Sherry Turkle would prefer not to tweet. “My publisher said, ‘Look, you have to tweet, you have to force yourself, you have to learn how to do that!’ ” Her publisher being the one that just released The Empathy Diaries , a gripping, elegant memoir in which the psychologist and scholar and critic of technology finally puts herself under the microscope. The megaphone of social media is more complicated. “I’m really not very good at it, so I just keep saying things like ‘surreal that . . .!’ ‘Thrilled to see my exciting . . .’ I never say that. I feel like such a jerk. And then I started an Instagram account. And I said, ‘I can’t do this. . . . I mean, I barely can keep up with my email.’ And considering all the people we have to be, it was just one extra person that I couldn’t attend to right now.” Though, she admits, “Once the pandemic is over, I may change my mind.” Minds and selves and how they change have long been fascinations for Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this pandemic time, as awful and deadly and isolating as it is, is also interesting. It’s also a time when the digital technology that she’s studied for so long has become increasingly entwined with our minds and bodies—and just at the moment when we were asking some of the urgent questions that Turkle’s been asking for years now. Like, How do our objects objectify us? Sherry Turkle with her mother, 1953. [Photo: courtesy of Sherry Turkle] In The Empathy Diaries , Turkle describes a long personal relationship with what anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal moments,” transitions and inflection points that can also be thresholds to new ways of thinking. Born in postwar Brooklyn to a working-class Jewish family, she read and wrote her way to Radcliffe—which she attended when it was folded into all-male Harvard—and then studied in Paris in 1968, when student protests were giving way to new ideas about the mind.
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In a world of screens, Sherry Turkle wants to make eye contact