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.
Part 3, Chapter 19-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “1976-1985”
Part 3, Chapter 19 Summary: “The Last Experiment”
Turkle faces resistance at MIT to becoming tenured on the basis that her book The Second Self (1984) isn’t “scientific” enough because it’s based on ethnographic interviews rather than “data sets.” Turkle’s decision to publish her book with a commercial press rather than an academic one invalidates the rigor of her research in the eyes of the academic board. In addition, she is discriminated against as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
While her application for tenure is being decided, Turkle is in contact with Charlie, who tries to use her status at MIT to gain his own status in the scientific community. He prints copies of his book, which he believes proves Einstein wrong, and writes accompanying letters to members of the science faculty at MIT introducing himself as Turkle’s father. She asks him not to send them, afraid it will affect the outcome of her application. Her psychoanalyst suggests cutting contact with him to “deactivate” him, and he never sends the letters. Nonetheless, Turkle is denied tenure. She manipulates the dean into appealing the decision due to their sexist behavior. Despite knowing that she is not accepted into the culture at MIT and is treated like an “inconvenient object,” she decides to stay there because of opportunities for intellectual growth.
A year after cutting contact with Charlie, he begs that she support an alternative treatment for an illness he is suffering from, having refused the standard treatments. She fulfills his request and sits by his bedside as he is dying. Turkle organizes a traditional Orthodox Jewish burial for him. She is grateful for her mother’s protection from him and recognizes the power of the image of the father she had constructed for herself as a child, that of a scientific hero that gave her confidence.
Part 3, Chapter 20 Summary: “The Assault on Empathy”
In 1985, Turkle’s perspective on her attitude to privacy and the curation of her public image shifts profoundly when she is confronted with her own lack of integrity by a profile interviewer from Esquire magazine. Turkle’s refusal to answer the interviewer’s basic questions about her family background prompts them to write, “Why choose masks unless you’re more comfortable with the third person than the first?” (332). When Turkle reads this, she decides that she wants to let go of her family’s secrets and live according to her belief that a person’s emotional life is not separate from their intellect.
Turkle meets with her estranged half-sister and brother, Susan and Bruce, and reveals that they don’t share a biological father. Turkle then feels free to share her story with the public and to pursue her research more ardently. She continues to develop her theory of the need for transparency in technology design. She believes that people lose sight of the computer as a mechanism when they interact with it without understanding how it works.
In 1991, Turkle has a daughter, Rebecca, with her second husband, Ralph Willard. Becoming a mother furthers her resolve to live according to her intellectual beliefs. She recognizes the challenges of raising her child to be empathetic in a society in which people create unreal representations of themselves online. Turkle is alarmed by a virtual community that “offer[s] the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship” (334).
Epilogue Summary: “People Are Not Objects”
Turkle reflects on the lessons she’s gathered during the interweaving paths of her academic career and personal history. She believes that her status as an outsider at Radcliffe, in France, and at MIT have allowed her sharp insight into people’s behavior and an appreciation of solitude. The act of writing a memoir gave her a similar distance and objectivity and allowed her to gain a new appreciation for her mother’s position and why she chose a life of secrecy. She considers how Charlie’s cruel experiments isolated her mother and feels greater empathy for her despite the pain she caused Turkle in her life.
Turkle feels objectified by her father, her husband, and the culture of MIT. These experiences heightened her sensitivity to technology’s commoditized view of people as objects with mineable data that can be sold. The goal of machine design is greater and greater efficiency, and humans, with their inefficiency and error-ridden experience, become devalued. Turkle believes this cultural attitude is leading people away from connection and empathy, as they become seduced by the idea that a relationship with artificially intelligent machines is simpler and preferable to the complexities of real-life relationships. The vulnerability of humans is believing machines care when they don’t.
Part 3, Chapter 19-Epilogue Analysis
In the last few chapters, Turkle relies less on the thoughts of other intellectuals. Instead, she focuses on her personal convictions and The Need for Empathy in Science, a central theme in her work and life. She sets herself apart from Minsky and other scientists who elevate machinery as the future of humanity. Turkle describes this way of thinking in short, staccato sentences to emphasize its crudeness: “People were ultimately data. Information objects. As Marvin Minsky had once put it, ‘the mind is a meat machine’” (321). In contrast, Turkle emphasizes the value of making mistakes and the honesty of imperfection: “Face-to-face, when we stumbled and lost our words, we revealed ourselves most to one another. Online, we preached authenticity but practiced self-curation" (335). She uses the anecdote of the Esquire interview to illustrate how the act of writing her memoir is an exercise in intimacy and honesty, one that demonstrates her growing personal empathy.
Meeting Charlie and giving birth to her daughter, Rebecca, bring Turkle greater truth and integrity. Charlie’s attempts to use Turkle’s position at MIT to further himself in the scientific community reinforces her realization that he objectifies her and lacks empathy. Their lack of connection is highlighted by the way her analyst objectifies Charlie and describes him as an object “activated” by Turkle’s interactions and “deactivated” by the removal of stimulus.
Though Charlie was cruel to her, Turkle’s caring for him as he dies allows her to access feelings of tenderness. She conveys gratitude for the “connection to the idea of him” that gave her comfort as a child (325). By seeking connection with Charlie, Turkle reconnects with the memory of her mother. She realizes that her mother was not lying to be manipulative but to protect her. This showcases the Plurality of Identity, as Turkle again recasts herself and her familial relationships through experience and loss.
Turkle connects her view of parenting to her work in AI research. She professes that she “want[s] to raise an empathetic child” (336), emphasizing the impact of her research on empathy and AI on her parenting. Turkle’s identity as a mother enhances her integrity, as after Rebecca’s birth, she feels she can’t separate her work life from her real life: “I couldn’t write my books one way and live another” (336). Turkle uses her research to guide how she parents Rebecca, reflecting on the “psychoanalytic first principle” that “[i]f you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely” (336).
Turkle describes moments with her daughter on vacation, watching Bambi, and picking out a wedding dress to convey the importance of developing bonds between people rather than with machines. In addition, Turkle uses language to assert the vitality of human relationships. For example, she compares communication between people to “the uncertain glory of a stumbling climb” (334). This is a metaphor, where something is compared to something else without using “like” or “as.” In this case, Turkle suggests that achieving human connection is not foolproof—it’s “stumbling” and “uncertain.” However, it is also filled with “glory.”
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