51 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleThe Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist who studies the relationship between technology and society. She holds a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is currently a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She writes about the culture of computers and the internet and examines the subject of the “‘inner history’ of technology, how it changes our relationships, including our relationship with ourselves” (xix).
Turkle has published 10 books over four decades of technological change. In The Second Self (1984), Turkle investigates the impacts computers have on human psychology. She wrote the book when everyday people were “first confronted with machines whose behavior and mode of operation invited psychological interpretation and that, at the same time, incited them to think differently about human thought, memory, and understanding” (Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self. MIT Press, 2005, pp. 1-15). For the book, Turkle conducted hundreds of interviews with computer users, from children to computer science students to hackers. She examines the growing tendency of people to speak of their minds in terms of machinery.
In 2005, in the Introduction to the 20-year anniversary MIT edition of the text, Turkle reassesses the lessons of The Second Self. Like in the 1980s, she says, humanity is again in a “liminal” space between the real and the virtual. This space, she argues, is an opportunity to look with fresh perspective at how intimacy with machines is shaping humanity. Turkle laments that machines are being designed without transparency; people have lost the knowledge of their mechanism and thus authorship over their experiences.
Turkle moves from optimism about the possibilities of the virtual to skepticism about technology’s empathy-limiting effects in real life. In Life on the Screen (1995), Turkle looks at the potential for people to discover a Pluralism of Identities through the language of virtual spaces. However, in Alone Together (2011), Turkle argues that the proliferation of virtual spaces has broken down real-life communication and increased people’s loneliness. Turkle’s previous research into the blurring boundary between humans and machines becomes an investigation of a decline in empathy in response to robots that mimic feelings but do not have them. In Reclaiming Conversation (2015), Turkle suggests that the balm for isolation is face-to-face empathetic conversation and connection.
Turkle transitions from academic writing to memoir due to her belief in The Need for Empathy in Science. Despite being a public expert on connection and conversation, Turkle struggled to discuss her personal life due to her family's secrecy about her biological father. In The Empathy Diaries, she demonstrates the interconnectedness of private and working lives.
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan, sometimes referred to as the “French Freud,” was a psychoanalyst and prominent Parisian intellectual from the 1950s to his death in 1981. Lacan’s writings and teachings focused on Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind, the structure of language, and the practice of psychoanalysis. Turkle attends his lectures in the 1970s while researching what she calls “The Lacanian Village” for her book Psychoanalytic Politics (1978), which examines the French culture of psychoanalytic thinking that developed after the May 1968 revolt. Two of Lacan’s major contributions to psychoanalysis are his theory of the “mirror stage” in the development of the ego and his controversial “variable length” clinical session times, which caused him to lose recognition from the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Lacan is a controversial figure and has been critiqued for being incoherent and difficult to comprehend. Turkle herself has admitted her own “impatience with Lacanian opacities” but values how Lacan “confront[s] people with a vision of psychoanalysis as the unacceptable, the discourse that subverts everyday securities,” and avoids “expected rhetoric” (Turkle, Sherry. “Lacan: An Exchange.” The New York Review, 31 May 1979). In her memoir, Turkle’s relaying of Lacan’s unexpected and disruptive lecture at MIT portrays his discourse as an “evocative object” that “works” on the mind. For Turkle, his lecture is an example of dépaysement, something that makes the familiar foreign again, creating an opportunity for fresh insight.
Lacan’s influence is a way for Turkle to discover the truth of herself:
Lacan argued that society constructs the individual through language and therefore we can understand ourselves only in the context of our social surround. In this way of thinking, psychoanalysis doesn’t treat a patient for ‘cure’ in an isolated consulting room. An analysis was a search for the truth of a speaking, social subject (197).
Turkle also touches on ideas from Lacan’s applications of psychoanalysis to other academic disciplines, which deepen her ideas about the Pluralism of Identities. She agrees with Lacan that a person’s public political and personal identities are inseparable. In this way, Turkle feels that she is “the most Lacanian” (217), with the overlap of these different selves being the subject of the book.
Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert was an influential mathematician and learning theorist who pioneered research into artificial intelligence and its applications for learning. He got his PhD in mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and became a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, co-directing the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab with Professor Martin Minsky from 1967 to 1981. He was a co-creator of Logo, the first programming language made for children.
In Papert’s lab, children used Logo to program a small “Turtle” robot to solve problems. Papert’s work with children and programming helped develop his constructivist theories of learning based on the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, which shows that people learn best while making things. Constructivism is “the theory that says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information” (“Constructivism.” University at Buffalo).
Papert believed that learning to program the robot gave the children agency over their own thinking process—“the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas” (Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms. Basic Books, 1980). His ideas about the importance of childhood objects and how children learn and interact with machines were developed in collaboration with Turkle.
Turkle and Papert met at MIT and were married from 1976 to 1985. They had a successful academic collaborative relationship. In 1992, they published a paper together, “Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete,” which analyzes the sociology of learning styles.
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minksy was an award-winning computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert. He was a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT from 1958 until his death in 2016. He studied how to teach machines common-sense reasoning and discussed his theory of human intelligence in his book The Emotion Machine (2006). He co-founded the AI laboratory with his research partner, Seymour Papert. Together with Papert, he developed a theory that views the mind as a set of decentralized programs, one of the founding principles of AI.
In Turkle’s memoir, Minsky represents the archetype of the intellectually brilliant but emotionally closed-off scientist and stands for the engineering culture Turkle encounters at MIT. Like with her husband and father, Turkle admires Minksy’s passion for knowledge: “He was interested in everything. Curious about everything. He expressed an opinion on everything” (257). She is fascinated with his obsession with technology and its potential and quotes one of his admiring students: “Marvin Minsky wants to create a computer beautiful enough that a soul would want to live in it” (270).
However, Minsky’s intensity and single-mindedness becomes a barrier to human relationships. For Turkle, Minsky’s vision of creating emotionally complex machines to replace human relationships is dangerous and disturbing. Minsky represents the aspects of technological culture that she argues against:
Marvin Minsky died in 2016. But I’m still fighting his idea, now more than ever part of the cultural mainstream, that it is good to have devices that can wean us from our dependency on one another. For Marvin, the burdens that come with human bonds were unnecessary and inefficient because an engineering solution was on the horizon—we are ultimately going to mate with machines or evolve into machines or become one with machines (346).
Like her father and husband, Minsky symbolizes a culture of objectification that threatens social relationships and connection.
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