 I'm at the New York Public Library today to talk to authors Steven Johnson and Sherry Turkle about technology. I'm interested in technology because I'm not using the internet right now. They've written books about technology, whether technology is progressive or not, what it's doing to us, what it's doing to our minds, and what it's doing to our society. I think it should be an interesting talk. I'm hoping to get my copy signed. You guys are here to discuss each other's books and the concept of technology as technology for progress or progress and technology. Yeah, particularly networks, I think, the way that networks are steering us both as individuals and as friends and families and also then as societies and political organizations. How far are we getting pushed in positive directions and how much do we need to steer the ship in other directions? It's something I saw in both of your books, but that technology gets what technology wants. No, no, you saw that in Steven's book. I'm teasing. One of the issues on the table, I think, is the degree to which it makes sense to have a technologically determinist position and the degree to which we get to say, not so fast, not so fast, and have a little bit more steering of the ship and saying that there are human purposes that may need to override some of the ways that technology would have it if technology were totally in control of the ship. You would both agree that technology wants something? I would say the technology has, there's this kind of technical term of affordances, right? When technologies are developed and they have default settings where if you live in a society with television, your political system will get more concerned with the way politicians look than a society built around the written word. That doesn't mean we're slaves to the technology because one, we can invent new technology and particularly with software, it's incredibly malleable so we can always change the rules of the software. Two, we make informed decisions as citizens or as governments or as corporations about what kinds of behavior and uses of the technology we want to encourage and what kinds we want to discourage. In some sense, what Sherry is trying to point out is that there are ways in which we've started to use these new technologies that we seem to be kind of falling into that we need to just step back and say, is everything we're doing here in the long run kind of good for us? Or some of these usage patterns may be a mistake? I think of it in terms of technological affordance and human vulnerability, that technology makes certain things possible and we're very vulnerable to certain of those things that it makes possible. But just because you're vulnerable doesn't mean that that's the direction you need to go. You can get a little less vulnerable if you think something is bad for you. For example, cars, you drive them fast enough, you get into really a lot of accidents, you don't put in seat belts, you don't develop an infrastructure for rules of the road. They can get you into a lot of trouble. At a certain point, you decide, these cars, let's think about how to make them safer. Let's think about how to design highway systems that will make it less likely that we get into accidents. And I think over the course of hundreds of years, it doesn't happen overnight, but you gradually develop that kind of infrastructure for dealing with this new technology. And I think that one of my favorite lines in my book actually is, just because we grew up with the internet, we think that the internet is all grown up. When that line came to me, I said, that's it. We have this sense that somehow what we have now is it. It's very early days, and we're just at the beginning, I think, of thinking how we need to change it and shape it and mold it to make it conform to really what our social and psychological values are, what we think the good life is. Yeah. A line, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, one of the problems we have is, just as you start to have that informed conversation about what this new technology is going to enable us to do, there's a new technology that comes along. I mean, Sherry and I have been writing about this stuff between us for quite a long time. And when you were first looking at MUDS, the expectations about what people were going to do online, so much of it was about creating role-playing identities for yourself. And the idea of a social network graph and using social networks to share family photos with your extended family was almost not on the landscape then. And so we have to have this conversation fast, because who knows what the next paradigm is going to be in five years from now. I hope you don't mind. You have a lot of MySpace references in your book. Oh, MySpace, those were the days. You've got a lot of Facebook, too, but it took a while to research your book, obviously, and this is moving very fast. I really like this line that you're saying. It was talking about robots, but delegating what was once love's labor changes the person who delegates. And I thought that was interesting in juxtaposition to the idea that a network can make a lot of things very easy and more immediate and quicker, and this idea of love's labor, that there might be just something that requires us, the very quality of it is the labor. Yes. Well, one of the themes of my work when I subtitled the book, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, is that we are delegating both to sociable robots, but also to social networks, or displacing onto technology. Some of the things that were better done face-to-face, person-to-person. To me, sociable robotics, to be your best friend, to be in conversation about intimate things is the ultimate example of something that shouldn't be delegated because a sociable robot, no matter how clever, doesn't know about loss, it doesn't know about love, it doesn't know about the, it can know about it in a kind of way that really isn't a way of human meaning and experience. So if I want to talk about the loss of my mom, I really don't want to go to a sociable robot, no matter how much it knows how to make me feel that it knows what I'm talking about, no matter how clever it is at doing that. So that would be, to me, the ultimate example of technologies that are built to get me to delegate love's labor, but I'm looking for love. And I think we do similar things, although less dramatically, in social networks, and I think that's a human vulnerability. Something that stuck out to me in your book related to that was the example of that sewer construction, there's the foundation of the house that was compromised and the sewer construction happening on that block would really mess up the house and be dangerous to the inhabitants. And he found out about that, basically word of mouth, or overhearing, and it was lucky he overheard. So what is the role for just talking face to face with your neighbors versus the peer network helping you with that? Well, that's something I want to make pretty clear here. So I'm actually not really arguing that the technology is driving this, and in many ways I had a line in the book somewhere that the internet is not the solution to these problems, the internet is just a role model. Like we can look at