The sociologist has critiqued our digital addictions. Now, like the rest of us, she’s been trapped behind her screens.
In the wild, orcas are a dominant species, apex predators that navigate a vast aquatic world in sophisticated family groups. But, as the neuroscientist Lori Marino has explained, they’re different in captivity. In the relative monotony of an artificial habitat, with their social development stifled by family separation and their wanderings limited to a concrete tank, orcas go a little mad. Their stress levels soar, their dorsal fins droop, their parenting skills decline; they get bored, they self-harm, they lash out. The cost of their confinement is a diminished internal existence.
Our pandemic isolation is voluntary, altruistic, and temporary. Still, after a year of social distancing, we might resemble lonely creatures drifting around in our tanks. Technology has allowed some of us to work, learn, shop, and socialize from home, exchanging the rough, natural edges of life for the smooth glass of our screens. We’ve come to inhabit the world that Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist who teaches at M.I.T., has described for decades—a world in which technology is “the architect of our intimacies.” Beginning with the publication of her first book on technology, “The Second Self,” in 1984, Turkle has chronicled our growing preference for expressing ourselves through devices, and gradually, with the rise of the Internet, the ease with which we confuse how individuals seem online with who they really are. Jonathan Franzen has described Turkle as “a realist among the fantasists, a humanist but not a Luddite: a grown-up.” Adults may have been tempted to assume she’s talking about Internet teen-agers; in truth, her arguments have always applied to the rest of us, too. Now, after four seasons of Zoom, we’re all living life on the screen.
Turkle’s work has focussed on moments of technological substitution: turning points when a fix initially advertised as “better than nothing”—a text when there isn’t time for a phone call, for instance—becomes the preferable option. In thrall to efficiency, we remember mainly the inconvenience of the old ways, and forget what’s been lost. As more of these substitutions occur, we live, increasingly, through the limiting channels of our devices. What was once normal—an in-person meeting or conversation, say, instead of a video chat—becomes inconvenient and even off-putting once the “friction-free” alternative has taken hold.
Turkle, who is seventy-two, normally lives alone in Boston, in a high-rise building. Last March, when her building’s shared elevators suddenly began to feel threatening, her daughter and son-in-law drove from New York to fetch her, and together they went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where, two decades ago, Turkle bought a beachfront cottage. Formerly a fisherman’s dormitory, it sits on a strip of beach that Henry David Thoreau traversed in 1849, while on a three-day, thirty-mile shoreline hike with a friend, William Ellery Channing. This was two years after Thoreau had ended his experiment in solo living by Walden Pond. Thoreau’s history on the beach in front of her house has special resonance for Turkle, who argues that our communications technology muddies the distinction between solitude and togetherness, compromising both.
“He was seeking deliberateness,” Turkle said recently, of Thoreau, over Zoom. The sea was visible through the window behind her. “That we should make our decisions about when to be together, and alone, and how much of each other we needed, with deliberateness.” Turkle was on her couch, bundled in a scarf and houndstooth jacket. Her device of choice is an eleven-inch MacBook Air, small enough to slip in a handbag but with the comfort of a real keyboard. Apple has since discontinued the model; Turkle bought three of them before they went off the market. (She said the thirteen-inch version is too big for a purse and requires a tote bag, which is a pain.) Turkle held her laptop close enough for her face to fill the screen; the impression created was of the intimate distance that one has from a candid and pleasantly talkative seatmate on a plane.
“Our relationships were becoming automatic and unthinking,” she went on, describing Thoreau’s moment. “What we needed was solitude, so that we would know when to value each other, and how to value each other. To me, it’s very special that I should find myself on Thoreau’s beach, thinking thoughts about coming out of the pandemic.”
Turkle has spent most of the last year alone in Provincetown, preparing for the publication of “The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir” (Penguin Press). The book, her tenth, begins in a Rockaway bungalow that her working-class Brooklyn Jewish family rented every summer, and traces the biographical origins of Turkle’s long obsession with curated surfaces and hidden realities. She writes that she grew up under a “regime of pretend.” Her warm and gregarious mother had a fluid relationship with facts that encompassed small fictions—she shaved years off the birth dates on her driver’s and marriage licenses, and claimed D.I.Y. credit for store-bought gifts—and bigger, darker ones. When Turkle was five, her mother married a man named Milton Turkle, moved her daughter to a new school and neighborhood, then instructed her never to reveal either her true last name, Zimmerman, or the fact that Milton was not her biological father. Turkle would later learn that there were good reasons for her mother’s determination to keep her from the man who fathered her. But the lie estranged Turkle from her own story, and made her acutely sensitive to the difference between self and self-presentation.
