Kim Mills: Over the past couple of decades, our devices have become our constant companions. About 85% of Americans now own a smartphone, up from just 35% a decade ago. And more than 70% of us are on at least one social media site, according to the Pew Research Center. These days, old friends are more likely to catch up with each other's news via social media or a text message rather than a phone call or a chat over coffee. Work meetings have moved to Zoom, and for some of us that change may be permanent. More and more, we live in a digital, virtual world.
How has this move to digital communication changed people's relationship with technology and our relationships with each other? How has conversation itself changed in the digital age? And how do computers and artificial intelligence affect how we think about other people, or even what it means to be human? Do we use our devices or do they use us?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.
Our guest today is Dr. Sherry Turkle, a professor in the program in science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University, and is a licensed psychologist. Dr. Turkle has spent more than four decades studying people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She's the author of several bestselling books, including Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Her newest book, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, ties together her personal story of uncovering family secrets with her research on technology and empathy.
Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Turkle.
Sherry Turkle, PhD: It's my pleasure.
Mills: So you've been studying people's relationships with computers since the 1970s. You were at MIT at the dawn of the personal computer. You've written about how that gave you a glimpse of the future that few people had at that time. Given that experience, what, if anything, has surprised you about where we have ended up today in terms of our relationship with computers?
Turkle: That's a great question. I think what surprised me is that we have so much evidence of harm, and yet we are barreling on. It's as though we refused to see the evidence before our eyes and in our hearts of how technology has eroded empathy, how it's assaulted empathy, how we look at our phones and not at each other, we text rather than talk. There's been an assault on conversation. Our children are less likely to be willing to sit at a dinner table and talk to us. And yet there's been an assault certainly on privacy, we all know that, we fear that. And yet we listen to tech gurus tell us about going into the metaverse and we listen to this and we say, oh yeah, the metaverse, maybe that's the next big thing.
And so I'm surprised, although, I guess I'm becoming hardened, I don't want to seem like a Pollyanna or someone very naive, but there has been a great deal of evidence that we have launched ourselves over and over again in technology dreams that have turned out not to be really in our human interest. And yet we seem ready to relaunch and I, as someone who's been a part of that technology criticism, I don't want to say I'm surprised that nobody's paid attention to me, but there have been many technology critics, many great psychologists, many great theorists and researchers who've—it's not me and me alone. This isn't about me, me, me. This is about many people, a cohort of scientists and social scientists and philosophers, who really have written about, take a look around, and yet we seem to not be attending to the depreciation of the world. That's a long answer to a short question, but I do think it's time for a red light and I'm still working on this problem, but I am surprised that we haven't done better at slowing the pace.
Mills: Well, you just mentioned the metaverse a moment ago, and I'm just wondering, since that looks to be maybe the next new thing, are we in effect building a new reality? Is that possible? Reality is what it is, I guess, but it just seems like we're trying to run away from where we live in a three dimensional world and go to this other place, which will somehow be more perfect.
Turkle: Yeah. The metaverse, and my book, Life on the Screen, was a 1995 book that really tried to document the first generation of metaverse, which was the first time that people built virtual worlds. The first generation of metaverse-like spaces where people could go and live in virtual communities, create avatars, create second selves, where they were thinner and—
Mills: And taller and younger.
Turkle: And better looking. So well, they were always taller and thinner and better looking. And often they were of a different gender. And I thought it was interesting and I tried to say some interesting things about how there was a sense of identity play, which I thought that was very psychologically interesting. I called them identity workshops. I used the work of Erickson on identity play to say, to try to make a psychological contribution to the good things that could happen when people have other spaces to explore identity in. The trouble was, is that when you live in a parallel life in a not real space, the things that happen in real space that are important don't happen, which is that the friction, the conversation, the needing to negotiate, the fact that people become ill. The fact that we deal with strife and war and learn to argue and make peace with one another.
