Sherry Turkle

We're talking about the effect of technology on face-to-face communication and the power of conversation on today's Please Explain. 

Since Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this week, hundreds of millions of users have created their own "look-back" movies, a one-minute-long reflection on a user's mo...

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) was caught playing video poker on his smartphone during the three hour meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Is the poker game...

Many of us spend hours with our smartphones and computers, texting and emailing. We peruse social networking sites, updating our followers several times a day on our moods and thought...

In 1999, Freedom Baird was in grad school, and Furbies--those furry little robot toys that talk to you and tell you to play with them--were all the rage.

Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.

The typical U.S. teenager sends 3,500 text messages a month on portable digital devices, and American children send eight texts for every phone call they make or receive. This same generation grew up with Furbies and other robotic friends. While all this technology might seem harmless or even beneficial to the masses, Sherry Turkle argues that it carries risks. Sherry is an MIT professor and clinical psychologist, as well as the author of a new book is called “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”

MIT professor Sherry Turkle discusses her new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, in which she examines how technology is diminishing our face-to-face contact and why that matters. 

Anticipating the future is a classic (and possibly uniquely) human pastime. For as long as humans have kept records of the past, we have also tried to predict our future...and in so doing, control our destiny. Why do we cling to these predictions? The end of the world, the end of humanity, even our future fortunes…why do we anticipate so much?

In honor of all the silver foxes out there (and the people who love them), we dedicate this week's tech segment to assistive technologies for older people.

This week's look at family issues tackles the impact of technology in the household. Blackberries, laptops and mobile phones may increase access to knowledge, but do they isolate chil...

Terminator Salvation, the fourth installment of the Terminator franchise, hits theaters today. The film takes place in 2018, an apocalyptic world where humans are outnumbered by m...