Sherry Turkle Quotes

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I'm really not interested in other people's opinions, because I think frankly most of those opinions are either misinformed and adding to this endless ball of hot air we have in our society where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and sacred and what counts.

The idea of harnessing the intelligence of the readership has been lost in the quest for Facebook likes. For many, readers have become synonymous with hateful commenters. It's time for a renewed push to realize some of the original dreams of the web.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

Well, a general danger of punditry is that there's very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you.

YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.

The listening community has the obligation of distinguishing informed opinion from tweets.

There's social media where people's politics are out there, they're forwarding articles and seem engaged, but it's only online. We tweet and pat ourselves on the back, thinking we have done something, said we're interested, but it needs more work.

I am not active in sharing my views on social media but I observe a lot.

It is boring to have all the answers. Only political people have answers.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

Very commonly I get queries. Somebody saw something of mine on YouTube and of course if there is a talk on YouTube, there aren't any footnotes - and they want to know why did you say this. Well if they bothered to look up something in print, they would've seen why I said that. If they ask for evidence, I just say well take a look and mention something they can read and that usually ends the conversation.

The Internet...has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans

We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we had electronic media.

I hear [my Twitter followers] say, you know, 'Bob Rae, you're an asshole'. [...] I'm working my way and trying to represent the people and speaking in Question Period and here we have vox populi, the thoughtful man on the street, 'you are an asshole!'. Thank you very much. I read it on my Twitter and I get up and ask a question.

How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.

The future belongs to social media. It is egalitarian and inclusive. Social media is not about any country, any language, any colour, any community but it is about human values and that is the underlying link binding humanity.

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.