Several years ago, I came across a service that would automatically transcribe messages left on my voicemail and send them to me immediately as texts. It made it possible to get the jist of a call without needing to take the time to dial in and listen to messages. The transcription was good enough to get by, for the most part. The service was a time-saver, since I rarely needed to actually listen to the messages. All gain, it seemed, with no pain.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist with clinical training in psychology, has focused on these sorts of accommodations to technology in more than 30 year studying human-machine interactions.  Turkle interrogates new technologies as they emerge around her in the belly of the technological beast at MIT, where she is a professor and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.   Alone Together is her fourth book exploring the changes in self that our adjustment to technology brings.

Turkle’s argument in Alone Together–which surveys the impact of social robots and communication aids such as e-mail, text messaging, and social media– is that we should be suspicious when new technologies seem to promise gain without pain.  Almost always, she suggests, the pain comes later, when some valuable aspect of self is altered in unpredicted ways. The result is a slow degradation of social life, in which intimate contact is harder and harder to sustain.

What have I lost in quickly reading, rather than hearing, my messages?  The answer occurred to me when I read Turkle’s discussion of the way people rely on texting rather than phoning. While text may be more efficient and avoid direct discussion of uncomfortable topics, it also eliminates hearing the true timbre of the human voice, which expresses the emotional tones that enrich the meaning of our words.  As a clinical psychologist, who daily attends to the subtle messages conveyed beyond patients’ words, this should have been obvious (it is worth mentioning that I never used this service for voicemail from my patients).  But that’s exactly Turkle’s point: without attending to the full implications of technological advance, we descend a slippery slope which impoverishes human interaction. And sure enough, on the night I started to write this review, I significantly misunderstood a communication from a friend because I relied on an incomplete text rather than listening to the full message.

In Alone Together, Turkle discusses a number of established and developing technologies that are similar in that they promise to address problems in human connection and relationship, but end up potentially leaving us more alone.  Turkle relies on the method she utilized in her pervious works: careful interviews with a variety of users of the new technologies.  She quotes generously from her subjects, who in this volume include children, adolescents, adults and the elderly.  The first half of the book focuses on robots, such as Furby, Tamagotchi, My Real Baby and Paro.  Turkle supplied some of these robots to more than 250 people and investigated their reactions.  She also discusses the robots of the future that are expected to care for the elderly in nursing homes, transport medical patients, and provide willing and flexible sexual partners.  The second half of the book analyzes the impact of various forms of digital communication, including mobile devices, social networks, Twitter, texts, and online collaborative games. While at times her quotations made me wonder if they were cherry picked, showcasing the worst possible examples, for the most part her subjects are articulate and open, and genuinely are grappling with technology they often seem to both love and hate.

Turkle’s early work led her to feel optimistic about the opportunities technology provided to expand the self; for instance, games that allowed individuals to create an avatar and experiment with their identities in a playful way.  Now, she appears pessimistic about the impact of social technologies.  Again and again, her informants reveal what she sees as attempts to substitute the painful but rewarding experience of intimacy with something more comfortable and less demanding.

She introduces us to a woman in her mid-twenties who hopes the robots of today will evolve eventually into computerized husbands to provide a “no risk” relationships, free of loneliness. We meet teenagers whose most important and gratifying experiences of themselves come from the Facebook persona they meticulously create.  We meet others who try to negotiate a new world of communication where people are loathe to connect in person or even over the phone to break up with someone or have an argument. There are children who become quickly attached to robot pets they prefer to real dogs, since they won’t get sick or die.  Some are eager for the day when robots come along who might serve as regular babysitters and might be more attentive than their preoccupied parents.  Already adult children are contemplating whether to spend $6,000 to buy their elderly, nursing-home- bound parents the Paro, a robot in the form of a pet seal who convincingly acts the part of an adorable responsive pet (some of the elderly don’t appear to realize it’s actually a machine).  The goal is to provide the kind of companionship that these adult children are either too conflicted or busy to provide themselves. One of the most poignant stories concerns the thrice divorced man who is aware his self-centeredness pushed away women. He hopes for a robot sexual partner someday that might satisfy his erotic needs and allow him to relate better to real women.  “Maybe I would want a robot that would be the perfect mate… [in addition to] a real woman,” he states. “The robot could take some of the pressure off the real woman. She wouldn’t need to perform emotionally at such a high level, really an unrealistic level…I could stay in my comfort zone (p. 65).”

Throughout these accounts, Turkle notes how eager people are to invest in relationships with technology to escape the more challenging aspects of relating to people. “With sociable robots we are alone but receive the signals that tell us we are together,” she writes. “Networked we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is a risk we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting or amusing (p. 154).”

Turkle’s description of the ways people make use of robots and other social technology is familiar territory for psychoanalysts, as she is well-aware.  She compares the use people make of robots to the way analysts have described narcissistic patients’ attempts to use people as “self-objects.”  This a type of relationship individuals attempt to create in which the other person can be experienced as perfectly responding to one’s needs–a process that becomes quite evident in intensive psychotherapy. The purpose, in part, is to minimize the painful experience of vulnerability to loss, rejection, or disappointment which is inevitable once one relies on another person.

The question Turkle does not address is whether people’s attempts to use technology to clean up the messy parts of relationships are caused by the availability of the new devices. It’s more likely these uses for technology are dreamed up by a society that is already plagued by a pervasive avoidance of authentic human contact.  In the 70s, such tendencies were widely debated following Christopher Lasch’s popular description of the “culture of narcissism.” Later versions of this critique appeared in Robert Bellah and his colleagues’ analysis of individualism, Habits of the Heart, and James Putnam’s study of the collapse of communal activities, Bowling Alone. The weakness in Turkle’s argument is her focus on the perils of technology to the exclusion of the broader social forces at work behind the phenomenon she describes. Difficulty tolerating experiences that threaten disappointment, disagreement or frustration are ubiquitous. We see it in our coarse, contentious political discourse, and more broadly in a popular culture that idealizes pain free, extravagant lifestyles.

Reading Turkle’s book, I detect a strong underdone of sadness and loss, the kind of emotion she believes consumers of technology work harder and harder to escape. What she is mourning, I think, is not so much what is lost as technology marches forward, but a kind of society that–if it ever really existed– has been on the decline for many years, for reasons we haven’t begun to understand.

© 2012 Robert Cohen 

Robert Cohen, Ph.D. is associate professor of psychology at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan, where he also is director of supervision and training for the Masters of Science in Clinical Psychology Program.   He is also an associate faculty member at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Cohen practices psychotherapy with adults, children and couples in Ann Arbor, Michigan.