Friendship Does Not Compute
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There are two stories being told in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, the new book by psychologist and M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle. The first is the cautionary tale suggested by the book’s title; the second is Turkle’s evolution from exuberant optimist about humanity’s digital life into the teller of that cautionary tale.
“Thirty years ago,” Turkle says in the opening words of Alone Together, “when I joined the faculty at M.I.T. to study computer culture, the world retained a certain innocence” — innocence, that is, about computers and our life with and on them. It was a world in which, she says, computer hobbyists tinkered, played simple electronic games, and mused about the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. “I witnessed a moment,” she says, “when we were confronted with machines that invited us to think differently about human thought, memory, and understanding.”
During this time, when she wrote her first technology book, The Second Self (1984), Turkle was, by her own account, “full of hope and optimism” about the emerging field of personal computing. Though she had some concerns about how attached people could become to their new interactive digital technologies, her main interest was in “how evocative computers fostered new reflection about the self.” A decade later, Turkle was beginning to observe that some people “found online life more satisfying than what some derisively called ‘RL,’ that is, real life.” Nonetheless, she feels that her book Life on the Screen (1995) “offered, on balance, a positive view of new opportunities for exploring identity online.”
But in Alone Together, Turkle’s earlier optimism about the transformative power of digital technologies has faded. Thus the book inevitably reads also as a story about the loss of that initial state of innocence she describes in the opening words. “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant,” reads one of the book’s epigraphs, from the Republic. It is curious that Turkle, in describing her previous work at the outset of this new book, does not wonder how Plato’s observation might bear on her own perception of the ostensibly Edenic state of the world of computer users at its dawn. Is it really the world itself that has lost its innocence since then?