In the metaverse you just walk away, you don't learn to negotiate. You don't learn to have the complex life and the complex love that are the things we really need to live a better life, and now more than ever before. In this country, certainly we need to learn how to talk to people we don't agree with. In the metaverse we can just silo ourselves and that's what's happened. People choose the community in the metaverse, where they agree with everyone around. So one of the things that troubles me about the move to the metaverse is that we know what's happened online, is that people have chosen the metaverse where everybody around them agrees with them. And we've siloed ourselves in places where we don't have to really develop these habits of dealing with community and dealing with friction.
Cyberspace can be a friction-free world. It's almost the ideal of what it's good for. And what happens in virtual community is that people tend and trend to go to places where there is no friction, where you're with people, where you don't need to have that quality of the real. That's very, very troubling, because that's exactly what we don't need. So harm is not just that people forget how to be empathic, harm is also that people don't learn the skills of confronting themselves and confronting other people and learning how to compromise.
And also, what is this desire to leave earth? Tech billionaires want to get on rocket ships and they want to play more complicated games, and they want to go to virtual realities, but we have a world on fire, literally we have a world on fire, and I think the habit of mind where you want to create an artificial world and artificial spaces instead of dealing with the very troubled earth we have here is one we need to really cast a very cool light on.
I don't think that cyberspace has put us, I'm a great believer in all the great things you can do in cyberspace, but I don't think it's put us in good habits of mind for dealing with each other and our children, which takes patience and dealing with complexity and friction and empathy, and not just splitting to a simpler world.
Mills: Well, that brings me to something that you've said, that people have called you a killjoy in our love affair with technology. And do you think of yourself that way, or are you just a Cassandra warning us of the dangers? Or is it too late?
Turkle: Well, I think this notion of too late, too late for what? I studied this, I didn't come to technology, my first studies of technology were quite, oh gosh, this is fabulous. In other words, I looked at children programming and I said, oh, my, this is unbelievable. This is a new Rorschach. This is a new place in which children are expressing their extraordinary creativity. I literally called it a, I called it computer Rorschach. I saw it as a new place for expression and self-expression. And I saw only possibility. And then I saw the narrowing of possibility as computers became not an expressive medium, but became closed down and became black boxes where you were told, well, don't learn how it works. Don't learn how to explore it. It's a box for playing games. It's an app. You are here to use the apps.
And I said, well, gee, this is a shame. This used to be a means for self-expression. Now it's an app machine. It became much less interesting. And not only was it an app machine, but now it was a machine where once you used the apps, the apps were collecting data on you and selling your data, and to use the app, you had to really give away a lot of information on you that were being sold to other people. And people were making money on the things you told the technology as you were using the app. So it became a box for giving away your privacy.
So I didn't become a killjoy, I became a close observer of what was going on. I think I became a concerned citizen. And I don't think there's anything inevitable, I think there's an inevitability that this technology will develop. I don't think there's an inevitability that we have to be its passive users. I think people have that wrong.
I don't think there was an inevitability that Facebook would become a collector of our, the data, and we would become the passive consumers of this product and let them do that. I was one of the people who were trying to explain what was happening, and I could see that people were really having trouble understanding what it meant when say, your data about you was being farmed and used for purposes that—
Mills: You think it's free, but you are the product. Yeah.
Turkle: Yes. You think it's free, but you're the product. And they kept saying to me stuff like, well, I can see that I'm being sold beautiful ballet slippers, because I buy ballet slipper shoes at Ann Taylor. So I get ads for ballet shoes from all over. I don't really mind that. What's the problem? Isn't that just a better form of advertising? I don't really see what I'm giving up. And I would be like—
Mills: But is there a way back? We've given up so much at this point, what can we do?
Turkle: Well, but we think there's a no way back because we refuse to think about regulation. Yeah. We regulate this industry, and you say that you can no longer have a business model where the business model depends on scraping information about people. And for now, for example, in the metaverse, people are talking about an educational model where data about students and their key strokes as they use educational products is collected as part of their certification, for example. But I think it's very important to go back to the early days of Facebook and say, people could not imagine what was wrong with taking your data. Because all people could think about was well, okay, what was wrong with that? Because it was like a new form of advertising.
