← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
01:36:39
Loading summary
Transcript62 lines
- [00:00]
A
Good evening. I'm Sadi Laloux, head of the Institute of Social Psychology, and I'm delighted to introduce our guest tonight in the ISP series, Professor Sherry Turkle. Professor Turkle is the Abbey Rockefeller MOSE professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at mit, and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in Sociology and Personality psychology from Harvard, and she's a licensed clinical psychologist. We love psychologists. Her most recent book is Alone why We Expect More From Technology and Less from each Other, and we asked her to use this as the title of her conference tonight. It's published by Basic Books in January 2011. It's the third in a trilogy on computers and people, and the other two, I remind you, are the Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit. And the first one was Life on the Screen Identity in the Age of the Internet. Professor Torkel will do a book signing at the end for those who are interested. Sherry's career research career began with the study of the social studies of Science of Mind, reported in Psychoanalytic Politics, I'll say that in French with the accent Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, a study of psychoanalysis in its cultural context. She studied the development of simulation culture and professional life over the span of a quarter century, and that's reported in another book, Simulation and Discontents at MIT Press. So, as you see, Professor Turkel is a prolific researcher. She does research on things that are very interesting for us here. As part of the work at the Initiative on Technology and Self, Professor Turkle edited also three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press. Evocative Objects, Things We Think with and Falling For Science, Objects in Mind and the Inner History of Devices. Professor Turkel writes on the subjective side of people's relationships with technology and especially computers. She's an expert on mobile technology, social networking and sociable robotics. I could go on for hours describing the many awards and prestigious invitations and commitments of Professor Turkle, but I don't want to take too much of your time, and most of you already know Professor Turkel. I would just like, before giving her the floor, say one or two words about her coming lecture on Alone Together, why we Expect More from Technology and Less from each other. The exploration of information technology on the self, on interpersonal relations and on community is a very important topic. It's very important for society and for societal debate. And at the Institute of Social Psychology, which is the home of of Societal psychology. We feel especially interested in these changes which all of you can live on your everyday activity, whether personally or if you have children, through your relations with your children. As I can see with this full all theater tonight, we are not the only ones interested and indeed a lot of departments at LSE are very interested in your work, Professor Tokel. And I can see a lot of your friends and fans around here, like, where's Judy here, Judy Vashman from sociology. I mean, a lot of people here are really anxious to listen to you. And so I will leave you the floor, but first I want to say something. You will talk. You will talk. I love being there. You will Talk without a PowerPoint. We discussed that. So Sherry came with this PowerPoint which you have here, which she designed specially for us. And as we discussed, she decided not to use it. And I think this is a statement that you can do interaction and excellent science without the intermediation of a machine. Professor Turkel, please.
- [04:59]
B
Actually, I decided not to use my PowerPoint because whenever I do, like something goes wrong. I don't know it. Just let me just talk to you. Let me just tell you stories. So it's really a pleasure to be here. I've always wanted to speak at the lse. It's kind of like a storied place. So I'm really very happy, really very thrilled to be here. And so thank you very much for this wonderful invitation. So let me begin with a story from my earliest days at MIT. And I have been at MIT a long time. I got there in 1978, I met the idea, and I actually went there studying French psychoanalysis. I went there studying French psychoanalysis and why psychoanalysis had not been picked up in France as it had been in other countries until Jacques Lacan. A kind of infatuation with Freud in France after the events of 68. Now the question of why MIT was interested in me with that kind of interest on my resume is not what I'm here to discuss, but essentially I was there to study the sociology of sciences of mind. And when I got to mit, really from the minute, minute I got there, I noticed my students using computational metaphors to think about mind. And I just became complete, you know, don't interrupt me, I need to clear my buffer. That was how they talked to me. You know, instead of talking about Freudian slips, they talked about information processing errors. And I just decided that I was going to make the study of computers and people the kind of subjective side of the computer presence, not what computers do. Full for Us, but what they do to us as people, to our relationships, really the center of my interests. And essentially I've been at that for 30 years. So you know a little bit about what I'm about. And from, you know, the earliest days at MIT, from 78, MIT kind of welcomed me as an outsider who was on the inside and allowed me to study it very generously. Sometimes maybe not so sure they'd made a good idea, but essentially I was welcomed by the institution to be an ethnographer in the place that I worked. And so from my earliest days at mit, I met the idea that part of my job as I did this ethnography, as an outsider on the inside, as an insider who was a little bit of an outsider, would be thinking of ways to keep technology busy. And I mean that in a very specific sense. In 1978, Michael Dertouzos, who was the head of the Laboratory for Computer Science, convoked the computer science faculty and me, this new ethnographer on the scene, to take a three day retreat at Endicott House, which is MIT's conference center, where we go to a beautiful spot to retreat and ponder things. A retreat in which the question was, what would we do with these new personal computers? And they weren't called personal computers at the time, they were called home computers. And these were the first computers that were being built that you didn't have to build, that you in fact could buy. Things like the Altair and the first handy Radio Shack computers were just coming on the scene and really nobody knew what to do with them. And so he convened. I have my notes. JCR Licklider, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Robert Fano, really the greats of the information technology revolution of the 50s, 60s, 70s to go and brainstorm on this question. And my notes from that meeting, because I was taking notes on everything. People suggested tax preparation, people said, okay. No one thought that anyone except academics would want to write on a computer. I actually have a quote from that meeting that somebody said, what's to write? I mean, who had things to write? There was no concept that regular people, and people call them regular people, would have stuff to write. Somebody suggested a calendar and was told that was a dumb idea because we all had these little calendars. I don't know how many of you visited Cambridge, but the Harvard coop and the MIT coop gives out this little black book that's exactly the right size for keeping your calendar. Who needed a database? You know, if you had a little calendar, everybody there, all these computer scientists had little coop Books for their calendars. So calendars. Nobody saw that. Somebody suggested that you'd want to put your names and addresses on a computer, that that would be something that this home computer would be good for. And then again, people said, if you didn't have a database, why would you want to have your home computer keep your names and addresses? That was also considered a dumb idea. People agreed that there would be games, and that's where it was. Everyone tried. There were no objections to the exercise. People stayed for two days and five meals. But there were not a lot of ideas about how we might keep these computers busy. But now we know that once computers connected us to each other, once we became tethered to the network, we really didn't need to keep computers busy. They keep us busy. Very, very busy. It is as though we are their killer app. And I only 15 years ago, for those of you who know my work, who know this book is the third in a trilogy on computers and people. In my study, looking at the early Internet, I felt a sense of optimism. Actually, in both of my books, my previous books on computers and people, but particularly in Life on the Screen, which is the one that came out 15 years ago, I saw on the Internet a place for identity experimentation. I called it an identity workshop, a place to try out aspects of self that were hard to experiment with in the physical real. All of this still happens, and all of this is still wondrous. This is not a book of repentance. Alone Together is not a book of personal repentance. But there was something that I didn't see. There is something that I didn't see. And I tell my students, call me not prescient, because I imagined in 1995 when life on the Screen came out, that this identity workshop stuff would happen. And then you would go offline and you would live in the face to face physical world, hang out, and then you'd go back online and you'd have your identity workshop stuff happening online in your virtual communities. Because that's what life on the screen was about. The nascent virtual communities, the early muds, moos, the virtual places on America Online. And then you go back and live your life, raise