the way that the internet was built and the kind of decision making and collaboration that went into the creation of the internet and the way that the internet was designed and the kind of architecture of the internet, and take that success story and say we can solve other kinds of problems, many of them not involving technology. And so it's not just about if we put everybody on Facebook the world will be better, I don't think that's true at all. And one of the places where this kind of peer network philosophy I think works the best is precisely in local neighborhoods and communities, because it is anchored in that kind of knowable community, that face to face community, and it may be augmented by new digital tools and by pattern detection software and tools that are allowing people to make decisions online, but it is embedded in the physical world of shared sidewalks and communities. And that's a space actually that I'm most excited about, it's a place where that technology is kind of layered over the physical world in a really positive way, not just being a kind of a layer that causes you to not pay attention to people and check your email while you're talking to them, which I'm tempted to do now just to demonstrate how annoying it is. How many emails have both of you received during this time? My leg has been vibrating this whole time now. You guys get quoted so often, Sherry, I especially see you because I read a lot about how internet is making us lonely or doing this or that to us. Can you guys just talk about how you see your work used and quoted versus what you would like people to take away from it? I'm not a Luddite. I really am not trying to take your toys away. So whoever is watching this, wherever you are, Sherry wants you to have your toys, keep your toys. And I think that's very important because I think that by calling a serious critique, I mean also my book is fieldwork based and it's been 15 years, I'm reporting. I'm reporting and I'm commenting on what I see. But I'm not just reporting on the good. I'm reporting on things that disturb me. I think that there's a tendency to take a report that is critical or says, look, developmentally this could be a problem for kids or reports on kids describing problematic things and absolutely go ballistic. So I've been reading some of the early reviews of Stephen's book and some people like it, some people like it a lot, some people like it a little less, but nobody says that ignorant slut, how dare he? Waiting for that. No, but they're not going to. You know, because it's a positive book and they might like it more or less. Some people really love it. Some people like it a little bit less. But they're not furious. And some people read my book, I read these reviews on Amazon, it's terrifying what people say about me. I mean it really makes me think, do I get police protection from Amazon? I mean, there's something about, and I think that's very interesting, I mean to be serious about it, I mean, you know, how dare she? How dare she? And I think that that is the reaction to, you know, I put it out there, I'm pretty self-confident and I have all this work that went into it. So I'm, you know, I can take it. But I think that is something that I would say about the reception of the book and what people say about the book is really where does that come from? It's interesting because I got some surprising reactions from people being defensive, just me saying that I wanted to leave the internet, taking that as an attack on them and feeling that they needed to defend why they use the internet as if I was saying, how dare you use the internet, everybody should stop. It's interesting that people take it so personally as if you're attacking them. Well, I think it's very important that we have serious work that critiques technology and you need to encourage that work and my professional career is to encourage, I teach at MIT and try to encourage that work at MIT and other places and you don't want to, you know, it's interesting if when you write that work after a 15-year ramp up, you really do get, what is that old Saturday Night Live saying, you know, Jane, you ignorant slut. So I'm happy you asked that question. I'm happy to have given a pretty honest answer and now you should answer. Well, I think the one thing about, just to talk more about Sherry's experience, you know, I think people want to see a critic of technology as someone who is stuck in the old way of looking at things and hasn't, you know, fully embraced the new technology because they don't understand it and the great thing about Sherry's career is that she's been, she's way ahead of everybody, you know, and she was sitting there and, you know, with Eliza in 1978 or whatever that was, you know, and so it's not like she's coming at it as a Luddite at all. She's just coming at it as someone who's observing things. It's not like I don't understand it. Right, exactly. From my perspective, you know, I agree there's not a need in society for people to be optimistic about technology and the latest gadgets. We have plenty of that. What we don't have is a lot of optimism about our capacity as a society to solve important problems and come up with interesting new kind of collaborative architectures to solve those problems and we have this very pessimistic sense of how we're doing as a society on a lot of fronts that actually isn't warranted. We have a lot of economic problems right now, but we have a lot, as I start the book with that kind of long list of kind of social health trends, all of which have been steadily improving over the last 30 years, in fact over the last 100 years for the most part. And so I'm not trying to just be a cheerleader for technology and I think if I were to write a book just about technology, I would have much more of Sherry's tone in it, which I think is incredibly important. I'm trying to say that there's actually a new vision of how change happens and the institutions that are responsible for that change that, as I said, is inspired by technology but is not kind of reducible to it. What do you think about me and what can we be doing about these things that you're talking about, both pros and cons? I want to just address your leaving the internet. I personally don't like talking about internet addiction because I think it encourages people to say I have to leave the internet. I have to throw away my phone. I prefer to think of it in terms of our vulnerability to not using our phones wisely and going on a kind of digital diet to get the balance right. I think if you decide to leave the internet for a time of stepping back and reflection, I think that's to the good. But I hope, actually, that you use the time for reflection and kind of a re-centering and come back to the internet to make the internet a better place for all of us. That would be my hope for about how you use however long you stay away from the internet. That's just my perspective. I would say we miss you on the internet when we're having a huge party there and you're really missing out. Sherry and I are having a great time on the internet. You would not believe what's going on. Typical. The one year I leave the internet, everybody has a party. Thank you so much, guys. Our pleasure. Thank you for having us. Thank you.