Sherry Turkle Quotes

We're living in miraculous times where connections are made at the blink of an eye, the tap of a thumb, and the click of a mouse. We can never replace human interaction, but these simple actions can be powerful and meaningful to those we connect with.

For Snapchat, the closer we can get to 'I want to talk to you' - that emotion of wanting to see you and then seeing you - the better and better our product and our view of the world will be.

For most of our users, the vast majority of their MySpace friends are also offline friends. They're just connecting through a different medium when they're on MySpace.

You can have a real ongoing dialogue through social media that wasn't possible before.

I think when you're starting up a situation, it's really fun texting or BBMing or whatever.

It's wonderful to move forward technologically, but we cannot forget that we are human beings who thrive on relationships, who thrive on interconnectivity, who thrive on sharing your feelings and emotions.

I definitely think there's some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don't think data collects it. They're not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.

Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.

People's social networks do not consist only of people they see face to face. In fact, social networks have been extending because of artificial media since the printing press and the telephone.

Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

If you interview people or friends who work with me, they would say I'm private or internal or don't emote a lot. Yet I do it every day for 10 million people. I just don't do it for the 30 people I'm in the room with.

It's amazing how directly you can connect with people via social media.

Our worst comes out when we behave like robots or professionals.

I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community.

Social media and the Internet haven't changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

Social media is its own sort of thing: Twitter and Facebook have changed the way everyone perceives everything.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

In this age of omniconnectedness, words like 'network,' 'community' and even 'friends' no longer mean what they used to. Networks don't exist on LinkedIn. A community is not something that happens on a blog or on Twitter. And a friend is more than someone whose online status you check.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

I actually feel like I have developed friendships through Twitter, people that I've worked with I can kind of keep up with them. I've totally turned a corner. I get it. And Instagram.

As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

There's some people that obviously abuse social networking or whatever, but I think it's a fantastic idea. I've never had any bad encounters with any of it.

We are more and more into technology. Everything is texting, and everything is instant. Flowers are completely impractical as a method of communication when you could just send a text.

On-line communities would form with people selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.