01UndatedOnline life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
02UndatedA good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
03UndatedIf you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
04UndatedWe have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
05UndatedWe see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
07UndatedWe cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
08UndatedChildren content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
09UndatedThere is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
11UndatedWe have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep -- it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." For Kafka, "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked." For Thomas Mann, "Solitude gives birth the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry." For Picasso, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
12UndatedIn his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
13UndatedIncreasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
14UndatedMy own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonelySherry Turkle / quote ↗
15UndatedYou end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
16UndatedHe experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
17UndatedWhen Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
18UndatedI call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
19UndatedI call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
20UndatedA woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
21UndatedFace-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
22UndatedFrom the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
23UndatedWhen one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.Sherry Turkle / quote ↗
