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Ms. Turkle: Oh, absolutely. And, actually, your email is making you 
nervous and you're going to probably extreme lengths to deal with that anxiety by spending a great deal of time attending to it so that it won't make you too anxious to function, to managing it. I mean, I say I do my email three times a day. That's a lot of hours because I think we're probably quite similar. You know, I can get 600 or 700 a day. Those people — you know, I will confess to your listeners — those 700 messages, those people really don't need to write me. You know, they want to. These are just people who have access to me because I have a public email and who have something to say to me and this is how the system works now.
Ms. Tippett: They don't all need to write to you and you don't need to feel beholden.
Ms. Turkle: Guilty.
Ms. Tippett: Right, but that's a hard thing. So this is making me think. I recently had a conversation with Anthony Appiah, who I think you've quoted, a philosopher. He talked about one of the things that technology has done is it's taken away the role of the editor. I mean, he was talking about how we send our opinions out into the world now and that there used to be this editorial function which meant a pause and it meant thinking and it meant that there wasn't so much raw emotion that things got edited.
Now, I'm thinking about what you said at the beginning that we're in the baby, we're in the infancy stages of this technology. I'm wondering if part of this move that you are advocating, of us becoming self-aware about using — shaping technology to serve human purposes, is that we hopefully gradually will become our own editors in terms of we won't necessarily write that nonessential email or answer that nonessential email. Is that part of the process we're in?
Ms. Turkle: Absolutely, absolutely. We're in between worlds now. I still treat email to me as though it were considered correspondence. And I feel as though I have a responsibility to answer my correspondence. But I think that as we become more sophisticated, we'll adopt a more humane set of rules, where we will adapt better to — well, first of all, one thing we'll do is that people won't expect instant answers. I don't know how it is for you, but if I don't respond to an email really within a few hours, people get angry at me. They'll say things like, "Don't you read your email?"
Ms. Tippett: I wonder if, as this happens, as we take a more proactive stance in shaping technology, being deliberate about it and, as you say, shaping technology to honor what we hold dear, you must see people taking different approaches to this. I'm curious about whether adults and young people will do it in different ways and if there may be some tensions we have to hold even in our different solutions to this.
Ms. Turkle: Well, I think that younger people have more options because they're not yet in the work world.
Ms. Tippett: OK.
Ms. Turkle: So young people will talk about, "I'm taking a holiday from Facebook" and go off for the summer and get out of the whole Facebook scene, where they feel a lot of pressure to maintain the profile. Because there is some very I think hilarious, I mean, I think my book is so funny, but I really know the author [laugh]. I mean, I read sections of this book that crack me up. These teenagers describing how, you know, they try to keep up their profiles, they make themselves thinner.
But then the stress of keeping up the profile just right, you know, you don't want to do this, you don't want to do that, you know, you don't want to show you care too much, but you don't want it to be too nonchalant because you don't want to be like some kind of slacker. Oh, it's just a lot of work. I'm interviewing one guy and, at some point, he's talking about all the work this is. He looks up at me and says, "I wonder how long I have to keep doing this?" It's so clear to him that …
Ms. Tippett: There's a world-weariness.
Ms. Turkle: Yes. It's like he can't possibly imagine that is like how long, how long? So, I mean, they just get exhausted. You know, they have to do this and their homework? I mean, it's just like one more thing. And get into college? So they'll drop out of Facebook because that's just a whole other project. Adults really can't, if they have jobs, just say, "I'm unplugging," since so many of us have jobs where the plugging in is really the main way we're with each other.
Ms. Tippett: Well, you know, I did declare an email sabbatical for two months last summer.
Ms. Turkle: Really? How'd that go?
Ms. Tippett: Well, my out-of-office bounce said, "I'm taking an email sabbatical. If it's urgent, you can call this number." It went fine, you know. It went fine. I came back and it all started all over again, but the world went on.
Ms. Turkle: Well, I've known a lot of people who declare email bankruptcy where you basically say, "There are 5,000" — make up a number — "There are 10,000 …
Ms. Tippett: In your inbox?
Ms. Turkle: Yes. "There are 10,000 messages in my inbox; yours is one of them" — a little program goes through — "and I am not going to be going through these messages. If you have continuing business with me, please send me another email. If not, I'm not going to be returning to your earlier request. I will just be considering that transaction, you know, archived."
Ms. Tippett: So I do want to talk to you about, though, again in this same infancy stage, I see interesting paradoxes emerging. We did a public forum on civil discourse after the Tucson shootings.
Ms. Turkle: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Tippett: We had this interesting experience that in the room, which we could have laid out differently, but it was about 100 people and they're all looking straight ahead and they're looking at me and it doesn't end up being a conversation.
It ended up being a presentation and a back-and-forth between me and other people, and they didn't interact with each other. Online — in this online space, there was incredible interaction going on, people sprouting ideas right and left about action steps and what they would do next. You know, truly reacting to each other and learning.
Ms. Turkle: I love that. All kinds of cross channels and back channels.
Ms. Tippett: Right.
Ms. Turkle: That's great, you know, but knowing how to do that and getting good at doing that, this is the art and science of 21st-century communication arts and sciences. It needs to be nurtured and developed, and I think that's the problem that we've had in education where, you know, you set up the ability for people to have WiFi in classrooms, you put them in big lecture halls, and they shop [laugh]. You know, I mean, was it just because we put them on WiFi that we thought they were going to be setting up exciting fora in which they would be bringing things to a higher level?
One university after another is rethinking this and, as I go around the country, you know, we talk about it, we laugh about it because everyone who's a professor today pretty much, you know, a senior faculty were there when this was set up and we remember what was on our minds and now we stand in the back of those classrooms and watch our students, you know, ordering from REI Sports and Amazon and on Facebook and on J. Crew. You know, we didn't give it enough thought, so that's what I mean.
