Sherry Turkle Quotes

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

The saddest utensil I've come across is an 'anti-loneliness ramen bowl,' which holds your iPhone to keep you company as you slurp your solitary bowl of noodles. But the iPhone cannot return your gaze or reassure you that you didn't squeeze too much lime into the soup, though maybe a dinner-conversation app is only a matter of time.

The smartphones and the computer separates everybody, makes you think that you don't need nobody else.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

I'm dating my iPhone.

We live in such an isolating time with technology and social media and I think that creates this feeling of having to connect, of having so many ways to connect but nothing's connecting.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.

I always felt really alone because no one wanted to talk about the things that I enjoyed, and that was really rap music and hip-hop as a culture. You know, having the shoes, using the words, buying the magazines, seeing the videos. And I had nobody to share it with, so I feel like I lived a lot online.

I'm equally guilty of using technology - I Twitter, I text people, I chat. But I think there's something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we're closer when in fact we're not seeing each other, we're not connecting.

As connected as we are with technology, it's also removed us from having to have human connection, made it more convenient to not be intimate.

We live in a society bloated with data yet starved for wisdom. We're connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. We must course-correct.

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.

I just sit around at home, and I have nothing to do, so I am on the Internet all the time.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

The more social media we have, the more we think we're connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other.

We're chipping away at our capacity for wonder. When hologram TVs eventually go on sale, they'll cost £20,000 and be bought only by those strange, heroic, friendless men who live in flats piled high with giant 80s mobiles and DVD players weighing eight stone.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

You have riches and freedom here but I feel no sense of faith or direction. You have so many computers, why don’t you use them in the search for love?

Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis.

I think, as people, we're isolating ourselves. We're talking to each other through our phones, arguing... those divisions freak me out.