Turkle told me that the early days of the pandemic had shaken her sense of self more deeply and unpleasantly than she’d expected. She treasures her independence, and has written extensively on the psychological value of solitude—and yet, as cases rose, she felt defenseless and alone. “I’m healthy, I’m active,” she said, in a subtle Brooklyn accent. “And then suddenly I was in the zone, just by my age, of the most vulnerable. It was like you had crossed the Valley of the Shadow. I really felt quite vulnerable, and I just wanted to get to the beach. And as soon as I got to the beach, I just”—she placed a hand on her heart and let out a sigh. “I just felt better.” Thus began a new phase of experimentation, in which Turkle, along with millions of others, explored how much life could be lived from within high-tech confinement.
“From a very young age, I saw myself as my life’s detective,” Turkle writes. She was, and remains, a noticer—a keen observer of the pauses and shifts in expression that indicate deeper conflict. A favored activity at her maternal grandparents’ apartment was sorting through a cupboard of photographs, documents, and family mementos. In this “memory closet,” she searched for clues that might make clear what wasn’t spoken aloud. It was in the memory closet that she saw her birth name written for the first time, and that she found a photograph of a man with his face torn away, leaving only tweed pants and lace-up shoes. This was her biological father, Charles Zimmerman; she saw him on only a handful of occasions in her early childhood, awkward outings that left her with the hazy sense of being watched. Years later, she mentioned this to an aunt, who confirmed that she’d been right: her mother’s relatives had hired someone to quietly shadow these visits.
In 1968, Turkle’s mother died, of breast cancer, at the age of forty-nine (she had kept her illness from Turkle, so she would feel no conflict about going away to college, which had been her dream); Turkle was nineteen, and had never spoken the truth of her paternity to anyone. Her stepfather, who appears in the book as a needy figure, demanded that Turkle abandon her education, at Radcliffe College, to care for him and her half-siblings; when she declined, he threatened not to fill out the paperwork she needed to continue her scholarship. Grieving and exhausted, Turkle eventually withdrew from college. Her maternal aunt and grandparents scraped together the cash for a plane ticket to Paris. Before leaving, Turkle repeated quietly to herself a mantra she’d come up with in a group-therapy workshop she’d attended after her mother’s death: “You are not supposed to be happy. You just have to walk toward the light.”
Turkle arrived in a country remaking itself: that May, a series of strikes and student occupations had upended cultural, social, and sexual mores in France. The May, 1968, movement protested a culture of strict, hierarchical social codes, trading them for what Turkle, in her memoir, calls “a politics built on immediacy and spontaneity.” The ’68ers “celebrated confrontation and conversation”—an exhilarating experience for a young woman establishing her own identity after a lifetime spent keeping others’ secrets.
Radcliffe agreed to count Turkle’s time in France as a semester of coursework, and found a solution for her scholarship, clearing her way to return to campus and graduate in 1970. She enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where her adviser was Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was popularizing the concept of liminality—the middle phase of a transformative ritual, when a person, place, or society is no longer what it used to be, but not yet what it will become. Those going through liminal phases are “neither here nor there,” Turner wrote, in 1969’s “The Ritual Process.” Instead, they hover “betwixt and between” their old and new habits and values, moving toward a life whose shape has yet to be determined. Chicago and Turner helped Turkle figure out what kind of scholar she wished to become: a “psychologically astute ethnographer with a special interest in how people think about thinking.” A clearer path to the research she wanted to do lay at Harvard, where she enrolled soon after and pursued a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology.
Turkle wrote her dissertation on a recent phenomenon she’d observed in France: Freudian ideas were migrating out from the technical discipline of psychoanalysis and into the broader culture. She was still writing when one of her mentors at Harvard, David Riesman, best known for the book “The Lonely Crowd,” called to say that she would be hearing from M.I.T., which was hiring for a new program in the social studies of science and technology. M.I.T. had scholars who understood software; the new program sought ones who understood people. Turkle’s research had tracked how concepts like repression or the Freudian slip had become part of everyday life. Her new work would follow the mainstreaming of concepts from the world of computers. “People ask me if my interests shifted from psychoanalysis to ‘computers’ when I arrived at M.I.T.,” Turkle writes. “I suppose it might look that way, but that’s not how it felt. It felt like the same debates moved from one venue to another.”