Ms. Tippett: So that's part of the growing up.
Ms. Turkle: Just this is part of growing up. Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think the Internet is all grown up and it's not.
Ms. Tippett: You know, one of the things that your work and reading you made me think about is, in this growing-up process and this process of change, is a natural space for grieving also or what we're losing or maybe that's part of also wondering what's amiss and addressing it.
You know, when you talked about growing up and your whole world 
opening up because of books that you found on a bookshelf and they took you someplace that your family wouldn't have taken you or those objects you stumbled upon, then I wonder will children in the future stumble on life-changing books on somebody else's Kindle? Is part of this process also saying what are we losing and some of it not being able to get back or even wanting to get back, but just noticing the loss? I don't know.
Ms. Turkle: Well, I think that one of the things that fascinates me now is the question of legacies.
Ms. Tippett: Well, what did you say? Where are memories kept? That's a big question with all this technology.
Ms. Turkle: Well, that's a big question in my book is where are memories kept. This is of great concern to me because now today's memory closet is locked in somebody's hard drive and it's also not tactile. It's also not …
Ms. Tippett: It can't be put in a box put in the basement.
Ms. Turkle: It can't be put in a box. Actually, this is very serious. I have my daughter's now going to be 20 and I would say I have 14 years of her life in boxes and in printed photographs, scrapbooks beautifully made, lovingly assembled. Then she started taking the pictures. They were digital. And then she got the iPhone. There was never a print again, and it just — we went into a different phase where we've got it on the computers.
Ms. Tippett: I recently started — so my kids went to Scotland with their dad; their grandmother lives there. It was a big trip and they wrote me these really hilarious and insightful emails and, for the first time, I printed out those emails and put them in boxes. I mean, it doesn't come naturally.
Ms. Turkle: Good for you.
Ms. Tippett: I thought, look, I want them to read these emails about their trip to Scotland. But you're right. If it had been a letter, it just would automatically have been filed away someplace tactile.
Ms. Turkle: Good for you. I end Alone Together with a story of my daughter's — she spent her gap year in Ireland. No sooner had I dropped her off than I'm already missing her [laugh]. We have a conversation on Skype and, before our conversation, I looked at my mom's letters to me when I was a freshman in college. She was dying and she didn't want me to know. The letters were so moving because she's struggling to tell me who she is and she senses that she doesn't have much time. Then I would write my mother letters — and, of course, I have those letters too — in which I try to tell her who I am as I'm taking this next step in my life.
So here I have my daughter on Skype and we're sharing every intimate detail of her life. She's holding up her dress. We're deciding on her shoes. I mean, I could not be more involved, and I'm like telling her, "Well, wouldn't you want to maybe, you know, write me a letter?" So she says, "Well, why don't you write me a letter?" Then I sort of say, well, you know, in some ways, this book is my letter to her because in this book I talk about my concerns about what kind of legacy this generation will leave to the next, and what are the things we want to leave?
You know, what are the things that, if we don't pass them on, even with this new technology, we're going to feel we didn't do our job? And I know the ones for me. I mean, I have the ones that are important to me. I feel very strongly about privacy, a very important conversation. You know, I can't necessarily make that conversation come out the way I want it, but I want to make sure that my voice is heard in the mix. That's very important to me. And then solitude, the importance of solitude.
Ms. Tippett: And this question of where leadership lies in starting these important questions about how we shape technology to be humane and sustainable, and the possibilities of that answer are more interesting because of the nature of this technology, right? There's a possibility for everyone to be a leader on their Facebook page or as they reshape their family lives. I don't know.
Ms. Turkle: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: You have special powers from sitting at MIT to really shape this big public discussion, but it's not limited to people like you.
Ms. Turkle: No. I think that's what really makes this technology so — so powerful.
Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.
Ms. Turkle: Is that, I mean, look at the way it empowers citizens politically.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah.
Ms. Turkle: You know, look at what's going on in the Middle East. You know, we need to take our inspiration from that, that people can make political revolution. You know, we can make revolutions in how we want to, you know, think about questions like privacy in our own country, civil liberties in our own country, the way we want to run our family lives.
Ms. Tippett: Right.
Ms. Turkle: So I'm optimistic because the people who I interviewed were not happy about the place that we'd come to. People sense that there's something amiss. There are a lot of people out there who — they love their phones, they love their music, they love listening to their books on their MP3 players, as do I. But there's something about this that is just tipped out of balance and they want to get it right.
Ms. Tippett: Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She's founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her books include Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
Near the end of that book, Sherry Turkle quotes Thoreau writing about his two years of retreat: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear …" "Thoreau's quest," Sherry Turkle writes, "inspires us to ask of our life with technology: Do we live deliberately?"
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Thank you for your thoughts. Isn't it interesting that the ideas of Darwin and Thoreau have never been more pertinent - that is, evolution and living deliberately? As for "email bankruptcy," a forum for ideas isn't necessarily a place for obligatory correspondence. Print writers of all kinds receive letters, but do we, as writers of such letters, have a right to expect replies or want to elicit feelings of guilt if no response is sent? No. I do, however, expect feelings of guilt if I don't reply to my sister, son, mother, or they to me, no matter what method of correspondence.
I loved the ideas presented here---very thought-provoking. May I offer a suggestion? Could you edit your interviews in future so there's not so much "you know" and "I mean" and repeated phrases that are part of conversation but that trip you up when you're reading? I'm afraid that got in the way of my being able to enjoy and finish the article. (The perils of being an editor...)