging themselves to these pickups at schools, and who were sitting there in the cars not looking up when the kid comes out of school, and it's driving the kids crazy. Never, you know, on the park, in the park, not looking up to the kid on the jungle gym because you're texting, and it's not the parents' fault, because the parents, when I interview the parents, which is the virtue of my method, which is then, you talk about my method, I get a chance to interview the parents, I'm there in the park, and I say parent, yo, which is what psychoanalysts say when they don't say, uh-huh, you know. And, you know, when they talk about how they have to do it for work, their work expects them to do it, so it's gonna be, there's gonna be, I believe there's gonna be a convergence of, in the next, and you know, I always joke, the AI people said, you know, we're gonna have artificial intelligence in the next 20 years, and then it was 20 years, and then I don't have, I've lived long enough to see in the 10 years, and five years, and Ray Kurzweil, he thinks we'll have the singularity by 2040. Do not hold your breath. Right, I think he used to be 20, maybe it was once 2030, and now it's 2040. The point is, I think there's gonna be a convergence that we're gonna see of many forces, where you're going to get the pushback. And I want us all, I mean, I want to be part of that conversation, but I really wrote the book so that we can all be part of that conversation. Final question. Thank you for being so patient. Well, this question got me going. Yeah. This is intuition, and I'm not quite sure whether it can catch or not, but it seems to me that, to some extent at least, when we've been talking about community, we've been talking about the individual's projection of what he or she needs to find outside herself, and we haven't talked about community as a body with some sort of identification, which names the humanistic norms in one setting or another. And so I'm interested to see whether we can put any sort of pin on the map for what's happening to the norm-expressing communities in this. Well, in the book, I talk about a new pragmatism. And I talk about it in a way, not necessarily like a good thing. So a new pragmatism is that it used to be, for example, in talking about, in the, take the robotic case, it used to be when I began my work that simulated thinking could be thinking. Simulated feeling was not feeling. I think the David was trying to get here with his authenticity question. Simulated thinking could be thinking. Simulated feeling was not feeling. Simulated love was never love. Now, objects are alive enough to maybe love me. Alive enough to maybe this me, or objects are taken as pragmatism basically is, is it alive enough for the purpose I want it put to? And that is the philosophical, I mean, if I had to put a fancy name, and I do, you know, try to situate where I think philosophically we're at, and I don't make a big deal of it because, you know, I try to lead with my strengths, you know. And, but I note that I feel that philosophically, the arc since I began my work has gone from what I call a romantic reaction to the computer presence, where the computer is not to touch certain areas, and the areas it's not to touch have to do with these places of human meaning. To a new American, and I say American pragmatism because I wrote the book in an American context, I wrote the book as my daughter was growing up, I didn't, it's not a study of the Midwest and the West and this is a Northeast Carter book. And so it's an American pragmatism where things are alive enough to do the job you want done. And it's a problematic moment because things start to sneak in with alive enough and some of the things that start to sneak in have to do with these questions of meaning that I don't think belong there. And that's my opinion. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sherry.