THE EMPATHY DIARIES

A beautifully wrought memoir about how emerging technology makes us think and feel.

In her latest, renowned MIT professor Turkle achieves something unique: a near-perfect melding of personal and intellectual memoir. The author digs deep into her childhood to understand where her lifelong thirst for understanding the interface between technology and humanity was born. She begins with a reunion with her long-vanished father and then moves into a crystalline recollection of her upbringing in postwar New York. The author was much loved by her grandparents and her aunt, who instilled in her a confidence in her gifts. Her relationship with her mother, who married again after divorcing Turkle’s father, was more fraught, but in a series of slow reveals, readers come to understand her mother’s behavior. The story only gets more interesting as Turkle chronicles her years at Radcliffe and blossoming as a researcher and intellectual. A clinical psychologist with a doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard, she faced stiff resistance to her determination to study as an ethnographer the impact of technology on humans. Once she moved to MIT, many colleagues weren’t interested in—or disbelieved—the evidence she gathered on how technology changes and isolates us. Denied tenure, she appealed, forcing open the door to the inner sanctum of MIT professors. In the final chapter, Turkle writes that our immersion in the digital world is causing us to lose true solitude, “where the capacity for empathy is born.” Her book was finished before the pandemic both heightened our isolation and increased our dependence on digital tools. What a gift that this brilliant scholar is still at MIT, writing and studying; perhaps her next book will investigate the current age. Anyone who studies, develops, or produces technology—and anyone who uses it—will gain crucial insights from this profound meditation on how technology is changing us.

A masterful memoir by a pioneering researcher and incisive thinker.