Authors: Sherry Turkle

Alone Together (63 page)

2
See
www.postsecret.com
(accessed August 4, 2010).

3
As throughout this book, I have disguised the details of this case and all others I cite.

4
Ashley Fantz, “Forgive Us Father; We’d Rather Go Online,”
CNN.com
, March 13, 2008,
www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/03/13/online.confessions/index.html
(accessed August 22, 2009).

5
The exceptions are significant: if at the earliest ages you were not nurtured—you often cried and were not fed—the vulnerability/nurturance expectation can be broken. Erik Erikson calls the positive laying down of expectations “basic trust.” See
Childhood and Society
(New York: Norton, 1950), 247-250.

6
This is the defense mechanism of “projective identification.” Instead of facing our own issues, we see them in others. There, they can be safely attacked. Insecure about her own appearance, a wife criticizes her husband’s weight; the habitually angry see a hostile world.

7
The Reverend Bobby Gruenwald of the Oklahoma-based
LifeChurch.tv
, an evangelical consortium of thirteen churches affiliated with the online confessional
MySecret.tv
, is one of those who argues that our notion of “community” should include online congregations. In the first year it was open, about thirty thousand people posted “secrets” on the MySecret website. The posts are linked to categories, which include lusting, cheating, stealing, and bestiality. When the site was featured on America Online’s homepage, it got over 1.3 million hits in a single day. Confessional sites like MySecret do not track IP addresses, which could identify those who post. This means that if someone posts a confession of a criminal nature, the site managers cannot do much about it. So, online, we read about people admitting to murder (these are often interpreted as soldiers writing about the experience of war) and enjoying child pornography: “A recent message on
ivescrewedup.com
reads, ‘I have killed four people. One of them was a 17 year old boy.’” See Fantz, “Forgive Us Father.”

8
Ray Oldenberg.
The Great Good Place
:
Cafés, Coffee Ships, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day
(New York: Paragon House, 1989). On virtual environments as communities, see Howard Rheingold,
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993).

9
There is, too, the word “world.” Sociologist William Bainbridge, a student of World of Warcraft, takes its title seriously and talks of the game as a world. See William Bainbridge,
The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For an interchange on the game as a “world,” or perhaps a “neighborhood,” see Tom Ashcroft’s
On Point
interview with William Bainbridge, “Deep in the ‘World of Warcraft,’” WBUR, March 30, 2010,
www.onpointradio.org/2010/03/warcraft-civilization
(accessed August 10, 2010).

CHAPTER 13: ANXIETY

1
“No More Teachers? No More Books? Higher Education in the Networked Age,” A Centennial Panel on Information Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 16, 2009.

2
There are at least three displacements in the passage from the book to the online text. First, there is the displacement of personal and idiosyncratic associations. Second, online links that are there to be double-clicked are determined by what the author of the text thinks it is important for you to be exposed to. Third, even if one accepts that such links are convenient, they are easily bypassed when reading is interrupted by an incoming e-mail or other online distractions.

3
In
The Year of Magical Thinking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), a memoir about the year after her husband’s death, Joan Didion describes how material objects became charged with meaning. So, for example, Didion cannot bring herself to throw away her husband’s shoes because she is convinced that he may need them. This same magical thinking is associated both with religious devotion and the “illness” of mourning. With time, Freud believed, the true object, the lost husband, comes to have a full internal representation. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in
The Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud
, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 14: 237-258.

4
At many summer camps, there are rules that campers should not have cell phones, which are routinely “confiscated” at the start of camp. Children now tell me that parents give them two phones: one to “turn in” on the first day of camp and a second to keep for calling home.

5
In October 2005, ABC News called the term “in vogue.” See “Do ‘Helicopter Moms’ Do More Harm Than Good?”
ABCNews.com
, October 21, 2005,
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=1237868&page=1
(accessed April 7, 2004).

6
In 2004, the Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence: phone calls made, TV shows watched, magazines read, plane tickets bought, e-mails sent and received. It was then partially revived nine months later. See Noah Schachtman, “Pentagon Revives Memory Project,”
Wired News
,
www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/09/6491
(accessed August 4, 2010). Backers of the project saw it as a near-perfect digital memory. Civil libertarians argued that it could become the ultimate invasive profiling tool. Such objections, of course, are undermined if people make agreements with private services (for instance, Facebook and Google) in which they sacrifice rights to their data in return for services on the system. When one agrees to such terms of service, the questions become, How transparent are the privacy settings on the service, and how easy is it for people to choose the privacy options they wish to have? Facebook has been the focus of much of the public discussion of these matters, centering on whether the “default” is more privacy or less. So, for example, in 2007, Facebook users turned against Beacon, a service that posted information about users’ purchases both to Facebook and other sites. More than fifty thousand users signed an online petition in protest, and Beacon became an application that users had to “opt into.” By 2009, it was shut down completely, and Facebook agreed to use $9.5 million to start a foundation dedicated to questions of online privacy. See “Facebook Shuts Down Beacon Marketing Tool,”
CBC News
, September 21, 2009,
www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/21/tech-internet-facebook-beacon.html
(accessed October 15, 2009).

