Ruminating with SHERRY TURKLE

What all that time on the screen is doing to us.

Sherry Turkle, a Brooklyn-born sociologist with an endowed chair at MIT, is one of the most psychologically insightful people I have ever known. Her 1984 book, “The Second Self,” was arguably the first important exploration of how computers are changing us as human beings. She expanded on these themes of technology and self in “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,”  “Reclaiming Conversation” and “Alone Together.”  Her new memoir “The Empathy Diaries,” hailed as an “instant classic,” is a moving effort to place her own life in the context of her work. If you want to know more about Sherry, The New Yorker recently published a good profile.

One of the great influences on my life was another Terkel--with a different spelling from that of Sherry’s stepfather, whose name she took. Studs Terkel lived near me in Chicago and my parents knew him a bit. Our family often listened to his interview program on WFMT and his 1974 oral history “Working”--which I read in high school--inspired me to interview the custodians and cafeteria workers I hadn’t paid enough attention to before. It wasn’t long before I decided to spend a good chunk of my life having conversations with all sorts of people.

There’s a straight line over 47 years from Studs to Sherry.

So let’s begin.

Photo credit: Peter Urban

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, Sherry.

Let’s start with a broad one--what do you think the pandemic has done to us?

SHERRY TURKLE:

It’s had paradoxical effects. We’ve learned to use technology in new ways, and often more creatively than we did before. I think of how I listened to Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello from his kitchen, or listening to Patrick Stewart reading Shakespeare’s sonnets from his back porch. What was so extraordinary about this for me was that they were in between performance and something more intimate. When Patrick Stewart got to Sonnet 20, he said he would skip it because “It wasn’t nice to women.” If this had been a performance, he would have just charged on. 

And yet, we have become sated with our screens. We have missed the full embrace of the human. I think we are in a better position to be more critical, more mature users of technology when we leave our confinement. 

JON:

Doesn’t it make the kind of conversation and connection you write about harder? 

SHERRY TURKLE:

Zoom makes empathic connection challenging indeed because empathy relies so much on meeting the face of another, making eye contact. On Zoom, if I want to give you the illusion of eye contact, I have to stare at the green light that is my computer’s camera. And not look at your image at all. This gives you the sense that I am looking at you in the eye. But I am actually looking at nothing at all. This is an empathy killer. We have performed empathic exchanges as best we could. The danger is that we come to be satisfied by what our machines have been able to provide. 

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“You have jumped to dystopia and I am determined to give the human spirit a chance!”

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JON:

Yep. The convenience of Zoom or other video conferencing platforms--only in wide-use for a year!-- is making it too easy to let our in-person skills (I can’t believe I’m using that phrase) rust. What happens when all people--not just kids--fall out of the habit of looking people in the eye or being comfortable out in public?

SHERRY TURKLE:

Jonathan, you have jumped to dystopia and I am determined to give the human spirit a chance! A world in which we “fall out of the habit” of seeking eye contact is a world where we have undermined our capacity for relationship and empathy. And I have argued, for years and increasingly, that empathy is the human capacity on which our humanity depends. This is an area where we are tempted because screens make us feel less vulnerable. Digital life in general offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of empathy. It always has and it continues to as it becomes more and more sophisticated. But this is a temptation we cannot afford to give in to. So, in this domain, I implore you to resist!

JON:

OK, I’ll try to be less dystopic. I’m a hopeful, optimistic guy so it shouldn’t be too hard. But on this subject--the great work of your career and threading through all of your books--you remind me a bit of Al Gore and climate change. You have summoned us to the cause, urged us to resist, then asked us to keep faith that we can prevail even when things are moving in the wrong direction. That’s a tricky thing for a person to do, much less a society--make that all societies.

SHERRY TURKLE:

 I have often made the comparison between climate change conversations and conversations about the impact of digital culture. I think your analogy with Al Gore is fair. Why? Because we are both calling people to necessary conversations that they don’t want to have because too much is called into question. When climate change was a conversation about sorting trash and giving money to save a whale, people were very chill. But that was such a misleading and depoliticized way to start the movement to save the planet. The planet is in crisis. And even now, the corporate world does everything to change the subject. And only one political party in this country will talk about it with any degree of realism. 

Similarly, our privacy and democracy are invaded and eroded by major digital players. And most of the people I interview still talk about social media as a “free luxury” that they “kind of like.” 

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“You remind me a bit of Al Gore and climate change.”

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JON:

But at least we have a highly empathetic president who, like FDR, has been ennobled by suffering. Biden is not faking his empathy. I compared him to a tail-wagging therapy dog. Even his worst enemy (and he has few) wouldn’t claim he lacks empathy. And the attitude toward tech companies and certain social media platforms has shifted over the last year or two. So I’m hopeful that --in the same way the fish rots from the head (see Trump and his subordinates), the fish pilots from the head, too. 