And I'm saying a lot was wrong with that, and bad on my part, not just me, but on a lot of people, that I don't think we early enough found compelling enough metaphors to explain. And the government certainly was out to regulatory lunch on controlling this new industry. Is it a monopoly? That wasn't the problem that it was a monopoly. The problem was it was doing something unprecedented that interfered with democracy, by interfering with privacy in a radically new way. And now let's just think about what this metaverse is going to do when, if you are a student and you're working in the metaverse, every time you type something, that data is being collected. Everything you do, everywhere you are, your location at every moment in time, everything you write. That's terrifying to me.
We just have to stop saying metaverse, metaverse and say, hold on a second. We may need very stringent controls on privacy and record keeping. And we may not need this metaverse so much that we want everybody just signed in and signed up, because people who are talking about the metaverse, it's not that they just want it so that you'll have a wonderful experience and we could be having this conversation in a fake cafe in Paris. That's what's missing from my conversations, is a fake cafe in Paris.
Mills: It's the holodeck on Star Trek. Right?
Turkle: Exactly. Exactly.
Mills: That we're all there. Yeah.
Turkle: Only I had—if only I had that, then our relationship would be good.
Mills: Yeah.
Turkle: The people who are selling this to you want total access to everything about your location, data, just everything about you. The cost of the metaverse is too high to pay. And the reason I just keep bringing up the early days of Facebook is that we weren't good about assessing those costs early on. And I think the metaverse gives us a new opportunity to say no, stop, before we're all hooked in and wearing goggles all the time. And no, we don't want this. And there is an example of something where we said, no, which was Google Glass. You may not—Google had these—
Mills: I do. I do. It was a bomb. Yeah.
Turkle: But Google Glass was very interesting. Google Glass was going to record everything you saw. And people said—
Mills: That's creepy.
Turkle: This is creepy.
Mills: Yeah.
Turkle: Well, this is a second time around on this. And now time has passed and people have gotten more used to everything they do being recorded and people aren't reacting, I think people have become numb. There's so much else going on. It doesn't have a reality yet for people, but I think we've become numb because of everything that's going on politically. And literally the earth is on fire. There's a war in Ukraine. We don't know how it affects us, immigration. Our country is torn. There are anti-democratic forces. We're shocked by so much, but when we turn our attention to this, this is not a good idea on its face.
And it certainly isn't what young children need. If you looked and you saw post-pandemic and you just stepped back and you said, what is the most crucial thing that people need now? I just wrote a book called The Empathy Diaries, and I've been studying people's need for really someone who can talk to them and say, yes, I hear you. I understand you. What you're feeling is reasonable. You're lonely, or you're frightened, or me too, or tell me your story. I'll tell you my story. People barely have words for their story. What children of five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, what they need most of all is a person, a mentor. Their parents are often shell shocked. And the idea that coming out of this pandemic, when people are thinking about classrooms, the thing that comes to mind is let's put them in a virtual space. It's really not the first thing that should come to mind. It really is an odd first thing.
Mills: But don't you think, because we've all been deprived of actual relationships with people, and maybe I'm old and that's why it bothers me. But when we get to the post-pandemic world, being able to see people whenever you want, to be able to go to a movie, go to the theater, have dinner with your friends. Do you think that there's a thirst for that? Or do you think that we've gotten so used to this wild virtual two dimensional world that we can't go back?
Turkle: Well, I think that people who are pitching you the metaverse are pitching it on the bet that psychologically, as you say, people are shell shocked and in a way, are too traumatized to go back. There's been a lot on how people say they want to go back to the office, say they want to go to the movies, say they want to get out there and mix it up. But actually when you really give them the opportunity, they're like, maybe I'll just stay in and watch Bridgerton, I'm feeling fragile. And I think that this metaverse thing plays into, maybe I could just meet friends in this place where I'd have a perfect body and a perfect face. And if I said the wrong thing, I could just leave. It plays into this feeling of fragility.
