Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle, a social scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, has been studying people’s relationships with technology since the early personal computer movement in the late 1970s. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the best-selling author of six books and three edited collections, including four landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

 Turkle has edited three books on our lives with objects, Evocative Objects, Falling For Science, and The Inner History of Devices. They explore how our relationships with the object world have significant implications for work, education, and intimacy. In Simulation and its Discontents, Turkle explores the costs, intellectual, personal, and political, of living so much of our lives in artificial worlds. 

Her most recent book, The Empathy Diaries (Penguin Press, March 2021), turns her method of “intimate ethnography” on her own life, examining the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped her into the woman and researcher she became, making the point that her emotional and intellectual became one, that her career, as she put it, became “lit from within.” It appeared to critical acclaim. Dwight Garner in The New York Times called it a "beautiful book an instant classic of the genre."