Sherry Turkle: ‘I am not anti-technology, I am pro-conversation’

In the social media age, we know how to connect: but are we forgetting how to talk to each other? Leading US psychologist Sherry Turkle wants to fight back

For nearly 30 years now, Sherry Turkle, professor of social psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been exploring the effects of digital worlds on human behaviour. Her books, Life on the Screen, The Second Self and Alone Together, have charted the seductions of "intimate machines", the advance of social media and virtual realities and the all-pervasive internet, and the effect these things have had on our culture and our lives. Her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age, is a call to arms to arrest what she sees as the damaging consequences of never being far from email or text or Twitter or Facebook, in particular the impact it has on family life, on education, on romance and on the possibilities of solitude. Using extensive interviews and half a lifetime of research, she suggests - with reference to the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s - that we are at a "Silent Spring" moment in our infatuation with life on screens rather than life in the real world, never wholly in one or the other. She measures these effects in a breakdown of empathy between children, in the consequences of increasingly distracted family interaction and a growing need for constant stimulus. Her antidote is a simple one: we need to talk more to each other. This interview took place by telephone last week.

You have been writing about these issues for a long time now. Has it always felt like a losing battle?
Less so now. In the beginning I thought I was saying things people didn't want to hear. I think more people see something happening now that they don't like, but they don't know what to do about it. This new statistic seems telling: 89% of Americans admit they took out a phone at their last social encounter - and 82% say that they felt the conversation deteriorated after they did so. It is captured by the story I tell of the young girl saying: "Daddy! Stop Googling! I want to talk to you."