Turkle became a faculty member at M.I.T. in 1976; not long afterward, she met and married Seymour Papert, a charismatic and brilliant mathematician with a startling habit of mentioning facts only when required—a daughter from a previous marriage, for instance, was only revealed on the eve of her visit, and a second ex-wife was only disclosed prior to their own wedding. Papert helped her track down her biological father. Learning, from him, of the psychological abuse he inflicted upon her, she forgave her mother for keeping them apart. But she also considered the damage that the secret itself had wrought in her own life. Her conclusion was that even the most painful, messy realities are better confronted than hidden. (Turkle and Papert divorced in 1985; from 1987 to 1998 she was married to Ralph Willard, a consultant, with whom she had a daughter, Rebecca.)
Early on, Turkle was hopeful about technology’s potential for encouraging self-understanding and deepening communication. In her early books, she wrote with great enthusiasm about children learning to code: understanding computers, she hoped, might make them think differently about their own thought processes. But there were also signs that our relationships with computers would be more ambivalent. As the personal computer and its operating systems evolved to become more intuitive, they also became less transparent. The symbolic representations of folders and icons meant that users no longer had to understand how their machines really worked; if this made computers more accessible, it also meant that they obscured things from their users. Healthy relationships, Turkle thought, rarely happen when one party has no idea how much the other is hiding.
In the following decades, Turkle published a series of increasingly skeptical books about technology and the inner life. “Life on the Screen,” from 1995, was optimistic about the potential of online role playing to provide developing adults with a protected space in which they could experiment with identities. But it also noted that a growing number of people seemed to prefer their online roles to the ones they inhabited in the physical world. By “Alone Together,” in 2011, Turkle was alarmed. The portability of smartphones and laptops meant that we could perform our online selves everywhere. People have a knack for projecting human qualities onto the inanimate things around them, she wrote; as our devices grew more engaging, it was easy for us to accept their indefatigable attentions in lieu of human ones.
As an ethnographer at M.I.T., Turkle was embedded among software engineers whose cultural values centered on efficiency and perfectibility. They built software that favored perfection, or the illusion of it. The “engineering aesthetic” works for software, but founders, Turkle writes, when it’s applied to “people and their social relationships. To understand people, the most important step often involves stopping to appreciate that you have a story with at least two points of view. There may not be measurements at all. The most relevant data may be feelings. Feelings aren’t friction free but conflict ridden.”
Face-to-face conversations can be halting, boring, discursive, and unpredictable; they are criss-crossed with competing signals—words, body language, tone, facial expressions. A text message is far simpler. It delivers the information we wish to convey without wasting bandwidth on the crosscurrents. But true intimacy, Turkle argued, in “Alone Together,” only happens when we share what we’d rather leave out—including the awkwardness of our actual, embarrassing selves. “Insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time,” she wrote. “We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
Once everyone began texting, they found that they enjoyed the medium’s superficial perfection. The same held for e-mail: as a professor, Turkle noticed that students preferred to e-mail questions back and forth rather than appear in her office hours. “They basically say they want to get their questions perfect, so I can make my answers perfect,” Turkle told the Guardian, in 2015. “They want my perfect to meet their perfect.”
When relationships are maintained through these technological channels, we share not ourselves but the story we want people to see. You don’t have to be an attention-hungry media influencer for this to be true; you just have to be someone who prefers to control how people see you—who fears the exposure of your flaws or frailties. “You have more efficiency because you have less vulnerability,” Turkle writes, of screen-based interaction. The more we present our streamlined selves, the less likely we are to experience the reassurance of true intimacy—of knowing that our flaws have been seen and accepted anyway.
Turkle doesn’t scribble these theories out longhand in a house off the grid. She’s on Twitter and texts her family; she owns her own suite of devices. Many meaningful interactions happen online, she told me, over Zoom. They’re most successful when they unfold between highly skilled and motivated communicators who have set aside other distractions. But Turkle is unwavering in the belief that therapy, mentoring, and education are done most successfully in person; by their very nature, they require both parties to be fully present and vulnerable. A Zoom interaction can be a quality one, but it has limits. The enclosed space of a video call blocks out a lot of information we’d otherwise get in the wild.