These political and social changes can take place rapidly. I’m trying not to be Pollyannish here but have a feeling the new “Roaring Twenties” can be good not just economically but represent some pulling back from our screens and prompt some algorithm reform that stops rewarding hate, which is already being diminished on social media.

SHERRY TURKLE:

Amen. Every author is allowed to have a favorite line she wrote and mine is “Just because we grew up with the internet, we think the internet is all grown up.” The internet is not all grown up. At best, it is in early adolescence. There is time to make the corrections. There is time to develop a digital culture that works for us. I think it can be helped by change from the top but there is great need for change from users, as they develop new habits of what they want from their online experiences. Right now, they want titillation and distraction. 

I believe that our time during the pandemic, to come a bit full circle, can help us re-value the capacity for solitude and the capacity for listening, which is something that constant distraction and distortion online takes away. If you can’t be peaceful with yourself, you look to other people to tell you who you are. 

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“Technology can make us forget what we know about life. It can make us treat people as objects and objects as people.”

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That’s what happens online. You go from the position: “I have a feeling, I want to make a phone call” to “I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text (or go onto zoom).” That always looking around to see what others think, what the online world is telling you is “hot,” is part of our tribal politics today. I am optimistic that our time during the pandemic has been a kind of time out that has let us all see our country anew, and come to a new independence in our thinking.

Parents, for example are not so quick to want online education for their children. Now they say: “Give my child a person. A mentor. Someone who will talk to my child.” So, I too, have come to my own optimism as we face our new post-pandemic realities.

JON:

That’s a great point—and a small silver lining to the—let’s face it—lost school year so many kids suffered because of the inadequacy of online education. 

But now I’m going to be a little pessimistic. That validation you say people seek online is actually an addiction, and addictions are hard to break. I hate to admit it, but I’m addicted to checking my Notifications on Twitter. Others are addicted to posting on Instagram. You’ve written about the science of it--the dopamine rush. How do people break it?

SHERRY TURKLE:

In this world of problems, I think we have big problems and small problems. Climate change, the polar icecaps melting and no one really wanting to pay attention because it is such a difficult conversation and doing something would cause us to radically change our way of life and organize as a planet (big problem). You being addicted to the rush from seeing that a lot of people like your tweets (smaller problem). 

The crisis of solitude and empathy that I see as a big problem is when people are so distracted by their devices (and here I would cite a study that showed that people were not willing to sit quietly for fifteen minutes without a device. They got so bored that after six minutes they started to electroshock themselves) that they do not develop the capacity for solitude and self reflection. 

They don’t learn who they are. When they are with others it is so others will tell them who they are — and this undermines their capacity for relationship. They can’t be empathic because they can’t ask: “What are you thinking, feeling? How can I learn about you?” The capacity for solitude is where empathy is born. 

The reason that Joe Biden can be a genuinely empathic president is that you know that he has the capacity to sit quietly, think, and pray, and consider his life. That is what qualifies him to reach out and hear other people. It is this undermining of our basic human capacity to be in mutual, caring relationships that is the real human crisis brought to us by digital culture. That, and the manipulation of culture by social media. Tribalism, disinformation, that we get information and disinformation in silos we can’t break out of. 

JON:

I’d like to bring this back to the personal. You write in The Empathy Diaries of how science and technology can get in the way of wisdom and empathy--what you’ve just been saying. I don’t mean to ask you to summarize your entire new book in a paragraph, but how did that play out in your own life? How did your challenges and setbacks help you navigate that tension? And when you talked just now about learning who you are--does writing a memoir (even unpublished, in the case of others) help you discover who you really are?

SHERRY TURKLE:

These are big questions. I’m writing about them now. Let me start with the last one. How writing a memoir puts you on a new kind of journey. I teach memoir writing at MIT, not a place known for its introspective culture. And yet students sign up for this course because they sense that somehow, it might help them, they don’t know how. We begin by writing about an evocative object, an object from your life that carries a high emotional charge. 

In my life, one evocative object I talk about in The Empathy Diaries is my grandmother’s “best dishes.” Her mother bought them as a wedding gift for her from a pushcart on the Lower East Side. All her life, my grandmother felt that these were her only possessions that would “outlive” her, the only thing she owned that had any value. She knew that her daughters would cherish them, that I would cherish them, that my children would use them. And she is right.

Someone’s family china

 For any significant holiday, event, when The Empathy Diaries was published, when my daughter was married, these dishes come out. The dishes bring me back to times and places and deep connections. And every student in my course finds objects that do that kind of work. I edited a book, Evocative Objects, in which people wrote memoir fragments about these kinds of objects. 

So, I don’t know if everyone needs to write a memoir. But I recommend that everyone do the exercise of writing about three evocative objects and seeing where it leads you. In my case, writing a memoir led me to find a lost father who my mother never allowed me to see or even talk about. And when I learned who he was, and the threat he had posed to me, I was able to reconcile with my mother, long after her death. She had saved me. So, writing my memoir changed my life. It gave me a new relationship with my mother, a chance to honor her, to see the love in the pain she had caused. It was an act that brought significant healing.

