Sherry Turkle: 'The pandemic has shown us that people need relationships'
Sherry Turkle, 72, is professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the first academics to examine the impact of technology on human psychology and society. She has published a series of acclaimed books: her latest, The Empathy Diaries, is an enthralling memoir taking in her time growing up in Brooklyn, her thorny family background, studying in Paris and at Harvard, and her academic career.
It’s quite unusual for an academic to put themselves central to the story. What was your motivation for writing a memoir? I see the memoir as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy – we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here’s a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others.
I also wanted to write this book because I’ve wanted to read this kind of book. That is to say a book where you learn about the backstory of somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story. Many people have this book to write but daren’t because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place.
And I knew that in my case, that wasn’t true.
So is there an academic whose yet unwritten memoir you’d like to read? I’m not going to tell you who I think has an interesting backstory, but I admire the work of Oliver Sacks. In his book Uncle Tungsten he shows how chemistry saved his life after he was so damaged by the war. The periodic table helped him organise his thoughts.
My deepest concerns really come out of my own story. I felt that not enough people are saying: my personal life and my profession are really mixed together and that’s what makes my professional life rich. I wanted to say that. There’s nothing in my personal life that I’m ashamed of. I’ve made mistakes that had false starts, but there’s nothing in this book that I disown.
In The Empathy Diaries you often write about putting yourself in the shoes of someone whose behaviour has been troubling in an attempt to understand their point of view. When did you become conscious you had that kind of capacity? Before empathy was a virtue for me, it was a survival mechanism. That’s because my family was trying to embed me in a tissue of lies. And I knew for my sanity, I had to have a little bit of distance. The periodic table wasn’t going to do it for me – I was trying to find peace in the world by putting myself in other people’s shoes.
One of these lies is explained after your mother died of cancer. You find out that she divorced your father because when you were very young he was conducting psychological experiments on you. How did that feel when you found that out? I don’t remember anything about the experiments, but when I found out about them in my late 20s, a remarkable thing happened. Which is that years after her death, I had a reconciliation with my mother. Because I’d been so angry that she had taken my father away from me. And now I realised that she had saved me. That was really a moment of great tenderness and empathy towards her because I understood for the first time that she did what she did with great love, empathy and compassion. As a child, I would have had no way of knowing this.
Eventually you tracked down your father. When I met him I was able to give up the fantasy of him. So I was able to realise that’s done now and you can stop turning him into Prince Charming – he was a flawed guy. There was a deep shift as I reconciled with my mother because although I loved her, I had showed her little cruelties – cruelties that darted out because I was so angry at her for depriving me of this father.
When you were researching your memoir, did you have new insights? Yes. There’s one event in particular – a story I don’t tell in the book because I didn’t have the realisation until after it was finished.
I’m around eight and a half, my mother comes to pick me up from my grandparents, hands me a white hat and says: “I knitted this for you.” I know this hat is from a store near the subway station. I don’t know why my mother is lying to me again; I can’t figure it out. Years later I spend a lot of time in psychoanalysis and it never gets resolved.
But when I’m writing the memoir, like the character in Homeland, I’ve placed index cards on the wall, with strings linking them, to make sure the timeline adds up. I figure out that my mother got her diagnosis of cancer at exactly this point.
So perhaps she was coming back from the doctor to pick me up from my grandparent’s house. And she’s decided not to tell me. She must have felt so alone, but wanting to connect with me, on the spur of the moment, she bought me this cap and, wanting to be more the perfect mother, hands it to me and says she knitted it. I could not empathise with her until I pinned where she was that afternoon.
In 1977 as a young professor at MIT you were asked to host a dinner at your home for [Apple co-founder] Steve Jobs, rather than spend the day
with him on campus with your male colleagues. Was it typical of the sort of patriarchal attitudes in academia at that time? Unfortunately, yes. I was the only woman in the department but more than that what I was actually studying – people’s infatuation and feelings about computers – was of interest to him.
His essential insights were that computers shouldn’t be these grey boxes sitting on tables. They should be beautiful things that people could identify with. I called it an intimate machine, I called the computer a second self – that was his kind of thing. So I deserved to be talking to Jobs. And of course, Steve Jobs walked into my apartment, looked at my vegetarian dinner and he said, this is the wrong kind of vegetarian and walked out.
So I was even a failure as the little woman. So I couldn’t even succeed as the lady professor who could make the dinner for Steve Jobs. I am so late to see the sexism in my own career and feel the appropriate anger.
The internet enables us to block, ghost and troll people. Yet it can help us feel less isolated. Are there two sides to the relationship between empathy and technology? The answer to that question is yes, which is why this is no simple story. Look at the pandemic. It has made us so dependent on forging relationships and maintaining relationships onscreen.
It’s a miracle, but there are limitations. Let’s not get into the following problem. You start out saying the internet is better than nothing, then suddenly you start saying maybe it is better than everything. When I was researching Reclaiming Conversation, one 18-year-old said to me: “I tell you what’s wrong with conversation that takes place in real time. We cannot control what you’re going to say.”
I’ve been in Zoom meetings where things get difficult and some people just disappear. Then they reappear after the difficult part of the conversation has ended. You turn off your screen and put it on mute. The problem we face as this pandemic is ending, God willing, is that some people are going to be tempted not to reappear. The thing about human contact is that we’re vulnerable.
In your years of studying technology, has there been a turning point, feature or service that has accelerated its unwelcome side-effects? There are two things. The point when Facebook and social media in general discovered its business model – that’s when the connection between democracy and privacy became my subject. After two manipulated US elections and the Covid misinformation, we are now seeing there’s a higher level of public consciousness about what’s going on here – 10 or 12 years ago I couldn’t get people to engage.
Number two is pretend empathy. AI programs that say they are listening, pretend they are your friend… more people are saying if they help an old or lonely person, that’s great. But this is my line in the sand. Living through the pandemic has shown that people need relationships, people need people. We can write programs that mimic us, but I don’t want to talk to a robot, something without a body, that isn’t a child, that didn’t have a mother.
If Silicon Valley changes its business model and we don’t have pretend empathy any more, I will put down my pen.
The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle is published by Penguin (£23.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Steve Jobs walked in, looked at my vegetarian dinner and said this is the wrong kind of vegetarian – and walked out