Sherry Turkle

Professor, author, consultant and researcher, Sherry Turkle has spent the last 30 years researching the psychology of people’s relationships with technology.

BIO & FOCUS

Sherry Turkle has investigated the intersection of digital technology and human relationships from the early days of personal computers to our current world of robotics, artificial intelligence, social networking and mobile connectivity. Her New York Times best-seller, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age” (Penguin Press, October 2015), focuses on the importance of conversation in digital cultures, including business and the professions. Her previous book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” (Basic Books, 2011), describes technology’s influence on relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

Sherry’s exploration into our lives on the digital terrain shows how technological advancement doesn’t just catalyze changes in what we do – it affects how we think and how we view ourselves in relation to others. Her research raises critical questions about technology’s role in business: what kind of work environment we want, and reexamines the limits of productivity, asking whether multi-tasking actually leads to deteriorating performance in each of our tasks.

BOOKS

Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (1978)

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984)

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, (Ed.) (2007).

Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, (Ed.) 2008)

The Inner History of Devices, (Ed.) (2008)

Simulation and Its Discontents (2009).

Alone Together, Basic Books (2011)

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin Press (2015)

SELECTED TALKS

Connected but alone?