Sherry Turkle

“We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

“Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.”

“We now expect more from technology and less from each other.”

“Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.”

“Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.”

“You'll always feel lonely if you always need validation. People don't like to be around those kinds of people.”

“The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.”

“When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had social clubs. It's never delightful to glamorize one's youth. My neighborhood was poor. But people felt part of the neighborhood. This was in Rockaway Beach, Long Island.”

“Our mobile devices are so powerful that they don't just change what we do, they're changing who we are.”

“If we don't know how to be alone, we'll only know how to be lonely.”

“When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.”

“Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.”

“A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this, it shares something with all the other ways we break up our day: when we text during class, in meetings, at the theater, at dinners with friends.”

“My highest value is not that the trains are on time. I want to be free.”

“Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.”

“It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'”

“We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.”

“I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.”

“The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.”

“We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We're aware that we're with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being.”