I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s most recent article for the New York Times, and I have to say that her position is misinformed. The article also reminds me why arguments about “losing humanity” are really mourning shifting cultural values and the loss of privilege, as if “humanity” were anything other than a label determining who matters and who doesn’t. Here was a particularly poignant moment from the article that convinces me that Turkle simply doesn’t get it.
One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.
And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?
That this episode is interpreted as horrific to Turkle makes me think she’s spent very little time in a nursing home, or with older people who are often left out of conversation and community. If there is a “we” that is unproblematically signified by the pronoun Turkle uses in her article, it doesn’t seem to include the elderly, the disabled, or the other members of society who are isolated by their differences. I wonder what Turkle’s title Alone, Together would mean if applied to deaf persons, who are often ignored in social situations because they cannot engage in spoken conversation; or to other persons with physical impairments, who are stared at or ignored by people who don’t want to admit that their bodies will - at some point in the future - also suffer from impairments.
I can’t help but compare Turkle’s alarmism with Tim Carmody’s elegant reflections on the way the iPhone helps him communicate with his son, who suffers from autism. When Steve Jobs died, Carmody tweeted
October 6, 2025 12:16 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavoriteAs he mentions in his essay, his son “has a severe receptive and expressive language delay. He’s 4 years old, and can read and spell words, and sing entire songs, but is more like an 18-month- or 2-year-old in normal conversation. He cannot use a telephone and has a hard time sitting still for video telephony. He has a thoroughly well-loved iPod Touch, filled with videos and apps that have helped him learn to speak and augment his ability to communicate.” Carmody mentions that his tweet was retweeted over 500 times, by a community similarly mourning the loss of Jobs and who - in the process - learned about Carmody’s extraordinary experience.
Clearly technology is being used not only to help Carmody’s son engage in conversation, but also to help spread an awareness that would not be possible without social media. Turkle’s argument is broad-ranging, but I’d like to limit my analysis to Twitter because it is the technology that has most changed my personal and professional life. While Facebook is about maintaining an online community, Twitter is essentally about crafting a conversation.
I don’t struggle with autism, nor do I (usually) have a problem talking to people around me. But Twitter has enhanced both the personal and professional relationships that I currently have. I have reconnected with people I knew from childhood and reconciled with friends who I’ve wronged in the past. And I have maintained relationships with people that actually benefit from the distance Twitter gives me. I can’t always communicate face-to-face with some people because, frankly, some people truly annoy me. But I’m able to retweet ideas they post, or respond to short bits of communication. And I value those heavily-mediated friendships that couldn’t possibly exist without Twitter.
I’ve also met new people online, found a community of scholars whose work matters to me, and who I now know as more than quoted words in essays. I teach with Twitter. As I have argued in MLA presentations and blog posts in the past, the asynchronous environment that Twitter creates allows students to respond frequently and thoughtfully to literary works, and Twitter also inspires deeper and more engaged reflection with literature. And it adds up. My students collectively wrote around 150,000 tweets over the course of a Spring 2011 semester class on William Blake. If you take the number of tweets and divide by the number of students in the three sections of my course (75), you’ll get an average of 2,000 tweets per person. Tweets are limited to 140 characters and, for argument’s sake, we’ll average that to about 16 words per tweet. This means that each individual student wrote 32,000 words on Twitter, or about 107 pages of text.
When Turkle mentions that the connection on social media applications like Facebook and Twitter don’t add up to conversations, I wonder what she means. In fact, I had a conversation about that issue with Trent Kays on Twitter. Kays is a thoughtful colleague and friend who I have never met face-to-face.
April 22, 2025 1:13 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
April 22, 2025 1:18 am via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavoritePeople live on social networks. They die on social networks. They get married on social networks, and are comforted by bots, and create art out of the masses of material they find online. ZeFrank says it best in his TEDTalk on social life online. “On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it’s easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there.”
**Addendum: On Twitter, @serial_consign made me aware that Turkle’s research “focuses on robotics and the elderly. May not be in the op-ed but she’s done homework re: elderly/disabled.” The point is well-taken, and yet I still feel her appeal to “the human” covers up the very real ways conversations are silenced for both the elderly and the disabled.
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