Authors: Sherry Turkle

Alone Together (57 page)

20
See “Tamagotchi Graveyard,” Tamagotchi Dreamworld,
http://members.tripod.com/~shesdevilish/grave.html
(accessed June 15, 2009).

21
In Japan, a neglected Tamagotchi dies but can be uploaded to a virtual graveyard. In the United States, manufacturers propose gentler resolutions. Some neglected Tamagotchis might become “angels” and return to their home planet. On the Tamagotchis I played with, it was possible to hit a reset button and be presented with another creature.

22
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in
The Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud,
ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 17:219-256.

23
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in
The Standard Edition
, 14: 237-258.

24
See “Tamagotchi Graveyard.”

25
Other writings on the Tamagotchi gravesite include the epitaph for a Tamagotchi named Lacey who lived for ninety-nine years. We know how hard it was for her owner to achieve this result, but he is modest about his efforts: “She wasn’t much trouble at all.” But even with his considerable accomplishment, he feels her death was due to his neglect: “I slept late on a Sunday and she died.” But in the simple expressions of guilt (or perhaps a playing at guilt) are frank admissions of how hard it is to lose someone you love. Mourners say, “I was his mama and he will always love me as I loved him”; “He went everywhere with me. He was a loving and faithful pet”; “I’m sorry and I real[l]y miss you!”; and “God gave him life. I gave him death.” Some mourners express their belief in redemption through the generativity of generations. Thus is “Little Guy” memorialized, dead at forty-eight: “I hope you are very happy, Little Guy. I’m currently taking care of your son. I know he’s yours because he looks and acts just like you. I’m really sorry I couldn’t save you and had you on pause a lot when you were older.” See “Tamagotchi Graveyard.”

CHAPTER 2: ALIVE ENOUGH

1
The fact that the Furby was so hard to quiet down was evidence of its aliveness. Even adults who knew it was not alive saw it as playing on the boundaries of life. The response of many was to see the Furby as out of control, intolerable, or, as one put it, insane. A online video of an “insane Furby” shows the Furby chatting away, to the increasing consternation of its adult owner. To stop it, he slaps its face, sticks his fingers in its mouth, holds down its ears and eyes, smashes it against a wall, and throws it down a flight of stairs. None of these shuts it down. If anything, its language becomes more manic, more “desperate.” Finally comes the solution of taking out the Furby’s batteries with a Phillips screwdriver. Now, the quiet Furby is petted. Its owner comments, “That’s better.” See “Insane Furby,” YouTube, March 15, 2007,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Dfg4xJ6Ko
(accessed November 11, 2009).

2
These enactments bring theory to ground level. See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181, and N. Katherine Hayles,
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

3
Michael Chorost,
Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

4
Here, the Furby acts as what psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed a “transitional object,” one where the boundaries between self and object are not clear. See D. W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality
(New York: Basic Books, 1971).

5
The idea that the Furby had the capacity to learn new words by “listening” to the language around it was persistent. The belief most likely stemmed from the fact that it was possible to have the Furby say certain preprogrammed words or phrases more often by petting it whenever it said them. As a result of this myth, several intelligence agencies banned Furbies from their offices, believing that they were recording devices camouflaged as toys.

6
Children move back and forth between he, she, and it in talking about relational artifacts. Once they make a choice, they do not always stick with it. I report on what children say and, thus, their sentences are sometimes inconsistent.

7
Peter H. Kahn and his colleagues studied online discussion groups that centered on Furbies. For their account, see Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn Jr., and Jennifer Hagman, “Hardware Companions? What Online AIBO Discussion Forums Reveal About the Human-Robotic Relationship,” in
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(New York: ACM Press, 2003), 273-280.

8
The artist Kelly Heaton played on the biological/mechanical tension in the Furby’s body by creating a fur coat made entirely from the fur of four hundred “skinned” Furbies, reengineered into a coat for Mrs. Santa Claus. The artwork, titled
Dead Pelt
, was deeply disturbing. It also included a wall of reactive eyes and mouths, taken from Furbies, and a formal anatomical drawing of a Furby. See the Feldman Gallery’s Kelly Heaton page at
www.feldmangallery.com/pages/artistsrffa/arthea01.html
(accessed August 18, 2009).

9
Baird developed her thought experiment comparing how people would treat a gerbil, a Barbie, and a Furby for a presentation at the Victoria Institute, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1999.

10
In Turing’s paper that argued the existence of intelligence if a machine could not be distinguished from a person, one scenario involved gender. In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he suggested an “imitation game”: a man and then a computer pose as female, and the interrogator tries to distinguish them from a real woman. See Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Mind
59, no. 236 (October 1950): 433-460.

11
Antonio Damasio,
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
(New York: Harcourt, 1999). Since emotions are cognitive representations of body states, the body cannot be separated from emotional life, just as emotion cannot be separated from cognition.

