39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Technology, author Sherry Turkle claims, is the “architect of our intimacies” (1). Everything from the virtual utopia of Second Life to Zhu Zhu pet hamsters is presented to us as artificial improvements of the real thing. It is seductive. But there is a downside to the illusion, a claim she makes by citing a story of a girl who texts her friend to get her attention even though they’re in the same house. The book asks “how we got to this place and whether we are content to be here” (2).
At the New York Museum of Natural History, Turkle’s young daughter Rebecca comments that they should’ve used robots for the Galápagos turtles rather than imprisoning living creatures. Many other kids agree. This unsettles Turkle. So does a book by artificial intelligence expert David Levy on the potential of romantic companionship with robots. She is worried that interacting with an inanimate object as if it were alive could leave us “diminished.”
An encounter where a Scientific American reporter accuses Turkle of “species chauvinism” for reacting negatively to the idea of humans marrying machines shakes her.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Nearest Neighbors”
As an MIT student in the 1970s, Turkle uses ELIZA, a basic computer program that engages in dialogue in the style of a psychotherapist. It doesn’t do much more than restate or expand on the user’s inputs. Despite this limitation, the students want to tell the program their secrets. Turkle doesn’t share ELIZA’s inventor’s belief that the students are deceived into thinking they’re talking to a real intelligence; rather, she thinks they are complicit in the fantasy, a phenomenon she refers to as the “ELIZA effect.” Turkle believes students use their knowledge of the program to prompt lifelike answers from ELIZA.
In the early 1980s, children begin encountering their first computers in the playroom, and “above all else, children asked themselves whether something programmed could be alive” (27).
Through interviews Turkle finds that children consider Furbies to be alive in a sense—they are not biologically alive but they do possess “relational readiness” (28-29). She claims that children are comfortable with seeing a robot as both machine and creature by citing a boy Wilson who considers his Furby a friend yet can “always hear the machine inside it” (29). She says this pragmatism is a “hallmark of our psychological culture” (29).
This can be seen in children mourning their Tamagotchis’ deaths. Turkle presents a girl who refuses to press reset on hers after they die and buys new ones. She claims that these children aren’t thinking philosophically but practically, as if the Tamagotchis were alive: what does it want, and what experiences have I had with it?
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
In the Prologue, Turkle introduces one central motif: the fact that technology tends to meet our vulnerabilities, rather than our needs. This includes, crucially, that “we are lonely but fearful of intimacy” (1). She will go on to explore this idea as it relates to both sociable robots and our online lives.
The Prologue covers many topics, serving as a roadmap for the rest of the novel. Turkle highlights many points supportive of her central worry of how seductive new technology is and how it could affect our culture. She worries robots and networked life are facilitating a kind of “emotional dumbing down, a willful turning away from the complexities of human partnerships—the inauthentic as a new aesthetic” (6).
Chapter 1 provides the first real example of this in the program ELIZA, an extremely rudimentary version of social interaction and transparency. Turkle sees ELIZA as an inkblot test for a psychologist, a surface onto which the user projects his or her own emotions. With ELIZA, Turkle introduces an idea that will be explored in numerous ways throughout the book: complicity. She says that “while some learned enough about the program to trip it up, many more used this same inside knowledge to feed ELIZA responses that would make it seem more lifelike” (24).Users are often willfully deceived by the robots because they wish to be fooled and fill in the blanks themselves.
Related Titles
By Sherry Turkle