your children, have dinner. What I didn't see, but what I first saw when I met the Cyborgs, a group at MIT called the Cyborgs in 1995, Steve, Man, Thad Stoner and their colleagues who wore the Internet on their bodies, who had little antennae on their ears, who wore backpacks with computers on them, who had keyboards in Their pockets, who had glasses, goggles that were screens, who essentially wore the Web on their bodies, but with all of so much so that people thought they were disabled and offered them seats, but they had no more with all of that stuff than each of us has. And each of us has just kind of silenced or tried to remember to silence when I started speaking than each of us has in the portable device that we are all carrying now. In other words, we're wearing the web with us. And when I saw them in 1995, I realized that I had missed in my imagination of what it would mean to have this new identity technology. I had missed out on something important. That we would have the capacity and that we would want to be able to essentially live. We wouldn't be cycling through different realities. We'd be almost living in a kind of simultaneous mesh of the real and the virtual, and that we would want to bail out in a sense of the realities that we were in, to go to these other places whenever we wanted to. And in fact, that's kind of what I decided to study. I decided to study two things at that point, one of which I'm going to discuss today and both of which are part of Alone Together, one of which I'm going to talk about tonight, and one of which I'm not. One is sociable robotics. The kind of robots that say, I love you, that say I want you, that I care about you, robots that deceive into making you feel they care about you. It turns out we're very cheap dates and people want to be so deceived. And I'm. I care a lot about these robots because they're on their way, elder bots, nanny bots, and people. I call it the robotic moment. Not because these robots really are sentient and caring, but because we want so much and are so ready to believe that we can kind of call in the cavalry and have robots do things for us that we're somehow disappointed that people haven't done for us. I'm not going to discuss that. But that's one thing I decided to track over 15 years. I had tenure and I had time. And then the other thing I decided to track over these 15 years was this story of mobile connectivity and this simultaneity that is now available to us. And in fact, we're on our email, we're on our games, we're on our virtual world, we're on our social network, we're texting at family dinners, we're texting as we push our children on swings in the park. We're texting at funerals. That's one of the things I'm studying. We text during family dinners. I've said that children I interview say that their parents are reading them Harry Potter, holding the book in the right hand and going through with the blackberries on their left. I'm doing a study of nursing mothers who are texting while they nurse. The guys in particular, the young men in particular say that their dads used to watch Sunday sports with them and in between plays, used to talk, talk to them or during commercial breaks. And now they contrast those kind of golden years of relating to their dads that way with their fathers now on their devices, on their laptops or on their, you know, digital devices, being kind of, you know, in the BlackBerry zone and being available, not available to them in a very different way. And they basically say that they miss their dads. From these same young people, I hear a kind of nostalgia of these young. They talk about the idea of telephone calls made, as one 18 year old put it, sitting down and giving each other full attention. These are young people who never. These are young people who never have had a call made to them, as far as they know, with someone sitting down and giving them full attention, certainly never from a peer. I mean, it's kind of startling. But that's their story and they're sticking to it. So from the moment this generation met the technology, they experienced it as the competition, and now it is their turn to be distracted. They tell me that they sleep with their cell phones and that even when their phones are put away, first they tell me they sleep with their cell phones to use them as an alarm clock. But then they quickly say, no, no, that's really not the truth. I sleep with my cell phone because I text during the night. I get texts during the night, and, you know, I sleep with my cell phone because I don't want to be disconnected at night. And even when their phones are put away, let's say, relegated to a school locker, they know when they have a message or a call. They insist that. They say that they can feel their phones vibrating even when they're not. It's called the phantom ring. And indeed, mobile technology has become like a phantom limb, both for adults and for teens. It is so much a part of us. The formulation that I like to use in thinking about all of this is that technology is seductive when its affordances meet our human vulnerabilities. Later, I'll tell you why I don't like to talk about addiction. I like to talk about affordances and vulnerabilities because it turns out that that's what it's about. And I think we're very vulnerable indeed. We're lonely, but fearful of intimacy. And constant connectivity offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy. That's one of the things that it affords. We can't get enough of each other. And I think this is one of the powerful things about what this new mobile moment is for us, offers us, is we can't get enough of each other if, if we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control. It's about the psychological affordance of the fantasy of control. I call it the Goldilocks effect. Like Goldilocks, not too close, not too far, just right connection made to measure the ability to hide from each other, even as we are constantly connected to each other. So, to paraphrase Thoreau, where do we live and what do we live for in our new tethered lives? What do we have now that we have what we say we want, now that we have what technology makes easy? For one thing, we have a technology that enables distraction from what we say we care about. Because what I have from my years of interviewing is that it's not unusual for people to complain that they're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to create, and then in a final paradox, too busy communicating to fully connect with the people who matter. And that's where I got my title, in continual contact. They feel alone together. And this can have developmental. I'm, you know, you know, kind of at heart, I'm a developmentalist. And it can have developmental implications quickly. To tell a story that describes one, I'm doing a study of 15 year old birthday parties because it's a perfect moment where you see the developmental implications of what this can mean, this sort of bailout phenomenon. For those of you who have 15 year olds or who know a 15 year old or who were ever 15 year old, you know that there's a moment at a 15 year old birthday party when everybody wants to go home. And that's the moment, particularly if there's boys and girls at the party when they have to talk to each other, they somehow need to talk and it's hard and it's awkward and usually it happens and the party ends. And by the end of the party they're closer to being 16 because they have done this difficult thing. I don't want to say if they've had fun now what happens when this hard moment comes hands Guesses they go onto Facebook, they go onto Facebook, they don't leave the party, but essentially they leave the party without having to physically leave the party. And this hard thing does not happen. Now this is not to say that what they're doing on Facebook and there's nothing kind of, you know, my work is not a kind of an apocalyptic cry that Facebook is bad, the social network is bad things, terrible things are happening. It's just to say that some of the implications of what it means to be able to bail out at a hard moment, you know, that there are implications here that should be studied and need to be kind of confronted. And to me the 15 year old birthday story is an important one. So that's part of what I mean about we have a technology that makes it easy to hide. We can communicate when we wish, we can disengage at will. We can choose not to see or hear our interlocutors. The kind of loss of the, the voice, the loss of inflection online, we can put forth the self we want to be. We can live more and more in a performative culture. Otherwise put we would rather text than talk. Mandy, a 13 year old, tells me, quote, I hate the phone. I never listen to voicemail. She says a telephone conversation is almost always too prying, it takes too long and it is impossible to say goodbye. A difficulty in not feeling rejected or that she's rejecting when she says goodbye. These are actually hard things for an 11 and 12 year old. By 13 you want to be learning that she doesn't have to. 16 years old, Stan, he won't speak on the telephone except when his mother makes him call a relative. He and he says when you text you have more time to think about what you're writing on the telephone. Too much might show these are interesting quotes because actually in my work these 13 and 16 year olds sound a lot like 30, 40 and 50 year olds describing why they would rather text than talk. And one of the findings of my research, and actually I was just, we were just chatting before that. When a qualitative methodologist like me talks about findings, really pay attention because I never. This is just not the way I speak. One of the findings of my research is the incredible similarities in how across the generations, people, the affordances and the vulnerabilities of this technology are so similar. We'd rather text than talk on the telephone. Too much might show wanting to bail out of hard moments. These are things across the generations. Here's somebody you know it