12
There are online worlds and communities where people feel comfortable expressing love for Furbies and seriously mourning Tamagotchis. These are places where a deep sense of connection to the robotic are shared. These “sanctioned spaces” play an important part in the development of the robotic moment. When you have company and a community, a sense of intimacy with sociable machines comes to feel natural. Over time, these online places begin to influence the larger community. At the very least, a cohort has grown up thinking that their attitudes toward the inanimate are widely shared.

13
BIT was developed by Brooks and his colleagues at the IS Robotics Corporation. IS Robotics was the precursor to iRobot, which first became well known as the makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner.

14
Rodney A. Brooks,
Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us
(New York: Pantheon, 2002), 202.

15
Sherry Turkle,
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
(1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 61.

16
This field has a vast literature. Several works that have influenced my thinking include the early book by Peter D. Kramer,
Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self
(New York: Viking, 1993), and the more recent Margaret Talbot, “Brain Gain: The Underground World of Neuroenhancing Drugs,”
The New Yorker
, July 27, 2009,
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot
(accessed July 21, 2009), and Nathan Greenslit, “Depression and Consumption: Psychopharmaceuticals, Branding, and New Identity Practices,”
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
25, no. 4 (2005): 477-502.

CHAPTER 3: TRUE COMPANIONS

1
Three recent works by authors who have influenced my thinking are Jessica Riskin, ed.,
Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Gaby Wood,
Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
(New York: Anchor, 2003); and Barbara Johnson,
Persons and Things
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Johnson explores how relations between persons and things can be more fluid while arguing a central ethical tenet: persons should be treated as persons.

2
Norbert Wiener
, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).

3
The literature on the negotiation of technology, self, and social world is rich and varied. I have been particularly influenced by the perspectives described in Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds.,
The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
(1987; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and by the work of Karin D. Knorr Cetina and Bruno Latour. See, for example, Karin D. Knorr Cetina, “Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Post-social Knowledge Societies,”
Theory, Culture and Society
14, no. 4 (1997): 1-30; Karin D. Knorr Cetina,
Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar,
Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts
(1979; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Bruno Latour,
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
(1987; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bruno Latour,
Aramis, or the Love of Technology
, trans. Catherine Porter (1996; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Bruno Latour,
We Have Never Been Modern
, trans. Catherine Porter (1991; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

In the specific area of the relationship between people and computational objects, this book is indebted to the work of Sara Kiesler, Lee Sproull, and Clifford Nass and their collaborators. See, for example, Sau-lai Lee and Sara Kiesler, “Human Mental Models of Humanoid Robots” (paper delivered at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Barcelona, Spain, April 18-22, 2005); Lee Sproull et al., “When the Interface Is a Face,”
Human-Computer Interaction
11 (1996): 97-124; Sara Kiesler and Lee Sproull, “Social Responses to ‘Social’ Computers,” in
Human Values and the Design of Technology
, ed. Batya Friedman (Stanford, CA: CLSI Publications, 1997); Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass,
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television and New Media Like Real People and Places
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Clifford Nass and Scott Brave,
Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Victoria Groom and Clifford Nass, “Can Robots Be Teammates? Benchmarks and Predictors of Failure in Human-Robot Teams,”
Interaction Studies
8, no. 3 (2008): 483-500; Leila Takayama, Victoria Groom, and Clifford Nass, “I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Won’t Do That: Social Aspects of Human-Agent Conflict,”
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(Boston, MA: ACM Press, 2009), 2209-2108.

4
The object relations tradition in psychoanalytic thought proposes that infants see objects (and people) in terms of their functions. This partial understanding is captured by the phrase “part objects.” So, for example, the breast that feeds the hungry infant is the “good breast.” The hungry infant unsuccessfully tries to nurse in relation to the “bad breast.” By interacting with the world, the child internalizes these external objects, which shape his or her psyche. Infants gradually grow to develop a sense of “whole objects.” The internalized objects may not be accurate representations of the outside world, but they are what the child uses as he or she goes forward. D. W. Winnicott reassured mothers that in a “good-enough” facilitating environment, a perception of part objects eventually transforms into a comprehension of whole objects. This corresponds to the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to see that both the “good” and “bad” breast are part of the same mother. In larger terms, this underpins the ability throughout life to tolerate ambiguous and realistic relationships. See, for example, Melanie Klein,
Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works, 1921-1945
, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle et al. (New York: Free Press, 1975), and D. W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality
(New York: Basic Books, 1971).

5
Emmanuel Lévinas,
Alterity and Transcendence
, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999).

6
The Pokémon is a character that appears in a card collection with which Henry plays an elaborate set of war games. He collects character cards in which different creatures from the Pokémon world have different powers. Then, teams of creatures challenge each other. Henry spends a lot of time strategizing about how to maximize his team’s powers in his war games. He spends a lot of time thinking about “powers.” I thank my research assistant Lauren Klein for her helpful explanations of the Pokémon universe.

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