The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, ...a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they no longer place value on living things and
authentic
emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic.
The computer as an "object to think with" enters into how
people think about their minds in several ways. First, it serves
as a model of mind, both historically and in contemporary neuroscience
and ...neuropsychology. Second, the computer enters into our thinking
about mind through our everyday interactions with computational objects.
In recent years, people have embarked on a range of new
"intersubjective" relationships, some of which, albeit
problematically, have taken machines as subjects. Understanding
these forms of interaction-one on one with computers, on the
Internet, in virtual realities, and with robotic
creatures-calls for psychodynamic modes of understanding. New
computational objects in the culture serve as "objects to think
with" for a revitalized psychoanalytic discourse.
For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace ...the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects--an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer--are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes--the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.
Victor Turner's The Ritual Process, published in 1970, spoke to its time. The social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s identified with Turner's idea that they were neither marginal nor deviant, ...but liminal elements in a procession through periods of structure and anti-structure. More than this, Turner argued that times of transition are privileged and generative for individuals and societies. Most recently, the analysis of liminality in The Ritual Process is relevant to considering America and its pandemic experience. Thinking about thresholds suggests how COVID's tragedy is an opportunity to see America anew.
The Inner History of Devices Turkle, Sherry; Verlager, Alicia Kestrell; Gathman, E. Cabell Hankinson ...
2011, 20110930, 20080829, 2008, 2011-09-30, 20080101
eBook
For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters ...our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening--that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines. In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an "intimate ethnography" that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: "This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope." Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: "What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?" The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer. In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan ("Tokyo sat trapped inside it"); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.
Falling for Science Turkle, Sherry; Hockfield, Susan; Ingber, Donald ...
09/2011
eBook
edited and with an introduction by Sherry Turkle as per Sherry"This is a book about science, technology, and love," writes Sherry Turkle. In it, we learn how a love for science can start with a love ...for an object--a microscope, a modem, a mud pie, a pair of dice, a fishing rod. Objects fire imagination and set young people on a path to a career in science. In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual. The senior scientists' essays trace the arc of a life: the gears of a toy car introduce the chain of cause and effect to artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert; microscopes disclose the mystery of how things work to MIT President and neuroanatomist Susan Hockfield; architect Moshe Safdie describes how his boyhood fascination with steps, terraces, and the wax hexagons of beehives lead him to a life immersed in the complexities of design. The student essays tell stories that echo these narratives: plastic eggs in an Easter basket reveal the power of centripetal force; experiments with baking illuminate the geology of planets; LEGO bricks model worlds, carefully engineered and colonized. All of these voices--students and mentors--testify to the power of objects to awaken and inform young scientific minds. This is a truth that is simple, intuitive, and easily overlooked.Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press, 2005) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (MIT Press, 2007).
Object Lessons Turkle, Sherry
Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World,
10/2010
Book Chapter
In the ongoing national conversation about science education in America, there is a new consensus that we have entered a time of crisis in our relationship to the international scientific and ...engineering community.¹ For generations we have led; now Americans wonder why our students are turning away from science and mathematics—at best content to be the world’s brokers, broadcasters, and lawyers and at worst simply dropping out—while foreign students press forward on a playing field newly leveled by the resources of the World Wide Web (Friedman 2005). Leaders in science and technology express dismay. On this theme, Bill
Empathy and Our Future Turkle, Sherry; Liu, Eric; Oxtoby, David
Bulletin - American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
07/2021, Letnik:
74, Številka:
4
Journal Article