really isn't a teen Problem in corporations, among friends within academic departments, people readily admit that they'd rather leave an email than talk face to face. Some who say, quote, I live my life on my BlackBerry are forthright about avoiding the, quote, real time commitment of a phone call. The real time commitment of a phone call. And here you see technology being used to dial down human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. And that's what I meant about the seduction of the promise of control, the Goldilocks effect. People are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay. So Dan, a law professor in his mid-50s, explains that he never, quote, interrupts his colleagues at work. He doesn't call, he doesn't ask to see them. He says, and this is a guy who goes to the office. He's not at home telepresencing, he's at work. He says, they might be working, doing something. I mean, they're at work. So yeah, I mean, they might be working, doing something. It might be a bad time. I ask him if this behavior is new. He says, oh yeah, yeah, we used to hang out, it was nice. And then he realizes, you know, he's been kind of caught out. So he reconciles, you know, my idea of an interview is to say, uh huh. So he realizes without my saying anything that he's been caught in a kind of contradiction. And he reconciles his views that what was once collegial is now interruption by saying to me, people are busier now. But then he pauses and he corrects himself and he says, I'm not being completely honest here. It's also that I don't want to talk to people now. I don't want to be interrupted. I don't want to be interrupted. I think I should want to. It would be nice. But it's easier to deal with people on my BlackBerry. Very similar to the 16 year old, we become entrained in a vicious circle that doesn't go really according to plan. We imagine that email and texting will give us more control over our time and our emotional exposure. But we send out a lot and we get even more back. So many, in fact, that the idea of communicating with anything but texts can often seem too exhausting. Shakespeare might have said, we are consumed with that which we were nourished by. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of communication, we're overwhelmed across the generation and we confront a paradox because we're insisting that the world is increasingly complex and yet we've developed a communications culture that is so rapid fire, in which the ramping up of the volume and velocity is so great that we can only communicate by sending out messages that can be answered in kind of quick emails and asking ourselves questions that can be instantly responded to by something quick. So we're asking each other simpler questions to get simpler answers that we can get really quickly. So we're communicating with each other in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses and not allowing ourselves the space to explain complicated problems. It's like we're training ourselves to ask and answer simpler and simpler questions. It's almost like we're putting ourselves, all of us putting ourselves on cable news. I once wrote about the computer as a second self. The computer is a place for the projection of self. Now, with mobile connectivity, I almost want to talk about a new state of the self itself. One of the ways this new state of the self itself expresses itself is, is how it changes the terms of how this generation growing up with it grows into adulthood. I've suggested some of the ways, but let me give you some important. What I consider the important kind of markers of a few of the ways in which this new generation is experiencing this. Most of all, today's young people grow up with the fantasy that in some way they will never have to be alone. I think this is one of the most important things. They still have the job of separation. Adolescents still have the job of separation, but essentially it can be worked through in smaller steps. They may find themselves texting their parents while in college 15 times a day. If 15 years ago, a student had come in to me as a clinician who texted a young woman who texted her mother 15 times a day, who phoned home 15 times a day, I would have been thinking certainly off the norm, and I would have been thinking in terms of separation issues. Now, in my social context, it is not off the norm. But just because something is not off the norm doesn't mean that it. You know, Freud talked about the shadow of the object falling on the ego. I mean, just because something is not off the norm doesn't mean that it doesn't point back to the issues that once made it seem problematic. You don't know how to think about, or we need to begin to think about what adolescence is without the kind of separation we used to associate with adolescents. Because adolescents, friends too, are always around. Feelings of being a bit stranded in adolescence used to be considered a step towards being comfortable with autonomy. Connectivity makes it possible to bypass those kinds of feelings, and we move toward a new sensibility that leaves us vulnerable. And let me just quickly try to characterize it by calling it I share, therefore I am. I share, therefore I am. Julia, 16, turns texting into a kind of polling. She says, if I'm upset, right as I'm upset, I text a couple of my friends just because I know that they'll be there and they can comfort me. If something exciting happens, I know that they'll be there to be excited with me and stuff like that. So I definitely feel emotions when I'm texting, as I'm texting, when I'm texting, as I'm texting. For Julia, as for so many of the tethered teens I've studied, things have moved from I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Two, I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. Let me say that again. I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Old school. I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. I'm not a technological determinist. Technology does not cause, but encourages and enables a sensibility where the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it. Our contact list has become like a list of spare parts to support the fragile adolescent or adult self. But when we use people in this way, we reduce them as we turn them to our own purposes. We're taking what we need. It is not the royal road. It is not the royal road to the best relationships. I'm not going to get into it, but obviously David Reisman wrote about relationships where things move from inner directed to other directed. That's a whole kind of tradition of talking about, sociologically, about these kinds of things, phenomena. Heinz Kohut, from the psychoanalytic tradition, writes about, you know, other, a kind of other directedness when he talks about narcissistic personalities where people literally become spare parts to support the fragile narcissistic self. More than this, what is not being cultivated, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone, to gather oneself. And there is a profound psychological truth. Loneliness is failed solitude. Loneliness is failed solitude. If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely if we don't teach our children to be alone. Indeed, if we don't remember how to be alone, we will only know how to be lonely. Having gotten into the habit of constant connection, we risk losing our capacity for the kind of solitude that energizes and restores. This brings me to some final thoughts. First, I want to say something about the metaphor of addiction. And then I want to close by talking about the moment we're at and I think an urgent issue about kind of call to arms about computers and privacy. These are two things I feel very strongly about thinking. Just essentially my message is, stop talking about computers and addiction and start talking about what are better ways to think about the issue of privacy. I really understand why people are drawn to the metaphor of addiction in talking about everything about the Internet. First of all, we do get a kind of neurochemical high when we multitask, Even though for every task we multitask, our performance degrades. There's every reason that people are drawn to the metaphor of addiction. But no matter how great the metaphor, those of us in the social and moral sciences, we have to work hard to avoid it when we think about this problem. Because if you're addicted to a substance, There is only one thing that is going to help, and that is losing that substance. And this technology is our partner in the life adventure that we're on. This is not about getting rid of this technology. This is about. Call it a digital diet. I mean, this technology is about making it a more satisfying partner as we move forward politically, ethically, morally, developmentally with this technology. The metaphor of addiction, which proposes an image of a solution that everybody knows we are not going to take, Just makes people feel hopeless. And when people feel hopeless, they say, oh, what the hell, give me my phone. Right. So we will find new paths, But a first step will not be to consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance. We are not in trouble because of invention, but because we sometimes allow ourselves to think it will solve everything. That social networking will solve everything, that social robotics will solve everything. That now game playing will solve everything. This is our vulnerability to two simple notions of the technological fix. As we consider all this, we will not find a solution or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. And this brings me to my second point, our moment of opportunity. Every technology provides an opportunity to ask, does it serve our human purposes? A question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Just because we grew up with the Internet, we assume that the Internet is all grown up. This is my favorite line in my book. It came to me in the middle of the night. I love it because it basically says it shows the distortion of