So I think it's playing into exactly what's going to make us feel ultimately more lonely, because in the end, this friendship without the demands of real intimacy is not really what makes people feel less alone. All the studies say that the Facebook friendship, the metaverse friendship, the online friendship. Yes, it gives you that sense of something, something, but it isn't the same as sitting across the table from someone and saying, how are you? What's been going on? Even a telephone call where someone can hear the catch in your voice. Someone can say you're telling me you're okay, but you don't sound good. You don't look, or you meet in a cafe and somebody says, what's going on with you?
Mills: Yeah.
Turkle: And people want, the fact that we can hide from each other. What I'm finding in my interviews, what I'm finding in my studies is that what terrifies people is this feeling of vulnerability. People run to the internet because they don't want to feel vulnerable. It's like this 18-year-old boy who only wanted to text and hated conversation. And I said to him, what's the matter with conversation? He said, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time, face to face. And you can't always control what you're going to say. And if you want to push everything to online, push everything to the metaverse, you lose that vulnerability. You have connection, not conversation. It's playing to our vulnerabilities, not trying to build our new potential strengths.
Mills: So, what is the solution then? Because I know you wrote a lot in Reclaiming Conversation about people using their phones, texting, never actually engaging with each other and talking. So, what do we do to roll back? Is it as simple as having a no email day, or putting your phone down for a couple of hours, or do we have to be even tougher than that?
Turkle: Well, I think first of all, you have to be willing to accept that there's a problem. In other words, you have to accept that, yeah, I can see in my own life that I'm using my phone, I'm using email, I'm using chat because I really do have this fear. I can recognize this anxiety in myself. So that you're motivated to do some of the steps that I'm going to tell you now that, I don't want to say they're tough love, or terrible medicine, but there wouldn't be steps we'd have to take if they were easy. They do involve a little bit of pain, because it's turning out that when given the opportunity, avoiding vulnerability is something we all want to do, because vulnerability is difficult, and turns out it's very hard for parents because they want to be vulnerable too, but no texting and anything having to do with food.
So no texting at mealtime, no texting when you're cooking, no phones at the dinner table, no phones when you're out, because it turns out that even having a phone on the table face down makes the two people in the conversation feel less empathic towards each other. Now why is that? The phone is turned off and its face down. It's because the presence of the phone reminds you of all the other places you could be. The study even works when you take the phone and you put it in your peripheral vision face down and turned off. That same lack of connection with the person you're having lunch with, because the phone is reminding you of all the other wheres and all the elsewheres that are now available to us.
Mills: Well, those emails that you're not reading.
Turkle: Yeah. The emails you're not reading, the people who are there for you. The elsewheres. And we need more presence with the people we're with, the people with whom we're vulnerable. I say this vulnerability thing is actually just an enormous part of the story. It's that presence to the people you're with. So no phones when food is involved, sacred spaces like the dinner table, like the car, parents need to tell their children when we're in the car, I'm not texting because I'm driving. And this is the time for our family to talk. And children go berserk. This is when I do my social media. And you say to kids, well, it's not the time for social media. It's a very privileged time for us to talk. So the car and meals become time for people to be together.
And then there can be other—different families sometimes do a day a week. And I happen to like there being, not so much days taken out, but times like meal preparation, in the car, and even there being a moment before dinner when people gather, or breakfast, or—not so much taking a full day, but there being places in the home where people know, well, here's a place where we're together and we don't text. The expectation is that when you go to this place, people are there for conversation.
In classrooms, people put their phones in a basket, they don't bring them to their seats. The classroom is for conversation, because if you have your phone with you, you start using it to look up stuff. And the value of the stuff that you can look up is great. You can look up with this guy says, or this woman said, and you can get all kinds of historical—I'm not saying it's not great to have all this stuff you can pick up by having your phone on, but I'm not interested in all the new, wonderful data you can bring to the classroom, that you can learn on your phone. I'm interested in your opinions. We're here to talk about your life, your opinions. I want you engage with what you know already. I'm not interested in any new information. I'm willing to take you as you are. Just leave the new information at the door. I'm not interested in any new information. They laugh, but we have wonderful conversations because they're just focused on each other.