In spring 2010, Facebook’s privacy policies again became front-page news. See Jenna Wortham, “Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries,”
New York Times
, May 5, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/technology/internet/06facebook.html?scp=2&sq=wortham%20facebook&st=cse
(accessed May 10, 2010), and Miguel Helft and Jenna Wortham, “Facebook Bows to Pressure over Privacy,”
New York Times
, May 27, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27facebook.html
(accessed May 29, 2010). This conversation will surely continue.

7
Miguel Helft, “Anger Leads to Apology from Google About Buzz,”
New York Times
, February 14, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/technology/internet/15google.html
(accessed May 29, 2010).

8
The corporate world has certainly behaved as though transparency about privacy policy is not necessarily in its best interest. When Facebook has been open about how much user data it feels it owns, users have not been happy. The corporate reality, however, is on the public record. An anonymous Facebook employee disclosed that the company saves “all the data on all of our servers, every hour of every day.” “At least two people,” the employee said, “have been fired” for spying on accounts. Cited in Stephen Burt, “Always On,”
London Review of Books
32, no. 11 (June 10, 2010): 21-22.

9
Polly Sprenger, “Sun on Privacy: Get over It,”
Wired News
, January 26, 1999,
www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538
(accessed August 4, 2010).

10
Eric Schmidt made the first remark about controlling behavior rather than worrying about privacy to CNBC. The video is available at Ryan Tate, “Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People,” Gawker, December 4, 2009,
http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people
(accessed June 5, 2010). His remark about name changing was made to the
Wall Street Journal
. Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “Google and the Search for the Future,”
online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142052748704901104575423294099527212.html
(accessed September 3, 2010).

11
On the issue of computational metaphors being taken as reality, see Harry R. Lewis (with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen),
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion
(New York: Pearson, 2006), ch. 3.

12
Robert Jay Lifton, “Protean Man,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
24 (1971): 298-304, and Robert Jay Lifton,
The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation
(New York: Basic Books, 1993). See also Sherry Turkle,
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

13
Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
, trans. Alan Sheridan (1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

14
Foucault,
Discipline and Punish,
195-228. Here is one example of Foucault on the relationship between remembrance and the constitution of a new kind of self: “First, to bring out a certain number of historical facts which are often glossed over when posing this problem of writing, we must look into the famous question of the hypomnemata. . . . Now, in fact, hypomnemata has a very precise meaning. It is a copy-book, a notebook. Precisely this type of notebook was coming into vogue in Plato’s time for personal and administrative use. This new technology was as disrupting as the introduction of the computer into private life today. It seems to me the question of writing and the self must be posed in terms of the technical and material framework in which it arose.... What seems remarkable to me is that these new instruments were immediately used for the constitution of a permanent relationship to oneself—one must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed, as a head of an enterprise manages his enterprise, a head of household manages his household.”

See Paul Rabinow, “An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 363-365.

CHAPTER 14: THE NOSTALGIA OF THE YOUNG

1
This recalls how French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talks about the analytic encounter. The offer to listen creates a demand to be heard. “In short, I have succeeded in doing what in the field of ordinary commerce people would dearly like to be able to do with such ease: with supply, I have created demand.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,”
Ecrits: A Selection
, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 254. For a discussion of Lacan and the “intransitive demand,” see Sherry Turkle,
Psychoanalytic Politic: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution
(1978; New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 85.

2
David Andersen, “Erik H. Erikson’s Challenge to Modernity” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 1993). After writing this chapter and the next, I found Alan Lightman’s elegant essay, “Prisoner of the Wired World,” which evokes many of the themes I treat here. In
A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
(New York: Pantheon, 2005), 183-208.

3
Anthony Storr,
Solitude: A Return to the Self
(New York: Random House, 1988), 198.

4
Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” in
Walden
(1854; New York: American Renaissance Books, 2009), 47. I thank Erikson biographer Lawrence J. Friedman for his insights on Erikson and “stillness.”

5
Thoreau, “Where I Lived,” 47.

6
Katy Hafner, “To Deal with Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook,”
New York Times
, December 20, 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/technology/internet/21facebook.html?_r=1
(accessed January 6, 2009).

7
Thoreau, “Where I Lived,” 47.

8
Kevin Kelly, “Technophilia,” The Technium, June 8, 2009,
www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/technophilia.php
(accessed December 9, 2009).

9
See Sherry Turkle, “Simulation and Its Discontents,” in Sherry Turkle,
Simulation and Its Discontents
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3-84.

CONCLUSION: NECESSARY CONVERSATIONS

1
Bohr says, “It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth” (as quoted in Max Delbrück,
Mind from Matter: An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology
[Palo Alto, CA: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1986], 167).

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