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The Empathy Gap
Digital Culture Needs What Talk Therapy Offers
By Sherry Turkle
When I first began studying online life in the early 1980s, I saw it as a place where people had an opportunity to express aspects of themselves that were typically repressed in their daily life. Back then, they did this in simple online chat rooms and, more elaborately, when they constructed game avatars. In those days, I was something of an enthusiast, trying to alert clinicians--psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and pediatricians--to the importance of these new digital spaces. In particular, I hoped my work would make psychotherapists more comfortable with technology and make them feel that they had a role to play in its development. In essence, my message to psychotherapists was this: here's a technology that functions as a kind of intimate machine and touches deeply on questions of identity. Watch for it as you do your work. In your practice, when clients talk about their web pages, their desktop designs, their avatars, they'll be talking about matters that reach far beyond the technical. Digital life isn't a realm of culture whose elaboration and interpretation should be left to engineers. We need therapeutic practitioners to understand its deeper dimensions.
Through the mid-'90s, my writings about technology and self were mainly hopeful about the psychological impact of digital culture. Indeed, in 1996, I was on the cover of Wired magazine for my work portraying online avatars as part of a new kind of "identity play" that expanded people's sense of themselves. Ironically, that cover story appeared just as I was changing my mind about where we were allowing technology to take us. I had two related concerns: we expected more from technology and less from each other. We were increasingly willing to talk to machines, even about intimate matters. And increasingly, with the rise of mobile devices, we were paying attention to our phones rather than each other. In both cases, there was a flight from face-to-face conversation. In both cases, technology was encouraging us to forget that the essence of conversation is one where human meanings are understood, where empathy is engaged.
Teaching at MIT, I was in the heart of the presentation of machines as companions and conversational partners....