Mills: I was just going to say, have you noticed major changes in students over the years? You've been a teacher for a long time. So 30, 40 years ago were students engaged in a different way, and what was that like? And how do you feel as a teacher now with the kids that, I call them kids, they're adults, they're college students.
Turkle: The main difference in students today is they have a much harder time reading a book. They're much more used to reading short hypertext. What they're most used to reading is something online, where they look at links and they look quickly at links and they jump around and they see links, and they jump and they jump and they jump and they jump. And that's what they're used to reading. That's what they're used to doing.
Mills: What's your relationship with social media? Are you on any of these sites, or do you know that there's—
Turkle: Well, I'm on everything. I'm on everything, but I think the trick is, and how you should raise your children, is you go on everything with them. I think I raised a child in the digital age and I went on everything with her and I showed her how to handle herself online. And then you teach your children how to set limits. So, there's certainly, I've got to say that during the war in Ukraine, the confirmation of the Supreme Court justice, there were moments when you could never tear yourself away from—the slap at the Oscars. There's this infinite, it's like, you can get the opinions of people from all over the world on these things, and it's very tempting, but you set a limit on it.
I have a rule, not in the bedroom. I just don't bring the phone into the bedroom. And just, there's got to be some place where you just say I've had enough information, but I enjoy and use, I study all of these sites. But I'm very concerned. The thing about Facebook is that its algorithm is designed to make you angry, to keep you there by making you angry. And then to put you with other people, just like yourself, who you can be angry with in the same exact way. So, the idea is, is that they're so smart because that is how you keep people's attention. You make them mad and then you keep them with people who are mad in the same way. An 18th-century philosopher wrote about the coffee shops in England and how he used to go to these coffee shops, the places where democracy was born. And he only spoke to people in coffee shops who he disagreed with, because that really is how democracy is born. You only speak to people you disagree with, because you learn how to talk and convince and work with people you disagree with.
It made such an impression on me that, that skill, it's the anti-Facebook skill. I really think of social media as the anti-empathy machine, because make you angry, algorithm to make you angry, then keep you among your own kind. It really is the anti-empathy machine. And everything about my work, and I write so much about this in The Empathy Diaries, is to do the opposite, is to ask how can we create in ourselves the sensitivity, the sensibility, where we can maximize our capacity for empathy? There's no robot. That's why I'm so against robot psychotherapists and robot companions and robot teachers, because a robot cannot be an empathic interlocutor because it's missing the essential. It's not human. It can't put itself in the place of a human. So we are the empathy app. And so we need to magnify and sensitize and make ourselves more and more able to do that.
Mills: Are these robots maybe inevitable? It just seems like, I don't know how we would stop them, and there could be a value. What if, as you're an aging person and you have no one to care for you, that you have a robot caretaker, is that a bad thing?
Turkle: Well, I think that there are all kinds of things robots could do. If robots could clean your house, the robots could make sure the dinner was cooked. I'm not—
Mills: It's The Jetsons.
Turkle: Yeah. I'm all for this Jetsons thing. But a lot of times these instrumental things that robots can do, are used as a gateway drug to introducing robots, to do things that robots can't do, which is to be a companion. And I think that what robots cannot do, because I've worked with robots in nursing homes, I've introduced these companionate robots in nursing homes. What robots cannot do is to say something that you said to me when I joined you, because we postponed our conversation because I needed to take some medical tests. And when I joined you, the first thing you said to me was, how are you? The context for you asking me how I was, was a context of a human being knowing that those medical tests might mean that I was frightened, that I was facing difficulty, that I might have had surgery. I might be recuperating. I might be facing difficult days ahead. You're a human being with a body. You know about mortality. You know we live in the time of COVID.
You come to that question, and I come to a human being asking me that question with a world of expectations and understanding, and empathy and connection, where that question meant something to me. I was grateful for it. I was moved by it. I answered it honestly, I didn't mince words. I said, I'd had tests. It was scary. I'm fine. It was a human connection. What does it mean for a robot to say, how are you? It doesn't have a body. It doesn't know pain. There's nothing that can comfort. There's nothing that can connect. In other words, it's a question that offers no there, there, after it asks the right question.
