The Empathy Diaries

December 15, 2020
Turkle has devoted her sustained and distinguished career to studying how technology impacts self-development. Her groundbreaking research conducted as an MIT professor laid the foundation for analyzing the inroads AI, digital devices, and reliance upon computers have made into contemporary communications and social mores, topics she has brought to popular consciousness through such best-selling books such as Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015). In this revelatory and forthright memoir, Turkle traces her fascination with identity to her earliest experiences as a child of divorce forced to relinquish her biological father and reluctantly accept her adoptive one. Academically ambitious yet constrained by economics and thwarted by the sexism directed toward women scholars in the 1960s, Turkle nonetheless charted her own course, but always with an eye toward how her objectives would be interpreted by her family, received by colleagues, and supported by mentors. Turkle's candor and transparency are totally in keeping with her personal and professional commitment to understanding human emotional motivation and our capacity for empathy, not only towards others but also towards ourselves.

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January 1, 2021

Turkle (social studies of science and technology, MIT; Reclaiming Conversation) draws connections between lessons learned in her personal life and her professional research interests. As a young girl in Brooklyn, her mother fastidiously cultivated a public image for their family, and Turkle recognized early on the association between that facade and self-identity. Turkle recounts her many experiences feeling like an outsider in her young life and her struggles to fit in, leading her to the field of psychoanalysis. As technology became more prevalent, Turkle began to explore how technology changes the way people think, especially regarding personal identity and empathy with others. She credits her "outsider's clarity," developed during her childhood, with her subsequent research topics. Descriptions of the beginning of her career and her involvement with psychoanalysis are a bit complex, and readers without prior knowledge in these areas may feel a little lost. However, Turkle's recounting of her childhood is richly detailed, and anyone who has felt the struggle to fit in will identify with her story. Family photographs throughout add a personal touch. VERDICT This genre-bending memoir is recommended for readers interested in Turkle's work or in the interplay between technology and self.--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

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Starred review from January 15, 2021
A beautifully wrought memoir about how emerging technology makes us think and feel. In her latest, renowned MIT professor Turkle achieves something unique: a near-perfect melding of personal and intellectual memoir. The author digs deep into her childhood to understand where her lifelong thirst for understanding the interface between technology and humanity was born. She begins with a reunion with her long-vanished father and then moves into a crystalline recollection of her upbringing in postwar New York. The author was much loved by her grandparents and her aunt, who instilled in her a confidence in her gifts. Her relationship with her mother, who married again after divorcing Turkle's father, was more fraught, but in a series of slow reveals, readers come to understand her mother's behavior. The story only gets more interesting as Turkle chronicles her years at Radcliffe and blossoming as a researcher and intellectual. A clinical psychologist with a doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard, she faced stiff resistance to her determination to study as an ethnographer the impact of technology on humans. Once she moved to MIT, many colleagues weren't interested in--or disbelieved--the evidence she gathered on how technology changes and isolates us. Denied tenure, she appealed, forcing open the door to the inner sanctum of MIT professors. In the final chapter, Turkle writes that our immersion in the digital world is causing us to lose true solitude, "where the capacity for empathy is born." Her book was finished before the pandemic both heightened our isolation and increased our dependence on digital tools. What a gift that this brilliant scholar is still at MIT, writing and studying; perhaps her next book will investigate the current age. Anyone who studies, develops, or produces technology--and anyone who uses it--will gain crucial insights from this profound meditation on how technology is changing us. A masterful memoir by a pioneering researcher and incisive thinker.

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