IT Blog

Sherry Turkle would prefer not to tweet.

“My publisher said, ‘Look, you have to tweet, you have to force yourself, you have to learn how to do that!’ ” Her publisher being the one that just released The Empathy Diaries, a gripping, elegant memoir in which the psychologist and scholar and critic of technology finally puts herself under the microscope. The megaphone of social media is more complicated. “I’m really not very good at it, so I just keep saying things like ‘surreal that . . .!’ ‘Thrilled to see my exciting . . .’ I never say that. I feel like such a jerk. And then I started an Instagram account. And I said, ‘I can’t do this. . . . I mean, I barely can keep up with my email.’ And considering all the people we have to be, it was just one extra person that I couldn’t attend to right now.” Though, she admits, “Once the pandemic is over, I may change my mind.”

Minds and selves and how they change have long been fascinations for Turkle, the Abby…