Sherry Turkle releases critically acclaimed new book, Alone Together

Facebook. Twitter. Second Life. Smart phones. Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for? Now, the question is what don't we use them for? Now, through technology, we create, navigate, and perform our emotional lives.

Alone Together is the result of MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle's nearly fifteen-year exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, it describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude. It is a story of emotional dislocation, of risks taken unknowingly. But it is also a story of hope, for even in the places where digital saturation is greatest, there are people—especially the young—who are asking the hard questions about costs, about checks and balances, about returning to what is most sustaining about direct human connection. At the threshold of what Turkle calls "the robotic moment," our devices prompt us to recall that we have human purposes and, perhaps, to rediscover what they are.

Learn more about Sherry Turkle.