our perspective. We can change this. We can make it what we want. We tend to see what we have now as the technology in its maturity, that the way we live with it now is how we're going to Live with it in the future. It is not with the network. It is very early days. It is time to make the corrections. And there is no place more important to make the corrections than in the domain of privacy, which is where I want to say a few words. And this is where I want to end and begin a dialogue. Over time, and I say this with much anxiety, living with an electronic shadow begins to feel so natural that that shadow seems to disappear. It disappears, that is, until a moment of crisis, a lawsuit, a scandal, an investigation. Then we all are caught, shot. We turn around and we see that we've been the instruments of our own surveillance. It is true that privacy is a historically relatively new idea. I cannot tell you how many radio shows I've been on, how many interviews I've done. People say, why do you care so much about privacy? Privacy is a relatively new idea. Privacy may be a relatively new idea, but hasn't it well served our modern notions of intimacy and democracy? What is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? These are questions we need to be asking ourselves and our students. For many, and particularly for many young people, and particularly for many of the Internet gurus who they're listening to the notion that we're all being observed all the time anyway. So who needs privacy has become a commonplace, but it really is a state of mind with a cost. I went to this award ceremony at a Webby which is where they give awards like the best website, and I was reminded of just how costly it is. I was talking to an Internet guru, excuse me, and the topic of illegal eavesdropping came up and all these, you know, the gathered. Weberotti began to turn this issue into a non issue. They started to talk about all information being good information. You've heard that information wanting to be free. And most of all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. You've heard this. This is the sort of talk at a pre awards wedding cocktail party. And one web luminary talked to me with animation about the spying controversy in the United States. This was sort of just as the government spying had come into the forefront. And to my surprise, he cited Michel Foucault's writing on the Panopticon to explain to me why he is not worried about privacy concerns on the Internet. Which takes me aback because for Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for actual surveillance by creating a citizenry that will watch itself. A disciplined citizen minds the rules. So in the end, Foucault talks about an architecture in the Panopticon that encourages self surveillance, always available for scrutiny. Everyone turns an eye on themselves by analogy, says my Webby conversation partner on the Internet, and this is a quote. Someone might always be watching, so it doesn't matter if from time to time someone is. As long as you're not doing anything wrong, he tells me, you're safe. In the hands of this technology guru, Foucault's critical take on disciplinary society had become a justification for the United States government using the Internet to spy on its citizens. All around us, at the Webby cocktail party, there are nods of assent. This would only be a story about my life as a Webby judge if variants of this way of thinking weren't very common in the technology community. You don't need privacy if you don't have anything to hide. And it's becoming a default position among high school and college students, which is what my research shows. For all of the talk of a generation empowered by the Net, when young people talk about Internet privacy, I most often hear resignation and a sense of impotence. When I talk to teenagers about the certainty that their privacy will be invaded, my thoughts go to my very different experience growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. That's when I grew up. My grandmother took me to the mailboxes every morning. She pointed to the mailboxes and she said, in the old country, the government used the mail to spy on its citizens. In the United States, it's a federal offense to open the mail. That's why we're in this country. That's the beauty of this country is what she said. So from the earliest days, my civics lessons at the mailboxes joined together privacy and civil liberties. I think of how different things are for children today who accommodate to the idea that their email and messages are shareable, unprotected. And I think of my Internet guru, who, citing Foucault with no apparent irony, accepts the idea that the Internet has fulfilled the dream of the Panoptagon and sums up his position about the Net as the way to deal is just to be good. But sometimes a citizenry should not simply be good. You have to leave space for dissent, for real dissent. You need to leave technical space, a sacrosanct mailbox, and you need to leave mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they in turn make and shape us. My grandmother made me an American citizen, a civil libertarian, a defender of individual rights. In an apartment lobby in Brooklyn. I'm not sure where to take my 20 year old daughter who still thinks that the applications that use the GPS capacity of her iPhone to show her where all her friends are seem creepy, but also tells me that it would be hard to keep them off her phone if all her friends have it. She says they would think I have something to hide. So I learned to be a citizen at the Brooklyn Mailbox. And to me, opening up a conversation about privacy in civil society is not romantically nostalgic. It's not Luddite in the least. It seems to me to be part of a healthy process of democracy defining its sacred spaces. Thank you very much.
- [44:52]
A
Thank you very much, Professor Turkle, for this live, face to face, deep interaction. I think the quality of the attention and the silence made this, made us understand that it's different to be here than from just browsing online. And I think you will agree on that. Would you agree on that? Okay, I'm sure there are lots of questions. Are there anyone's ready? Yes. Oh, my God. All right, one, two, three. Okay. And be short in your questions, please. And four up there.
- [45:33]
B
Thank you very much indeed. I thoroughly enjoyed your talk, but I have a slightly. I don't see.
- [45:39]
A
Yes, it's Eve up there. Can you just say who you are.
- [45:44]
B
Or raise your hand? I just couldn't say. I'm Eve Middleton Kelly and I'm here at lse, the director of the Complexity Group. As I said, I enjoyed very much your talk, but nevertheless, I do have a slight disagreement, which is that I think you paint a rather bleak picture. Although I recognize a great deal of what you say. Nevertheless, I think it cannot be applied generally. And I was wondering whether you have also studied older generations, those who have not grown up with the Internet, as well as whether you have looked at different national cultures and if there are differences between them. Because I think that might show us some quite deep distinctions from what you have described. Well, to the first. Have I shown different generations? Yes, I have studied different generations. And really one of the things that I, insofar as I've studied families, and I would say that one of the surprises of my work is that I expected to find kind of teenagers driving their parents crazy. And instead I found parents really upsetting their children because it was the parents who were texting when they were driving, the parents texting at the breakfast table. The parents, you know, the testimony from the children had to do with complaints about parents and their kind of attentional involvement in the new technology. So one of the, one of the most robust findings, because I think when you're doing research and you're really pretty much expecting to find one thing and then you find another has to do with the, you know, as I really say that sometimes the quotations between the 50 year olds and the 15 year olds, you know, if I hadn't coded everybody and could kind of go back and find their ages, they were quite similar. So I think that the vulnerability to this technology is quite great among people who did not grow up with it from birth. I mean that's the first question. I think that we, where there are digital divides, but I think that there's a, and certainly people who've grown up with it have, you know, special, you know, special affinities and have a kind of, you know, living on Facebook or sort of never wanting to, you know, leave certain kinds of social networking milieu's or something very special about growing up with it. But I'm very, I'm very struck by similarities as well as differences on the question of national cultures. No, my study is a United States study, but from reading the literature there are, you know, there are similarities with other, with other places. But my work is a study of the United States and of family life in the United States. I should say though, about just before, I mean just very quickly, you know, I want to hear your questions but I should say about the dark tone is that I think my dark tone is a refreshing break from the, you know, I was kind of had a reputation as somewhat of a sort of, I don't know, Internet utopian sort of COVID of Wired magazine kind of woman. And I think when someone like me, who has no particular motivation to leave that heady world of being admired as a technological utopian and darling of people who read Moired magazine says that she studied something for 15 years and something is amiss. I think there's something that's amiss. So it's not to say that a lot of things aren't going great. My book is about something that's going amiss. So it is. I mean that's, I mean I just want to say that my book is about what is going amiss and I try to make that clear that that's not because a lot of things aren't going great, but my book is about what's going. Am I.