On the question of technology and wisdom, The Empathy Diaries takes this phrase as a theme: Technology can make us forget what we know about life. Most of all, it can make us treat people as objects and objects as people. We try to get relationships among people to be “friction free,” which has nothing to do with how relationships with people really work (they are filled with friction and passion and tears and laughter) and we try to get objects to act as though they were people (look at all the computer psychotherapists being peddled these days).  

We need to develop a new kind of relationship with technology where we are not asking it to do this kind of work. I once said, “We ask more of technology and less of each other.” It’s time to put an end to that. 

JON:

That’s a lot to unpack and I hope readers will read Sherry’s books to help them do so. The story about your father experimenting on you in hopes he’d be the next B.F. Skinner is chilling. In the meantime, I want to briefly explore “Technology can make us forget what we know about life.” Can’t it also help us learn what we don’t know about life--or lives? When I look back at the books I’ve written, it’s hard for me to believe that I wrote my first one without Google. I’m hugely dependent on it every day and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Do you?

SHERRY TURKLE:

Of course, it is always possible to find a technology that we feel broadened our world and say, “What about that? Doesn’t that disprove the larger assertion?” I am no Luddite here and I am an enthusiastic user of Google. But we must always remember that Google brings us what is on Google, what has been found and codified. I had a student who spent the morning in Le Corbusier’s archive in Paris and by the afternoon, only had access to the digitized archive. The archive had “transferred over” to its digital form and was no longer open to her, although there she was in Paris. 

So much had been lost. The cigarette burns, the little bits of paper that he had used to figure out his design. The coffee stains. Certain letters, small notes that seemed of little consequence were not digitized. It was all “better” because it was now available to the world. Searchable. But something, many things, many human things had been lost. This doesn’t mean we should stop digitizing archives. It just means that we should have greater humility that we are losing something that may pertain to life and what matters about life.

CREDIT: FONDATION LE CORBUSIER

On the larger question, technology wants life to be friction-free. Just like good technology is. But much of what is important about our lives is precisely what has friction, resistance, idiosyncrasy. Or consider medicine and its digital patient records, no longer a topic for discussion. We turn patients, as Abraham Verghese has so beautifully put it, into e-patients, who are “chartable.” In digital ways. And all the things about the patient that are not easily captured that way are lost. It is well known that medical students now struggle to take a medical history. The story of the life. It really doesn’t fit into the algorithms that will matter. But we may be forgetting what we know about medicine in this process of translation. 

My pet peeve here is computer psychotherapy. I am trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. When therapists are excited about chatbots as psychotherapists, I wonder how they have forgotten that what makes therapy powerful is that patient and therapist are both human. They have shared the arc of a human life. They share a body, the experience of pain, the experience of being small and learning that one day you will be big. They share the fear of death, the understanding that something of you might live on. Computers may be able to simulate these concerns, but they do not have these concerns. They would not be an appropriate interlocutor as a psychotherapist. And yet, this is one of the hottest areas for AI research today. That is technology making us forget what we know about life.

JON:

This is very scary. The only silver-lining is that there are some intermediate tech fixes that offer an advance if not taken all the way to AI.

SHERRY TURKLE:

Only a silver lining if good people know to stop at the intermediate tech fix!

JON:

I was talking recently to a woman who runs a mental health clinic for children and teenagers. Before the pandemic, many of the kids rarely showed up. With Zoom, the therapists can essentially guarantee attendance, though the presence of parents in the house means that the kids often have to take their phones into the bathroom to have confidential convos with their therapists.

SHERRY TURKLE:

I think this is a great image! 

JON:

I think we’ve also been using tech well here. Yes, we aren’t looking at each other in the eye, as in person, or listening to each others voices, as in a podcast or phone call. (the demise of which among young reporters disturbs me. It’s really hard to get a story by text or email).  But we are returning to the epistolary tradition that is captured in those archives you mentioned. 

I just spent a good chunk of the last five years researching Jimmy Carter. He already lived in the era when letter-writing had gone out of fashion. But at least I had some letters to peruse. Rosalynn gave me Jimmy’s steamy love letters from the Navy (A lot steamier than anything between John and Abigail Adams. The Obama Library will be all digital. What a loss for scholars. Even if some emails are preserved--and many won’t be--they aren’t the same as letters. 

SHERRY TURKLE:

Well, I’m glad that we had this correspondence between us! I think the key to good correspondence is that we know each other and we are giving each other our full attention. In my opinion, that’s what makes it work. 

JON:

Thanks, Sherry!

Question for the OG community: What did you appreciate and despise about technology during the pandemic?

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ALTER KACKER

“Is there anything more piss ignorant than not using older people as a resource?”

—Bill Maher

April 23, 2021