As always, though, she’s less interested in the machines than in our relationships with them. The first half is about social robots, those sci-fi androids that promise (one day) to sweep the kitchen floor, take care of our aging parents and provide us with reliable companionship. “Alone Together” is really two separate books. She summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence: “We expect more from technology and less from each other.” If the Internet of 1995 was a postmodern playhouse, allowing individuals to engage in unbridled expression, Turkle describes it today as a corporate trap, a ball and chain that keeps us tethered to the tiny screens of our cellphones, tapping out trite messages to stay in touch. In Turkle’s latest book, “Alone Together,” this optimism is long gone. As one online user told her, “You are who you pretend to be.” Instead of being constrained by the responsibilities of real life, Turkle argued, people were using the Web to experiment, trying on personalities like pieces of clothing. In 1995, Sherry Turkle, a professor of the “social studies of science” at M.I.T., published a book about identity in the digital age called “Life on the Screen.” It was a mostly optimistic account, as Turkle celebrated the freedom of online identity.
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