"Sherry Turkle and the contributors use memoirs, psychoanalysis, and ethnography to illuminate our attachments, our grief, our compulsions, our use of things to explore life and death, to shape new selves. Their insights make this book important reading not only for professionals but for everybody who wonders where innovation is taking us." —Edward Tenner (Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity)
In such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, MIT sociologist and psychologist Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, bringing together three traditions of listening—that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices.
In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an "intimate ethnography" that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: "This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope." Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: "What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?" The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer.
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit; Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and Falling for Science: Objects in Mind.
