If people start to buy the idea that machines are great companions for the elderly or for children, as they increasingly seem to do, we are really playing with fire.
Sherry TurkleRead
I am not anti-technology; I am pro-conversation.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal interaction over reliance on technology.
Sherry Turkle's quote highlights a distinction between supporting technology and advocating for meaningful human conversations. While technology can be beneficial, it should not replace the depth and richness of face-to-face communication that fosters genuine connections among people.
Themes
TechnologyConversationCommunicationHuman ConnectionInteraction
In practice
Example use cases
During a team meeting, I reminded everyone, 'I am not anti-technology; I am pro-conversation,' to encourage open discussions.
More from Sherry Turkle
All quotes βWe live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
Sherry TurkleRead
The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
Sherry TurkleRead
Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. Weβd rather text than talk.
Sherry TurkleRead
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.
Sherry TurkleRead
The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
Sherry TurkleRead
Similar quotes
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
Eric S. RaymondRead
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
Donald KnuthRead
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
E. F. SchumacherRead
You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.
Walter IsaacsonRead
I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
Ada LovelaceRead
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
Larry PageRead