Sherry Turkle

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

There are moments of opportunity for families moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school - a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent!

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things__er or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation__ think of it as 'whole person conversation'__f things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

Online life is about premeditation.