If it takes the Turing test, which is a test, if you can tell, is it a human or a robot? It passes the Turing test. It asks the right question. It asks the question that a person would ask. The conversation would look the same. So people get all excited. Look, the robot ask the right question, but it doesn't do anything for the person because there's nothing that the robot can understand. There's nothing the robot can get out of my answer, that will give me any comfort. So I think that a lot of all this jumping around about the robot as, oh, it'll ask the right questions, it can companion, is people not being willing to look deep and say, what is it to be a person? And what is it that people really need in a companion? And this is really the heart of my work now on empathy, is that we don't want to admit that empathy is not just asking the right questions and checking a box.
The robots can have pretend empathy. They can absolutely look as though they are saying the right things, but it has no meaning. During the pandemic, The New York Times called. And they said, we really want you to try out this robot psychotherapist, everybody's downloading it, everybody thinks it's great during the pandemic. And I went online and I tried it out and I said to it, I made it into the kind of psychotherapist I wanted. I think I made it into a middle-aged woman. I gave it a name. And I said—
Mills: You really got into it.
Turkle: No, I really wanted to try it out, because I said to this reporter, I said, I didn't want to just fake it. I said, well, are you calling me, because you just want some negative person? He said, yes, we just know you'll say something negative. I said, no, I want to really try it. So I gave it every shot. So I said, look, can you talk about loneliness? Because I'm during the pandemic, I'm living here alone. I have a daughter and a son-in-law, we speak often. They lived with me during the early times of it. But now I'm here alone and—yes, I can talk about loneliness, the robot, the chatbot says to me. I said good, because that's my main issue.
So then I said, well, what do you think about loneliness? And there was a glitch in the program, and the chatbot says to me, it's warm and fuzzy. So it was fixed by the next day, because this was a very, very smart chatbot. Its name was Replica. It was super smart. It was totally fixed by the next day. I took a screenshot and I sent it to The New York Times reporter. I said, look, this was the glitch. This was very smart chatbot. Tomorrow this glitch will be gone, but this is why.
Mills: But if you were in crisis and it had a glitch, then what?
Turkle: The point is, why should this thing know about loneliness? It doesn't have a body. It's not worried about being intubated from COVID, it's not worried about being ill. It's not worried about going to the hospital. It's not worried about breathing. It's no use to me given why I was afraid of being alone. It couldn't possibly have my anxieties and my fears and my—that's what's wrong with it. It's not about whether or not it answered the right questions. It's fundamentally, we shouldn't even be thinking about this. I want to use an expletive, but what the hashtag are we even thinking about siccing this thing on a lovely person like myself, who's worried about catching something and needing to say goodbye to her daughter on a screen? I don't need to be treated like a fool being given some chatbot to talk to. I need a person, find me a person.
But I think it's a failure of our imagination, of our social mobilization and our community as human beings if we don't organize ourselves as people to be there for each other. But the idea that we're going to lay this on a bunch of programs that have no idea what we're anxious about, and the fact that they can say the right things for 15 minutes doesn't mean that they have any qualifications at all. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, do you like the play?
Mills: One final question, which is, what's next for you?
Turkle: Oh, well, this is my current. I'm interested in why are we letting ourselves get fascinated by going to space, going to the metaverse? Time to be interested in our children, ourselves, our agency, our earth, our relationships, everything about how technology has worked out for us has given us a lot of wonderful things that has underscored our need for more privacy, more democracy and more empathy. That has been the message of where technology has taken us. So the idea that we're focusing on less privacy, less democracy, and more metaverse, less empathy. I'm going to be giving those people a very hard time.
Mills: All right. Well, I look forward to keeping track of what you're up to, because I agree that these are some things that definitely need some fixing.
I appreciate you joining us today, Dr. Turkle. Thank you very much.
Turkle: Thank you.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you listen on Apple, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
Sherry Turkle, PhD, is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé professor of the social studies of science and technology in the program in science, technology, and society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She writes on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on culture and therapy, mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics.
