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This post first appeared on aud.life

There aren’t a lot of women who (get to) write “big ideas” books about technology. I can only name a handful. But one of them, Sherry Turkle, has a new book coming out.

She’s in marketing mode at the moment, with a recent interview with NPR’s Scott Simon and an op-ed in The New York Times. Jonathan Franzen, who’s become quite the joke himself, has reviewed the book for the NYT as well, which is probably just the latest excuse some folks need to make fun of Turkle’s ideas in turn.

I’m frequently struck by how ungenerous the readings of her work often are by those in education technology. Her previous book, Alone Together, has been reduced to a caricature – an anti-technology screed, one that refuses to recognize that any good “connection” can come from computer technologies, one that insists, in a parallel to Nicholas Carr’s claims (or at least a caricature of his work) that “the Internet is making us stupid,” that the Internet is making us anti-social.

I only recently read Alone Together, as I didn’t realize – based on the tweet-length reviews of it I’d seen from educators, I guess – that it addressed artificial intelligence at length. (Most of the responses I’d seen focused on what it purportedly said about social media and social networking.)

Me, I’m really interested in our views of and reactions to robots, particularly the push from certain quarters that we accept their inevitability. I found the book to be quite provocative, especially as she examines the development of “caring machines” – this has significant implications for ed-tech and for teaching machines, as I argued in my keynote this summer at UW Madison. (Turkle points out that companion robots are introduced to children and the elderly – “the most vulnerable” – first. Ed-tech trivia: Some of Sebastian Thrun’s early work was on building robots for nursing homes.)

When Turkle writes that “there is psychological risk in the robotic moment,” I’m reminded that her background is in psychology (not, say, in cultural studies or history or educational technology). This shapes her methodology; this shapes her analysis. The emphasis in that phrase – “there is psychological risk in the robotic moment” – shouldn’t be on “the robotic moment.” That is, I don’t think that Turkle is writing with a nostalgia for a time in the past in which social connections were whole and healthy (as some have suggested). The emphasis should be on “psychological risk.” In other words, I think Turkle has this sense of whole and healthy Self as informed by psychoanalysis, not by history. That Self is challenged by many things – all sorts of traumas, losses, needs, desires, vulnerabilities – and one of the new challenges is computer technology.

I don’t think psychology explains everything. Not even close. (My background, of course, is in literary and cultural studies.) I think history matters – indeed, I’m really interested in the relationship between the history of educational psychology and the history of ed-tech. And I insist that structure matters too – institutions, cultures, societies, systems – and I wonder if psychology focuses on the individual at the expense of all that. (Does this explain, I wonder, why Turkle’s work sometimes feels like it veers towards white middle class anxiety?) I wonder if psychology of tech focuses too much on the individual and the tech.

I’m not really interested in defending Turkle. But it is interesting to me that it’s her books (as opposed to male critics of tech) that seems to elicit the most negative responses from those in ed-tech – responses that seem to often put words in her mouth. Hmm.

And I do admit, I’ve got some fondness for Turkle: I first read Turkle’s work as an undergrad in a women’s studies class in the early 1990s. More accurately, I first read Turkle and her (then) husband Seymour Papert’s work as an undergrad in a women’s studies class. I learned of Papert through Turkle, and the former has shaped my thoughts on ed-tech profoundly. It’s my own nostalgia, I realize, for books in the 1980s – for a different moment – that could be so hopeful about tech.

Audrey Watters


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Audrey Watters

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