Course:MDIA300/Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is an American sociologist and clinical psychologist, serving as the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle’s research, work, and writing focuses on human-technology relationships, broaching  topics human digital sociality, computers cultures, digital-emotional relationships, social media and social robotics. and Turkle is also the director and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Personal life and Education

Turkle was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. Turkle obtained a BA in Social Studies from Radcliffe College, later amalgamated with Harvard University. Upon graduation, she studied for a year at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, France and received Certificat d'Etudes Politiques. In the introduction to Evocative Objects, she wrote that she was particularly influenced by ananthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, particularly in how he viewed “material things” as “goods-to-think-with.” Turkle returned to the United States, studying for a year at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago before enrolling in a dual doctorate program in sociology and personality psychology at Harvard University.

Awarded both PhDs in 1976, Turkle began studying psychological training, publishing her first book Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. Turkle accepted a role at MIT to study the sociology of sciences of the mind, later citing this as the beginning of her work studying technology. Turkle has remained faculty at MIT for the entirety of her career.

Major Works

The Second Self

Turkle’s 1984 book The Second Self: Computers, and the Human Spirit, presents the argument that people view computers and their active interactions with them as mediums of their personal identity. Citing clinical research, the work presents a theory that a person’s social and psychological self is altered through reflective relationships with computer technology, becoming crucial aspects of. Turkle argues that personal computers act as tools to grant individuals agency in exploring their multiple ‘selves’ — drawing on psychoanalytic personality theory.

Life on the Screen

Published in 1995, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet elaborates further on discussions of how computers shape human identities. Turkle expands broader on peer-to-peer interactions as mediated through computers and the internet, proposing a digital-era conception of identity that is externalized, decentralized, and increasingly multifaceted. She further presents peer-to-peer social interactions as characterized by the ability for users to switch between digitally embedded and developed personas.

Evocative Objects

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With was published in 2011 with Turkle serving as the books editor. A collection of personal essays and letters from guest authors, the book discusses how the individual, particular relationships that a person forms with objects alters their perception of both themselves and reality as a whole in ways specific to the mediating object. In her introduction, Turkle described each essay as presenting “objects that connect them to ideas and to people.” Evocative Objects works as a whole to highlight how the self is defined and related to through these specific objects.

Alone Together

Alone Together (2011) examines an observed phenomena of a modern degradation in organic sociality in favor of increasingly common interactions with social media, digital technology, and artificial intelligence. Turkle proposes that contemporary technology possesses the ability to simulate and interact with humans on an emotional level, leading to an overall decline in a person’s regard for other people. Drawing on clinical experience, she argues that personal privacy is no-longer held in esteem and that people interact increasingly personally with digital sources, thus fueling a self-centred decline in circumspection.

MIT Initiative on Technology and Self

Turkle is the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self: an academic component of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. The initiative offers courses influenced or taught by Turkle with a focus on cross-discipinarity examinations of “the relationship between technology and conversation.”

Influence in Media Studies

Turkle’s writing and works have been highly influential on the discipline of media studies, specifically in bridging research on personality psychology and sociology with digital technology. With her research being based in clinical work and observations, Turkle’s writing has been noted for its grounding and tracking of human emotions regarding digital interactions. Works such as Life on the Screen and Evocative Objects places media objects in a central role regarding how Turkle’s research has spanned the rise and mass adoption of public internet usage, surveying intimately the relationships that people develop with technology and outlining correlating decline with both traditionally observed communication styles and self-perceived psychological wellbeing. In regards to criticism that she applies skepticism toward the adoption of such technology, Turkle said in a 2014 review with Scientific American that her “message is not antitechnology” but instead reaffirms a fundamental “need to assert what we need for our own thinking, for our own development” — presenting a perspective that centres concern for human wellbeing within media scholarship. Turkle’s ongoing, multi-disciplinary approach to her work continues to reaffirm the broad theoretical and analytical base from which media studies draws upon.