- [50:18]
A
Rob Jenkins University of Glasgow a palate cleanser. Palate cleanser ROB Jenkins University of Glasgow I was struck by something that you said early on about the reward value of arm's length relationships and how we have an insatiable appetite for them. When I was in my early adolescence, Top Gun was out of the cinema and it made it tough, me and my peers, because the girls that we were interested in were only interested in Tom Cruise. And there was a sense in which they did seem to have a rewarding relationship with Tom Cruise despite never meeting him. And I wondered if you think we are relating to each other now the way we used only to relate to celebrities. I'd also love it if you could give advice on a one line rejoinder to if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
- [51:13]
B
Everybody has something to hide. Everybody should have something to hide. You know, People shouldn't grow up thinking that they have no opinions that can't be private opinions. It's not healthy in a democracy for people to grow up that way. So that's that and on. And no, it's very different. You know, I like my story. I stand by my story. The 15 year old birthday party. I mean, it's my parable that, you know, maybe the girls at the 15 year old birthday party really had Tom Cruise. You know, maybe their relationship with Tom Cruise while they were Talking to their 15 year old boys was playing in the back of their mind. But there they were talking to you as a 15 year old and that was good. And now they're on Facebook on the Tom Cruise or whoever, the Justin Bieber fan page. And they would be better talking to today's iteration of you at 15. They need the practice. We all need the practice. Hi, my name is Isabela and I'm a journalist. You talked about uses of technology across generations and you mostly talked about parents and their kids. My interest is in a much older age group because I have a mother who is in her late 50s as an example, and she just completely stopped living in the real world, as you were describing precisely, and just completely started living online as this alter ego kind of just created another person online. So I guess my question is two part short questions. One is, did you find anything in particular about how this age group, anybody that's over, say 55, behaves online and takes this technology on their hands. And the other one is when you talk about a digital diet. Well, let me just take that before we go to the digital diet because it's such a different. I won't be able to remember. Okay, somebody who goes online and really lives an alter ego online and finds more pleasure, more gratification from that life than the life they're living. That is not about 55 plus 35 or younger. That is about someone who really is finding Online what they can't find in the rest of life, in their physical life. And the question that we have as a society is, do we care? You know, what is our commitment to people using the Internet and preferring their online life to what those people call the rest of life? And that is, you know, my own feelings are that the virtual should be used to enhance your quality of life in the real. But, you know, some people really argue and argue strongly that their life on the Internet is better than what they have in the real. And they want to, they want to pursue that. My own feeling as a, you know, is that the virtual should be used to enhance that. When I talked about Identity Workshop, that my enthusiasm was for using the virtual and bringing it back into the real. And in matter of fact, I ended life on the screen with an image from a film by Vim Vendors, a very dystopian image where people are walking, where they develop the capacity to put their dreams on little screens. And people are walking around looking at these screens with blankets over their heads because they are, they fall in love with their dreams on the screen. And I think that that's a, you know, that's something that we have to, you know, contend with as people spend more and more of their lives online and games like Second Life and in worlds like Worlds of Warcraft and argue that these are worlds where they have, you know, fantastic gratification and so forth. So that's the first question on the question of the digital diet. On the digital diet. I can imagine, for example, a digital diet making its way through the school systems. For example, teaching kids in school how to handle their technology or making, I don't know, parents teaching their kids. So my question was, I guess, related to the first one. How do you help? How do you promote this idea of a healthy digital diet across all generations? I think you begin with very simple sacred spaces. For example, that the kitchen is a technology free zone. No texting at meals, no devices at meals. The notion of a conversation at meals being something that now obviously it's not like you become the police. I mean, you know, it's a wonderful thing when somebody has a question you want to look up, you don't say no, don't. You can't look it up on Google. But, but in general, the idea that you share a meal together where there's conversation, whether it's in somebody's like going like this to the person next to them. I think I struck a chord. I mean, you know, the idea that mealtime in a family, particularly children, are 2, 3, 4, 5 years old. Have a meal with them. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, time to talk, you know. So I think that just beginning with something as simple as that, taking a walk alone with your children, you mean to you. I found in talking to parents. Parents tell me that they will not take a walk to the candy store with their children without bringing their device. In other words, parents are modeling a world in which they will not take a walk with their child without bringing their connectivity device. I think that, that, that is not what should be modeled to a child. I'm very fortunate. I have a house on Cape Cod. I walk the dunes that Thoreau walked. People used to walk those dunes, head up, looking at the sky, looking at the water, looking at the dunes. They now walk the dunes with their head in their devices, with their children, also with their devices. You begin to model that you, you don't live on Cape Cod, you have other things. You take a walk with your child without the devices, in other words. But again, my favorite line in my book, it's still my favorite line. Just because we grew up with these devices doesn't mean that our use of these devices is all grown up. I think we have to be generous with each other and say, look, we fell in love with this stuff. It's like too amazing that we have this stuff and we can learn to live with them better. But I think you begin to say, well, you know, how do we want to live with this? So I think you begin to model a way of life in which. Eyes to the sky.
- [58:49]
A
Yes, thank you.
- [58:50]
B
I like that. Eyes to the sky.
- [58:51]
A
Yeah. Right. I mean, technology shapes. Certainly does.
- [58:56]
B
Could. Hands up hand person.
- [58:57]
A
Sorry.
- [58:58]
B
Yeah.
- [58:58]
A
Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Technology shapes us, certainly, but we also shape technology. And we are the final arbiter. If we don't like the technology, we can, we can, we can, we can ignore it. So. Yeah. So. All right. We all share a sense of nostalgia about how it used to be in the past, but technology cannot be stopped. It is genie out of the bottle and technology will go on. We have got to get used to technology. Anyway, my question would be at this time would be this. What essential changes? This technology that you're talking about is bringing in human nature.
- [59:40]
B
Excuse me, I didn't get the.
- [59:42]
A
Yeah. What are the essential changes?
- [59:44]
B
Essential or social?
- [59:46]
A
Essential changes in human nature. Social.
- [59:48]
B
Essential what? Essential.
- [59:49]
A
Essential. Yes.
- [59:51]
B
Essential changes as technology.
- [59:54]
A
That it is bringing in human nature.
- [59:57]
B
Essential changes to human nature.
- [59:58]
A
Yeah. To human beings. Yes.
