I’ll give you a couple of examples, some dark and some not so dark, because they don’t all have to be dark. Characters in a book have their hold on you, but you have to volunteer for duty, in a way, to them. I think the difference now is that we have an opportunity to bail out to other relationships with active demands, people with active demands on us and claims on us, whenever the going kind of gets tough in our relationships with people who are in our lives and in the room in a way that a book does not. Turkle: That’s such an excellent point, and I think that those were exactly the kinds of objections that were made, that peoples’ attentions were elsewhere. And that’s how we live now, and that I think is something where we need to mark the moment because it’s not necessarily a heroic moment, because it means that we’re not giving each other full attention in the physical in a way that may be very detrimental to our physical relationships.Īnne Strainchamps: I guess I’m wondering if this necessarily has to be a bad thing because I would imagine that when the printed book came along people might have had similar complaints, you know, you could be in the same room and there’s someone sitting reading a book, and in their head they’re far away from the rest of you in the room. And that can only come if you have a device with you that lets you literally be at dinner with your friends, looking up, and looking down then a moment at your Blackberry and doing something in your virtual world, doing something on the screen, texting, doing something on facebook, that your life is a mixture of what you do in the real and in the virtual. What I didn’t see in 1995 is that the interpenetration of physical and virtual is to the point that we are living a life-mix of what’s in the physical and what’s in the virtual, and I think that’s genuinely new. Sherry Turkle: We’ve gone from multitasking to multi-lifeing. She tells Anne Strainchamps that the phrase made her realise something new. While researching the book Turkle came across an expression she’d never heard before- “life-mix’, the mash-up of online and offline lives. “Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other’. Now Turkle’s released the third book in this trilogy. Jim Fleming: MIT Professor Sherry Turkle’s been studying the ways we interact with machines since 1984 through her books “The Second Self’ and “Life on the Screen’.

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