Take the conversation we were having, Turkle said. “It would be better if we were together having a cup of tea in my home, because you would sense things about my body posture. You would sense things about how I move in space. We would take a walk on the beach. There’d be something in what it’s like to be in Provincetown. You’d see the little places where they hung fish and canoes in my house.” Similarly, she continued, “We are much less likely in this Zoom encounter—trust me—to have a quarrel. I know this from research. Because the little things that happen that would cause a quarrel don’t. The little ‘rough around the edges’ things—your doing little things that’ll annoy me, and my doing little things that will annoy you—are not going to happen here. You’ll leave and I’ll leave before we even get started on those.”
It was O.K. for the two of us to have this impoverished interaction, Turkle said, because we didn’t need a deep relationship for me to write my article. The problem, she said, is when “I’m a professor and you’re a mentee. And the university decides that, as my thesis student, what we’re doing is really good enough. You are getting enough thesis supervision this way; it doesn’t justify your visiting me. It’s expensive. So what if you don’t see my hanging fish hooks?” She raised her eyebrows. “All of a sudden, this kind of conversation becomes good enough in education. It becomes good enough in mentoring. It becomes good enough in K-through-twelve mentoring. All of a sudden, this becomes not just better than nothing but better than anything. And we don’t ask ourselves, Well, what is being lost?”
On Zoom, Turkle is an intensely focussed interlocutor. She looks directly at the face she’s speaking to onscreen rather than at the camera, so her eyes appear somewhat downcast in the video feed. She never pats her hair or rearranges her facial expression in ways that suggest that she’s become distracted by her own image. During our Zoom calls, I closed every other program on my laptop and placed my phone in a different room so that she wouldn’t notice my eyes flick, even momentarily, to a notification. Video chats are relatively “friction-free.” Still, talking to someone whose lifework is conversation can be stressful.
During the pandemic, many people have been forced to make do with technological substitutions for in-person life: Zoom Thanksgivings, FaceTime funerals. Many of these workarounds will be set aside once it’s safe to gather in person again. But we might also be surprised by how difficult it is to abandon some of our new habits. One of Turkle’s worries is that, once it is possible to interact face to face, we will find ourselves gravitating toward the frictionless options with which we’ve grown comfortable.
On one of our Zoom calls, Turkle asked me what points of conflict or irritation I thought would develop between the two of us if we were meeting in person. On the audio recording of the call, my pause after this question is very long. Eventually, I answered. I said that I had noticed her tendency to digress and speak in full paragraphs. I’d gotten used to the asynchronous style of text and e-mail communication; maybe in person, it would be hard to relax into the rhythm of conversation, or to turn off that internal voice which was impatiently running down the list of things I’d like to say and tasks I’d like to accomplish. On Zoom, I could more easily hide the signs of my distraction. In this sense, it was easier.
In other ways, of course, it’s not. This year has offered a stark and painful lesson about social deprivation. After a year away from people who don’t live in my house, I’m finding it harder to respond to the increasingly rare texts from loved ones asking how I am, and I notice that the texts I send asking that question often go unanswered. Too much has built up to compress into a text. There used to be so many entry points to conversation, little stories that let us ease into or dance around deeper subjects: the comings and goings, commutes and dumb things people said at work, trips and dates and things we did to amuse ourselves that could be offered as lighter alternatives to what we weren’t ready to share. What I want, more than anything, is simply to be in the presence of the people I love and miss the most—to see how they hold themselves now and what their faces look like when they tell me, with words or tears or silence, what this last year has been like for them. I want them to do the same for me. I want more than can be communicated through a device.
In the pandemic, we’ve used the tools we have to build the best roads we could to one another, and this has been a kind of progress. Turkle is a theatre buff, and in isolation has delved into the art experiences that have sprung up because playhouses and concert venues were shuttered: the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, in his #SongsofComfort series, posted videos of songs he performed and encouraged professional and amateur musicians around the world to do the same; Patrick Stewart gave daily Instagram readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in which he pets his dog and adjusts his glasses, skipping the poems he finds unlikable and repeating lines that don’t land right the first time. Stewart’s short videos don’t have the slick polish of a rehearsed production. They seem more like the offerings of a man at home like everyone else, looking for something to do. The pandemic, Turkle said, had pushed us to make our mediated communications a little less efficient and a little more human. “It reminded us all that when we have the time, and the imagination, and the need, we can make something of this thing,” she said.
Now, though, the world is getting ready to open up again. Orcas, after long periods of captivity, often have to learn how to survive in the wild; they can struggle when released back into the sea. Our task is to navigate our own transition. We need to return to the complex world we once knew, embracing what we missed from the other side of the glass.
Corinne Purtill writes about science and human behavior.
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