- [60:00]
B
Well, you know, I'm not a. Those who study brain science Are concerned about, you know, really changes. You know, Google is changing the way that we think and process information. I mean, people are, you know, there are those who are arguing, you know, there are profound changes in our way we process information, our cognitive structure. I respect that. I respect that tradition of research. It's not my research. What I know how to argue is what I found in my tradition of research. And I really, from looking at my hundreds of interviews is this. I share, therefore I am the number of, you know, the. My analysis of connecting in order to. Connecting in order to form a thought, the descriptions of connecting in order to constitute a feeling, the terror of disconnection. And not just in teenagers, but the panic that people feel. Have you ever left. Have you ever talked to somebody who left their cell phone at home? And then talking to people about what that's about. In the United States, 911 was a very important marker that comes up in my interviews, both in children of a certain generation, about the terror of not being able to reach parents. Because during 9 11, the teachers were basically baby boomers who did in an emergency what baby boomers were trained to do in an emergency, which is go into a basement and, you know, hide. And these children were put into basement rooms and told to hide. Not under desks, but pretty much. And they couldn't reach their parents, and parents couldn't reach. Reach their children. And there were no telephones. And so there was this kind of experience of parents not being able to reach children and children not being able to reach parents. And the discussion of 911 came up over and over again in the discussion of cell phones and why you need a cell phone. All of which convinced a generation of parents that 8 years old is the right age to give a child a cell phone. Eight years old is now the age in the United States that children want cell phones and parents are convinced the child should have a cell phone. So now with 911 sort of receding, and I thought, well, you know, after that generation kind of grew up, I wouldn't see that anymore. So I actually continued my study several years after I actually thought that I had enough data because I wanted to see. See this book was longer in the making because I wanted to see if this 911 thing kind of receded and the 911 thing receded. But this lowering and lowering the age of this kind of panic of not being connected did not recede. So I think that there is a kind of fundamental, kind of fundamental fear of disconnection where people now no longer can even say what it is that they're terrified about. But, you know, people, you know, needing to know, needing to be connected, needing to get their email beyond any. And you can say, well, it's my business. I mean, people say it's my business. You know, my boss needs it. And, you know, they. They talk to you about the kind of instrumental thing, but then I talk to them long enough and kind of in a sustained enough way that other anxieties come out. And I think that there is something about a kind of fundamental panic about disconnection that I think is. I call that essential. Excuse me. Maybe you could take the microphone. Because I'm not hearing. Maybe you could take the microphone.
- [64:17]
A
Passing fashion, passing fad, that overuse of cell phone. Maybe simply a fashion which will disappear in time.
- [64:31]
B
I end my work on a cautiously optimistic note because I think, as I said, that there is some sense that something has gone amiss and it is possible that we will certainly. I think one thing that has gone amiss in the business world is the. Is the way in which we use constant connectivity and messaging in ways that keep us from working in some sense, the substitution. I mean, part of my work was done in business settings, law firms. It wasn't just children and parents. I went into law firms and architecture firms. And I mean, it's a study of business as well as pleasure and business as well as kind of. Of the business of kind of child raising. And there really was a sense that being on your email all the time was keeping people from their jobs in some sense, if their jobs were becoming communication and that it wasn't a question of interruption. We were talking about this earlier. It wasn't so much a question of interruption. It was a question of what is my job. My job is coming, keeping up with my email. And I think that that is going to start to. That that is going to start to get righted. And I don't think that's a question of a fad of email. I think that's going to be a question of productivity and people wanting to get things done. There's a program, I don't know if you use it here, but called Freedom, where you buy a program that basically shuts down your wi fi so that you can get work done. And, you know, I have great stories in my book about the strategies that people use essentially in order to finally get some work done. It's certainly no, you know, if we went around, this was a different setting, if I was teaching a seminar and went around the room of, you know, what do you do when you really have to finish a paper. You know, people kind of smashing, you know, smashing the connector. I mean, people go to great lengths. So I think that there is a. I think we are going to. I think the sense that something is amiss and we're going to get it right. But I can't say enough that. I mean, the first thing that we're going to need to get right is going to have to do with the way in which we think about privacy concerns. Because in going particularly into high schools and colleges, you know, the high school and college settings, there is no. No good language that. That age students have, in my view, for distinguishing between people being willing to put pictures of themselves at parties on Facebook and the need for privacy in a democracy. In other words, both about, you know, the word privacy kind of stands for both of those things. Things. And in the media as well as in kind of young people talking about privacy, those things get kind of smushed together as though they're the same thing. And that's not good. That's not good. We really need to make better distinctions and get a more compelling and a better, you know, a better discourse about those things. And I. I can't think of a better audience than you to. To start thinking about that problem, because this really is a pressing, necessary conversation, in my view, just before I give.
- [68:28]
A
You, well, your number five. And we have. I have registered 14 questions. Right. And I have already refused four more. Right. And we have 15, 16 minutes left. So please be.
- [68:44]
B
Lane Dina Cola, University College London. As an American, you can work on the problem, too.
- [68:53]
A
I feel I can say this as.
- [68:55]
B
An American, that nothing helps Americans see.
- [68:58]
A
That something is a problem so much as when it's happening in another country.
- [69:04]
B
And I'm wondering how with your web guru, who's kind of an advocate of if you have nothing to hide, then there's no problem how they would be receiving the events in the Middle east and in Egypt and so on. Does that. Is that a contradiction that they might.
- [69:21]
A
See, or is it kind of.
- [69:24]
B
Somehow they qualitatively judge that as a.
- [69:26]
A
Different kind of scenario than privacy concerns in the U.S.
- [69:31]
B
I don't think that. I think that they think of. The use of technology in terms of what's happening in the Middle east, as I want to say, a justification. That's the wrong word. As a. What's a better word than justification? As an example of how the web is a technology of liberation? I think it's more that people, usually somebody will stand up and say to me, hey, what about what's going on in Egypt. What about what happened in Egypt? Don't you like that? And then I say, just in case anybody was going to say that, and I say overthrowing despots, good. Texting at funerals, bad. You know, I mean, you know, to me, you know, kind of apples, you know, apples and, you know, apples and oranges. I mean, you know, but that, what I'm saying is not that there aren't. That these technologies cannot be used as technologies of liberation, but they can also get us into personal trouble and they can also get us into political trouble. That doesn't mean they can't also get us into political excellent things. You know, I mean I'm not a technological determinist. This really is about human choice. And I'm saying that's why, that's why. I mean, you know, although it sounds like a self help book thing and that's not particularly my thing, I kind of like this digital, I mean this digital diet notion because I mean it really is about how we choose to use it. I do believe these are questions of human choice. And that's why I like the notion of affordance and vulnerability because it turns out we are vulnerable to certain of the affordances that are not that good for us, both politically and personally. Others may disagree, others may have different values than I have, but this is my book, this is you. And you know, this is my forum. You know, this is, this is my book, this is my forum. You're hearing. Know what I have to say, you know, but no, I think that the Arab Spring is more my technology people would say showed. Told you, you know, this is a good thing. Unless I'm not understanding your question. Well, primarily I'm wondering if they would see the possibility of state surveillance. Oh, oh, I was thinking of the sort of, you know, organizing. Oh well, the state. They would also see the possibility of state surveillance and say that in the end they believe that the. In the end they believe that the information wants to be free side of the Internet is what will when despite all. And I think they look at something like WikiLeaks and they say, you see. Told you so. Told you so. This is a, you know, this is an ongoing debate.
