Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

The 10th anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author

＂A persuasive and intimate book . . . showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends, and coworkers, even from ourselves.＂ --Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

＂[Turkle] presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships.＂ --The New York Review of Books

＂Neil Postman was the greatest media analyst of the late 20th century . . . I often wish that Postman was here with us today as the pace of change and concerns about harms increase rapidly. But we do have a Neil Postman, and her name is Sherry Turkle . . . Reclaiming Conversation was a landmark work of media scholarship . . . Sherry gives us the most powerful summation of how smartphones and social media, these powerful technologies of connection, have damaged close human relationships. She does it in four words: ’We are forever elsewhere.’＂ --Jonathan Haidt, bestselling author of The Anxious Generation

A prescient bestseller a decade ago, and essential today--with new insight into the threats of generative AI.

Sherry Turkle, long an enthusiast for the promise of digital technology, now investigates its troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. At the dinner table, children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. At work, we retreat to our screens and home offices, forgoing the water-cooler conversation that once made us more productive and engaged. Online, we post opinions that our friends will agree with, avoiding the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. When we turn to our devices instead of to one another, the cost is our own humanity.

But there is good news: conversation cures. Face-to-face dialogue builds empathy, friendship, and creativity; it’s the cornerstone of democracy and good for the bottom line. Drawing on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle makes the paradigm-shifting case for conversation.

SHERRY TURKLE has spent the last 30 years studying the psychology of people’s relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the author five books and three edited collections, including a trilogy of three landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen and most recently, Alone Together. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, she is a featured media commentator. She is a recipient of a Harvard Centennial Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.