Cultural analyst Sherry Turkle presents on Alone Together at TEDxUIUC. Following is the full transcript of the TEDx Talk.
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Sherry Turkle – Cultural analyst
Good afternoon. When I first got to MIT in 1978, Michael Dertouzos, who was the head of the laboratory for computer science held a meeting. There was a several day retreat in Endicott House Conference Center, in which he assembled the greatest minds in computer science really at the time to figure out the question of what people might want to do with what was then called home computers. The word personal computers really hadn’t come into the lexicon yet.
Now these were the first computers that you didn’t have to build. These were the first computers that you could actually buy. And these great computer scientists got together and I was invited to the meeting because I had begun my studies of computers and people. They got together and they kind of gave it their best shot. Somebody suggested the children might want to learn to program, listen to respectfully, maybe. Somebody suggested that we would want to put our address books on computers and people laughed, and said well actually paper and pencil, little books, paper was perfect for that because most people didn’t have a database, they had a couple of names and addresses so that didn’t make a lot of sense.
Some people suggested well a calendar and actually people said well no, I don’t like using the computer for my calendar. I really find the little Filofax is much better. You can flip through which is much more practical. I tell this story because I think it’s very important to know, to remember that really not that long ago, we were trying to figure out how we would keep computers busy. And you know, now we know that once we networked with each other. Once computers were our portal to being with each other, we really don’t have to worry about keeping computers busy. They keep us busy. It’s kind of as though we are their killer app.
So how does that work? We’re on our email, our games, our virtual worlds. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, we take our lives into our hands to do that even with our kids in the back seat of the car. We text each other at funerals, we go to the park and we push swings with one hand and we scroll through our messages with each other. Lot of my research is observing families and you know, this is what I see.
The children who I interview say that their parents read them Harry Potter again with their right hand reading the book and the left hand scrolling through the messages on the Blackberry. Children describe that moment at school pickup. They’ll never tell you that they care but they describe that moment where they come out of school looking for that moment of eye contact and instead of that moment of eye contact with the parent who after all had shown up at school pickup that parent is looking at the iPhone, looking at the smartphone and is reading mail.
So from the moment this generation of children met technology, it was a competition and now they’ve grown up and today’s teenagers, this generation of children who’ve grown up with technology being the competition, they now have their turn to live in a culture of distraction.
And what do they tell me? They tell me that they sleep with their cell phones. They begin by saying, well I use it as an alarm clock, and then they come clean and they say well actually it’s not just because I use it as an alarm clock. They want to sleep with it just in case they get a message, or they want to communicate and then they say that even when their phones are put away — let’s say relegated to their school locker — they know when they have a message or a call, they feel that, they can tell at long distance that they have a message or a call, they say they can just sense it. Indeed adults as well as teens report that they feel their phones vibrating even when they are not. This is a well-known phenomenon, it’s called the phantom ring. It’s been reported all over.
When you take our phones away from us, we become anxious, we become impossible, really. Modern technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of us.
So what is the arc of the story that I want to tell? Only 15 years ago looking at the early internet, I felt an incredible sense of optimism. I saw a place for identity experimentation, I called it an identity workshop, for trying out aspects of self that were hard to experiment with in the physical real and all of this happens and all of this is still wondrous.
