“Alone Together”: Is technology ruining our ability to be alone?

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:24:00 +0000

Sherry Turkle's new book, "Alone Together," ends in mourning. In October 2009, the author, an MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology, went to her local synagogue for Yiskor, the special Yom Kippur service that remembers the dead. There she heard the rabbi deliver a sermon about the importance of talking to the deceased and communicating four messages to them: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you."

"That is what makes us human, over time, over distance," Turkle says of our ability to talk sincerely to other human beings, whether they belong to our past or our present. Our "knowledge of mortality" and our "experience of the life cycle" is conveyed in just such simple messages: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you." They are the most intimate words we can say to another. Without them, she suggests, we are machines akin to the robots in Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which imagines a future in which robots and humans are indistinguishable.

Can the Internet save the book?

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:30:00 +0000

(With additional questions from James Mustich, editor in chief of the Barnes & Noble Review).

According to media columnist Michael Wolff, the name Clay Shirky is "now uttered in technology circles with the kind of reverence with which left-wingers used to say, 'Herbert Marcuse'." Wolff is right. Shirky has emerged as a luminary of the new digital intelligentsia, a daringly eclectic thinker as comfortable discussing 15th-century publishing technology as he is making political sense of 21st-century social media.

In his 2008 book, "Here Comes Everybody," Shirky imagined a world without traditional economic or political organizations. Two years later and Shirky has a new book, "Cognitive Surplus," which imagines something even more daring -- a world without television. To celebrate the appearance of the revered futurist's latest volume, we're delighted to share a February discussion between Shirky, Barnes & Noble Review editor in chief James Mustich, and BNR contributor Andrew Keen. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation about the future of the book, of the reader and the writer, and, most intriguingly, the future of intimacy.

Salon.com > Andrew Keen

“Alone Together”: Is technology ruining our ability to be alone?

Can the Internet save the book?