- [73:11]
A
Another question here. My name is Seb Schmoller and I work for an organization called the association for Learning Technology. The robotics chapters of the book are great. I've got to got just past those and I'm about to start the part that your talk has covered. So getting kind of two for one. And I'M cautious. This might be a slight distraction. I'm trying to pick up on the point you were making about privacy and what is intimacy without privacy and what is democracy without privacy? Because I think there's another layer that what your talk has kind of prompted me to think about is the way in which so many interactions are sorted by software. So it's not only are the people sort of living alone together, but also the connections they have with each other are mediated by software which they don't have control over and don't understand. And I think that's a kind of further deepening of the problem that the communication is mediated by software that we don't understand and don't control. So that even if we were to change our behaviors, we don't have choice over the software that's used to control or influence what it is we find when we look for things on the web. What it is that happens in the communication that is mediated online. It's badly expressed, but I think it's.
- [74:44]
B
That's very interesting. It's a very interesting point. I mean, the whole question of what people mean by transparency. This is something that I've written about at length on the notion of transparency and opacity. Transparency used to mean, to put it too simply, being able to open up the hood and look inside. Whereas transparency, the Macintosh, meaning of transparency. Essentially, since 1985, transparency meant the ability to double click on an icon and make something happen. Precisely not knowing how it worked. So there's been a kind of inversion, not knowing how it worked in that old fashioned mechanical sense. So what used to be called opacity is now called transparency. And we no longer even try to teach children anything about the innards of the computer. We kind of, you know, teach them how to use tools. So the notion that computer literacy is teaching children how to use word, PowerPoint, I mean, you know, I think it's a travesty of what was once thought of as computer literacy. It's, it's, you know, it's. I don't think it's worth teaching. For those of you who teach, you know, forgive, but I don't, I, you know, I don't think that's what it's about. Thank you for that comment. Yeah.
- [76:12]
A
Can you hear me? Yes. My name is Tony Yates. I'm a psychotherapist. You began your lecture with a reference to psychoanalysis, and you use the word early in the lecture. Identity, our cyber identity, our interconnecting texting identity. And later on you use the word self. As though the two were synonymous, which in many people's minds they are. But you will know that they are not at all the same thing, and that the self is usually experienced in solitude or in passionate intimacy. But it's not the same thing as your identity, which you hang up in the cupboard at night with your suits. The Internet deals with identities connecting with each other. But what has happened to that precious and evanescent entity called the self?
- [77:03]
B
Well, I'm suggesting that it's in crisis. I'm suggesting that the Internet that I share, therefore I am, is. Challenging. In my comments on loneliness as failed solitude, I'm trying to approach modestly the question of the self and say that there is a narcissistic tinge. And for those of you, you who you know are not into psychoanalysis, speak. Narcissism in this tradition doesn't mean thinking you're great. Narcissism in this tradition means feeling so fragile that you need other people to kind of prop you up. And a self that is constant, a self that is hyper connected, a self that learn, a self that expects to be always connected is vulnerable to being a self that uses other people to feel itself safe. And I would say that this another way to look at my work is to think of what I'm doing as a kind of culture of narcissism. Digital Digital days or Bowling Alone Digital Days to use or Lonely Crowd Digital Days to use. The kind of touchstones that my title alludes to. Thank you for the.
- [78:55]
A
Was number nine.
- [78:55]
B
I'm sorry.
- [78:58]
A
Number eight. Number nine. Yeah, you can hear me. So my question for you is in relation to commercial. Sorry, my question is in relation to commercialization and what I would perceive these days as the relentless tie towards commercialization in our daily lives. I was listening to a radio program the other day that was referring to the future of advertising and marketing in the world. And the conversation was basically saying that the future of advertising and marketing will become more and more commercialized or it will become more and more personalized through the utility of social networking? And I'm thinking in particular of the like button on Facebook and so on. So I'm wondering, is there a way in which we can use the existing social media to highlight this, to highlight this phenomenon from taking over and the legitimization of this. What I would perceive as an incentive, insidious commercialization and commoditization of our lives and to bring about the rebalancing and correction that you talked about towards the end of your talk.
- [80:23]
B
So using the social Network against itself.
- [80:26]
A
Yes.
- [80:27]
B
Love it.
- [80:35]
A
I do. But I'm, but I'm, I'm afraid that I piss people off because I do, I like to, I have to use Facebook and I'm considering leaving Facebook for reasons I want you.
- [80:49]
B
Like so many of the people I interviewed. One of the interesting things, that many of the people in my book leave Facebook for various reasons, but then feel they have to go back, as they put it, because their lives are on it. And that's one of the interesting, one of the interesting, interesting things about Facebook. You know, what have we done to create a company, a place, a space where people leave? You might have political reasons. Other people leave because the pressures of performance simply get to them. It's such a performative space, particularly for adolescents. I mean, one young man talks about, should I put on my profile, Ms. This is an 18 year old young man, you know, should I put in my profile that I like Harry Potter? Does that make me seem sexy because I'm showing my child side or does that make me seem nerdy because, you know, it's, you know, it's because it's such a nerdy thing. But maybe it means I'm sexy because I'm not too afraid to show. I mean, you know, you know, this is where they live. So I mean, the pressure, I mean, there's so many reasons to. But then this is where the, their lives are. This is where the parties are, this is where they learn about what's happened. I mean, then they go back. But I mean, on the issue of the political, the politics of resistance, which is essentially what you're raising, I think this is the, you know, this is the next generation of, you know, this is the next generation of, of where the politics of resistance will have to happen. I don't know if it's going to be on Facebook or it's going to be, take some other form, but clearly. Political resistance to a surveillance society where we are the instruments of our own surveillance, is going to take place in the places where we're the instruments of our surveillance or is going to have to be formulated in some way taking into account the places where we're the instruments of our own surveillance.
- [82:54]
A
Thank you.
