Sherry Turkle
Authors & Journalists ·
Part of the wider tech-criticism reading list this library draws on for broader context on technology's effects.
Sherry Turkle is grouped among the secondary tier of technology critics the Evidence Library draws on for broader context beyond the campaign's core sources — writers whose work examines how digital platforms and always-on technology reshape attention, behavior, and social life. Her writing sits alongside that of Jaron Lanier, Roger McNamee, Max Fisher, Adam Alter, Cal Newport, and Nicholas Carr as part of the wider critical literature on technology's effects that this library uses to round out its case.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (11)
BOOKS
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
Published in 1984, this early book by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle is based on interviews with children, hobbyists, and early programmers encountering personal computers for the first time. Turkle argued that computers were not neutral tools but 'objects to think with' — machines people used to work out questions about identity, control, and what separates a mind from a mechanism. She described children forming strong attachments to computers and debating, in their own terms, whether a machine that plays chess or talks back could be considered alive. The book is a foundational text in Turkle's long-running study of how people's emotional relationships with technology shape self-understanding. TechKids Foundation includes it as background on the decades-long history behind current debates about children, screens, and machines, not as evidence about clinical outcomes.
Evocative Objects: Things We Think With
This 2007 essay collection, edited by Sherry Turkle, gathers first-person pieces by scientists, designers, and scholars reflecting on specific objects — often from childhood — that shaped how they think, including several essays that touch on early computers and electronic toys. The organizing idea is that people form emotional attachments to objects that go well beyond their practical function, and that studying those attachments reveals something about how identity and habits of mind develop over a lifetime. Several contributors describe childhood devices as companions that structured solitary play. TechKids Foundation includes this volume as part of the broader intellectual foundation behind Turkle's later, more direct arguments about screens and relationships — it does not itself make claims about screen time or mental health.
Falling for Science: Objects in Mind
Edited by Sherry Turkle and published in 2008, this companion volume to Evocative Objects collects short essays — many by MIT students and faculty — about a specific childhood object that first drew each contributor toward science or engineering: a chemistry set, a broken radio, a particular toy taken apart and rebuilt. The book frames early, hands-on tinkering with physical objects as a route into scientific curiosity, implicitly contrasting object-based, exploratory play with more passive forms of screen engagement, though it does not study screen use directly. TechKids Foundation includes it as part of Turkle's broader research tradition on how children's early relationships with objects and technology shape lifelong habits of mind and learning, relevant background for the library's interest in hands-on, creation-oriented alternatives to passive screen use.
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
In this 1995 book, Sherry Turkle turned to the early internet — bulletin boards, chat rooms, and text-based virtual worlds known as MUDs — to examine how people, including many teenagers, experimented with multiple online identities distinct from their offline selves. She described this as evidence that digital life was reshaping how people understood a stable, singular sense of self, replacing it with something more fluid and 'decentered.' The book helped popularize the idea that the internet is a social and psychological environment, not just a tool, and that spending significant time in it is associated with changes in how young people build and present identity. TechKids Foundation includes it as an early, influential account of how online spaces shape adolescent identity formation, written well before social media as it exists today.
The Inner History of Devices
This 2008 essay collection, edited by Sherry Turkle, examines devices ranging from pacemakers to ham radios through the personal histories of the people who used them, arguing that everyday technology is bound up with memory, loss, and identity in ways that are easy to overlook when discussion focuses only on a device's function. Several essays consider how attachment to a device can substitute, in small ways, for attachment to people. The book extends Turkle's long-standing argument that machines are never psychologically neutral. TechKids Foundation includes it as further background on Turkle's research tradition connecting technology design to emotional life, part of the intellectual groundwork for her later, more pointed arguments about children, smartphones, and social withdrawal.
Simulation and Its Discontents
In this 2009 book, Sherry Turkle looks at how computer simulation changed scientific and engineering training and practice, drawing on interviews with architects, engineers, and scientists who increasingly work through simulated models rather than physical prototypes. She raises a concern that heavy reliance on simulation can be associated with a weaker feel for the underlying physical reality a model represents, describing students who trust a simulation's output without fully grasping why. The book is a professional and academic study rather than a work aimed at parents, but its core theme — that simulated experience is not a full substitute for direct, physical engagement — runs through Turkle's later, more general arguments about screens and childhood. TechKids Foundation includes it as scholarly context for that broader argument.
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Sherry Turkle's 2011 book is her most widely cited argument that constant connectivity can leave people feeling more isolated, not less. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with children, teenagers, and adults, she describes kids forming attachments to sociable robots and toys and, at times, becoming genuinely unsure whether a machine that talks back 'cares' about them — a confusion she treats as worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as childish. She also describes teenagers who say texting feels safer than talking on the phone, and who report anxiety about being unreachable or about a conversation that can't be edited before sending. Turkle frames these as warning signs that always-available technology is associated with young people practicing less face-to-face connection and self-disclosure. TechKids Foundation includes this book as a core secondary-tier source on the social costs of passive, isolating screen use.
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
In this 2015 book, Sherry Turkle argues that face-to-face conversation — including the unstructured, sometimes boring conversation of family dinners and solo downtime — is a skill children build through practice, and that a phone's constant presence is associated with fewer chances to practice it. Drawing on classroom and family observation, she describes students who struggle to sit with silence or read a friend's expression without a screen as backup, and teachers reporting shorter attention spans and more surface-level classroom discussion. Rather than arguing for abstinence, the book proposes concrete 'device-free' zones and times — the dinner table, the classroom, the bedroom before sleep — as ways to protect space for conversation. TechKids Foundation includes it as a solutions-oriented companion to Turkle's earlier work, directly relevant to schools and families weighing practical phone-use rules.
The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
Sherry Turkle's 2021 memoir traces her upbringing in postwar Brooklyn — including a family secret about her father's identity that she says shaped her lifelong interest in what people conceal and reveal — through her graduate work at Harvard and her decades on the MIT faculty. She connects her personal history directly to her research question: why some people find machines easier to open up to than other people, and what that reveals about empathy, secrecy, and connection. The book does not present new data on children or screens; it is a personal account of how Turkle's own life led her to study technology's effect on relationships. TechKids Foundation includes it as biographical context for readers encountering Turkle's research-based books, showing the personal throughline behind her decades of work on technology and connection.