The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist who studies the relationship between technology and society. She holds a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is currently a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She writes about the culture of computers and the internet and examines the subject of the “‘inner history’ of technology, how it changes our relationships, including our relationship with ourselves” (xix).

Turkle has published 10 books over four decades of technological change. In The Second Self (1984), Turkle investigates the impacts computers have on human psychology. She wrote the book when everyday people were “first confronted with machines whose behavior and mode of operation invited psychological interpretation and that, at the same time, incited them to think differently about human thought, memory, and understanding” (Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self. MIT Press, 2005, pp. 1-15). For the book, Turkle conducted hundreds of interviews with computer users, from children to computer science students to hackers. She examines the growing tendency of people to speak of their minds in terms of machinery.

In 2005, in the Introduction to the 20-year anniversary MIT edition of the text, Turkle reassesses the lessons of The Second Self.