Review of 'Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A psychologist's perspective on interactions with hardware (robots) and software (texting and facebook). Do intimacy or privacy belong in a machine interaction? Why do we want a robot to succeed? Why do we feel a text interaction is enough? Why don't we long for the loss of the human touch?
This book does a very good job explaining this perspective, and brings up some deep questions. What I would have liked to see is a historical perspective, a comparison to similar social changes of the past - but that's outside the scope here.
Not the first Sherry Turkle I've read, and I sought this book out long before the Colbert report or Facebook controversy. This is not a pysch textbook of case studies. This book does contain anecdotes to illustrate the author's points, not serve as examples of the norm. Addressing the final criticism I've seen, there is a point …
A psychologist's perspective on interactions with hardware (robots) and software (texting and facebook). Do intimacy or privacy belong in a machine interaction? Why do we want a robot to succeed? Why do we feel a text interaction is enough? Why don't we long for the loss of the human touch?
This book does a very good job explaining this perspective, and brings up some deep questions. What I would have liked to see is a historical perspective, a comparison to similar social changes of the past - but that's outside the scope here.
Not the first Sherry Turkle I've read, and I sought this book out long before the Colbert report or Facebook controversy. This is not a pysch textbook of case studies. This book does contain anecdotes to illustrate the author's points, not serve as examples of the norm. Addressing the final criticism I've seen, there is a point to both halves of the text, and a decent conclusion also, but I can understand that those who came to just read about facebook (chapters 9 through 11) might not get it.