- [82:57]
B
But this, you know, again, coming back to privacy, I mean, the conversation just, I mean, I mean, I believe, you know, this, but the conversation in high school and college about privacy is, cannot, these kids cannot make the distinction between privacy being about, I don't care about privacy. I like to upload photographs and the kind of privacy democratic institutions rely on that Notions of what privacy is, why you need privacy, what privacy is about. These are not conversations that even 24, 25 year olds, excuse me, some of you look quite young, but you know, but this is not a discourse that again, from an American perspective, our education has prepared our students to talk about. So, you know, for years, you know, I've been part of computer literacy movements and computers in schools and teaching computers in education and what you teach, I really, you know, if you, you know, I think a lecturer should say, you know, what to take away, you know, think about, I share, therefore I am. You know, try not to use the notions of addiction because really, and think about how to talk about privacy so that kids can have this conversation. Because right now the level that that conversation is on is a 16 year old girl saying things like who would care about me and my little life? Or 17 year old boy saying to a 13 year old boy saying to me, when I really care about my privacy, I think it's very important. When I want to have a private conversation, I go to a pay phone and one that uses coins because he knows that if he uses a card it can be tracked. And those are really hard to find in Boston because mostly it's really hard to find a payphone that uses coins. Those are not mantras of empowerment. And this is how kids are talking. Who would care about me and my little life? And I go to a, I go to a telephone that uses coins and you know, this is what makes me think feel something is amiss when you have 13 and 16 year olds talking like this. And these kids have absolutely no idea who reads their email, if it's illegal to read their email, if their teachers are reading their email, if Facebook is reading their email, no idea of what their right to privacy is about, what the status of their email is, who has a right to it. They've never, they can't understand the terms of agreement on any, anything. They click. Somebody compared the number, the New York Times compared the number that there are 30, I think there are 3,500 words. They compared the US Constitution to Facebook's terms of agreement and it was like, you know, it was like off by, you know, 10 orders of magnitude or something. I mean, it was, you know, these kids are not empowered in important ways. Anyway, I'm taking away from the questions. You see, I'm very, I really feel strongly about this, this.
- [86:42]
A
Hi, Dan Nixon from the bank of England. I was really interested in, on the topic of kind of our relationship with technology and how connected we now are and on the level of that connectivity, what you see then on that level of connectivity going forward. So if you'll excuse me, as an economist, I kind of conceive of some of these things in a kind of demand and supply framework. So on the supply side, I mean, you can think that the supply or the potential for greater connectivity through technology is only going to increase. It's certainly not going to fall going forward on the demand for that. I guess you point to choice as kind of the key factor. So how much we want this is going to determine how much more, or not depending on the case connected with we become. So if that's really the key factor kind of going forward, what's your kind of summary view on how that's going to play out? Do you think we've reached a level where we're now going to plateau, or do you see this as more of a kind of secular trend where it's just going to go on and on more and more?
- [87:47]
B
Oh, I think it's going to get more and more because I think that the, you know, several years ago there was no mobile web and essentially there was a research project and a mandate to invent the mobile web. I mean, we used to. The model, you know, the model was you, you use your apps even on an iPhone sitting down. You know, you had it on you, but you were stationary. And then, you know, it had GPS location, had location capacity on it and essentially you could use it anywhere, you could use it moving. And, you know, the word went out that this was a, you know, this was a business opportunity and the, and a whole generation of new ways of being and living were invented and a business model and a way of living and being was invented. And it was something that people, you know, you know, did we demand it, did we demand to be doing stuff as we were moving, checking in, checking in places and playing games as we want? No. I mean, we were, you know, commerce and demand went, it went hand in hand. So I think that as long as there's money to be made and as long as there's commerce to be had and business, I mean, there's going to be this, you know, this meshing of making and inventing and there's going to be more and more, but that doesn't mean that people can't become more informed and discriminating consumers. You know, I think it's a little, it is a little bit like food. You know, more and more junk food got created. It did more and more process, sugary, you know, everything. And then Gradually, actually, and really only in the last little. You know, I want to say, really, within the last 10 years, I think more and more people have started. You begin to see a consumer body begin to say, well, hold on, let's really look at what this stuff is doing to us. And, you know, what about food? What about what we're eating? Let's talk about this. And there's no reason that we can't use that model to speed up the process. What about the gamification of life? Is that really where we want to go? Is that really what we want to do? So I'm not putting my money on the industry being any less aggressive in. In kind of inventing stuff to sell us and the pace of apps slowing down. I don't think that's it. And some of these apps are wondrous. I mean, you know, who wouldn't want to make reservations to go travel halfway around the world while you're waiting in line on Starbucks? I mean, you know, this can't be a bad thing.
- [90:56]
A
Number 10, who's number 11? So I just asked for an extension of 10 minutes and actually got it right. So if. Because that's fascinating, I'll just ask you my own questions as number 10, Maurice Merleau Ponty, the phenomenologist, say that we are where we can be destroyed. Right? And you described to us how people are fleeing the world of real interaction where they can be hurt. And as you described, they try to go to connectivity to get connectivity without the constraints or the risks of intimacy. Right. Here are those people leaving, for example, this probably to go to. But I mean, this means that now.
- [91:44]
B
Wait, I lost you.
- [91:46]
A
What I mean is that now the place where we can be hurt. Right. Is precisely on that digital network. Okay, so. And privacy is about this issue, that your digital body can be hurt there. We thought we would flee the risk of physical interaction by going in there and having sort of irresponsible interaction. But now this is where we live, and this is where it can get caught. This is where we can get hurt because this is where we exist. And we can't even leave Facebook because that's where our life is. We invested our life there. So isn't now you're saying it's no.
- [92:22]
B
Longer a place of no risk?
- [92:23]
A
Absolutely. And this is where our digital body is being. Our self is being transported. Right? So we have a digital body that can be heard there. So this issue of privacy you're talking about is. Isn't that how we have to teach now these new selves, how to behave responsively, responsibly, responsible and also safely but politically joyfully, and how to deal with their new identities. I mean, this. Isn't that the new education that we have to create to make the people live their digital bodies?
- [93:02]
B
I think that's a good, I think that's a good way to put it. You have to live a responsible digital life. And that includes everything from, you know, cyberbullying. I mean, that includes everything from how to behave in a way that you're not going to get into, you know, serious privacy issues, how to cyberbullying. I mean, but I think you also need to live digitally in a way that respects your physical, your physical life. And here I think of the kinds of relationships people have online that seriously undermine their, their kind of physical, real relationships, their marriages, their relationships with their children. I mean, one of the people I interview in a park is interviewing, I'm interviewing him in the park. His kids are there and he has his iPhone app out that puts him on second life. And he's talking with his digital mistress. He calls it multi lifeing. And you know, arguing that it's his relation, you know, digital, it's his second life relationships that allow his first life, you know, his first wife relationships to prosper. And I mean, you know, these are issues that I've studied now for, you know, really since the late 80s. And you know, the, the kind of way we live this new digital mix is, you know, we, we are vulnerable creatures. We are psychologically vulnerable creatures. And living the multi life is something that we need to educate ourselves about because, you know, we're fragile, we're more fragile than, than we think. And the multi life is not so ourselves are put into great, can be put into great disarray when we, when we live the multi life. They're putting, we're vulnerable in the multi life. That's how I would put it. And we don't treat ourselves as vulnerable. We treat ourselves, we treat ourselves as though these things are games. Maybe that's the point that I'm making is that both in the area of robotics, both in the area of robotics and in the area of digital life, we're touching on very deep things and we're treating it as though they're games. And I guess that's the ultimate message of my work. These aren't games. These are very, these are very delicate things and we should treat them with really greater respect.
- [96:11]
A
I'm being told that we definitely have to stop. Is that correct? So I deeply apologize to you.
- [96:17]
B
My email is sturkeledia mit edu. I look forward to chatting. It.