All right. We came across this website, crackberry.com. It's for people who really love their BlackBerrys, or are addicted, considering the name comes from, oh, you know, the smokeable form of cocaine that produces a psychoactive high. The site does offer a 12-step program, offering you to help step away from the device. Step one, admit we are powerless over our CrackBerry - that our lives have become unmanageable without the little gadgets, and like Pavlovian dogs we are slave to its beeps, vibrations, buzzes and rings. Now if you need help for this, you can head to our blog, we'll link you through to salvation.
You can even use your BlackBerry to look it up, email it to your friends, post it on Facebook. Oh, no! I believe I was just enabling you! I'm really sorry. Our next guest studies our electronically tethered lives. Clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle is a professor of social studies of science and technology at M.I.T., and founder and director of M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Society. Sherry, thank you so much for joining us on The Bryant Park Project.
Dr. SHERRY TURKLE (Professor, Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology): My pleasure.
STEWART: You gave a speech last weekend at Harvard's Neiman Conference on Narrative Journalism. One of our staff happened to be there, was quite impressed, came back and reported that you talked about cyber-intimacies and cyber-solitudes. Would you define each for us?
Dr. TURKLE: Well, I like to put them actually - I like to write it out cyber-intimacy slash cyber-solitude.
STEWART: OK.
Dr. TURKLE: Because I think one of the main stories today is that we're involved with technology, such as the BlackBerry, as you just mentioned, such as instant messaging, such as social networks, where we sometimes don't know if we're alone or if we're together. We feel connected. We feel engrossed. We spend five hours doing our email. We're talking to people all over the world.
We get up and we look around, and there's nobody home with us physically. We can live alone. We can be isolated. We can really be only connecting sometimes through the screen, or our most intense engagements are with our romantic partners in a virtual space, who we never see otherwise.
STEWART: You mean that I text "I.L.Y." to my husband more than I get to say it?
Dr. TURKLE: No, I mean something else. I mean, that you go on a place like Second Life, which is a virtual community, and you form a friendship, you form a relationship, and then in that virtual space, it's not uncommon that people actually - people who are involved with other people, and have different lives, or live in different parts of the world, actually marry.
But in the confines of the virtual space, forming very close attachments, attachments that really matter to them, often without knowing if the person they're attached is an 80-year-old man in a nursing home in Tampa, or a 17-year-old, you know, guy in Madison, Wisconsin, who is a college student. I mean, there's - since people many times online play characters, you know, create avatars and create characters who they aren't necessarily, we form these connection, and I'm adding all of these connections kind of together.
You know, the avatars, the email, the instant messaging, which are different in many ways, but alike in one way that I think is very important that the connections we make there, we don't always know how to take back to the rest of our lives, and they don't always sustain us in the rest of our lives, and so we live in this kind of on the border between a sense of intimacy and a sense of solitude.
STEWART: You've edited two books, "Evocative Objects: Things We Think With," and "Falling for Science: Objects of the Mind." The essays explore objects as emotional and intellectual companions. Now how is it that humans cognitively construct a relationship with an object, a thing, an email account?
Dr. TURKLE: We are built to do this. Our ability to take an object and infuse it with meaning, with caring, with even love and attachment and often a sense that it cares for you back - seems to be hardwired in us, and it's particularly true with the new kind of robotic pets. You see it very dramatically with the new kind of robotic pets that are on the market now.
Remember the AIBO I mean, if something looks at you, seems to track your motion in some way, and the new robotic pets like Pleo seem to recognize your voice, or be able to follow your eye motion, or know your name, which these new objects are programmed to do - it's like we are cheap dates. We believe that there is somebody home if an object can do these things.
STEWART: Well, adults may be able to tell the difference, but I'm wondering about children.
Dr. TURKLE: Well, I have some concerns. I mean, I think the best kind of play - as I was answering your last question I was thinking of the movie with Tom Hanks where he embodies the basketball with all of the...
STEWART: Oh, "Castaway." Yes.
Dr. TURKLE: Yes, "Castaway," with all of the connectivity power of a person - that we really are built to be sociable, and when something sociable, authentically sociable is not there, we need that company, we need that sense of another, and we will create one out of the materials available. So moving on to kids, that ability is very, very powerful. I mean, when a kid takes a row of Barbie Dolls and puts them in detention, what that child is doing is something very healthy, you know, makes a tea party and turns their back to the tea table. What that child is doing is very healthy.
That child is doing unto the dolls what they somehow feel should be done to them. They've probably done something wrong, and need a little bit of punishment. The question that we face now as we are giving children, you know, potentially a robot nanny, you know, or some kind of doll that has an agenda of its own, and maybe doesn't want to be put in detention - has some intelligence of its own, and wants to engage with the child on its own terms, is that we're not giving children that completely open space to do that kind of projective play.
STEWART: Sherry Turkle is a professor of social studies and science and technology at M.I.T., and founder and director of M.I.T.'s Initiative on Technology and Society. Sherry, thank you very much.
Dr. TURKLE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.