Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is a professor, author, consultant, researcher and licensed clinical psychologist who has spent the last 30 years researching the psychology of people’s relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauz_ Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Turkle has investigated the intersection of digital technology and human relationships from the early days of personal computers to our current world of robotics, artificial intelligence, social networking and mobile connectivity. She has shown how technology doesn’t just catalyze changes in what we do – it affects how we think. Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She is the author of five books, Psychoanalytic Politics, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Interent, Simulation and its Discontents, and most recently, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other and the editor of three, including Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices. She’s been profiled in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American and Wired, and was named “woman of the year” by Ms. Magazine and among the “Forty under Forty” who are changing the nation by Esquire. She is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, The Colbert Report and 20/20.