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10 Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self

Sherry Turkle

In the mid-1990s, a group of young researchers at the MIT Media Lab carried com-

puters and radio transmitters in their backpacks, keyboards in their pockets, and digital

displays embedded in their eyeglass frames. Always on the Interne t, they called them -

selves "cyborgs." The cyborgs seemed at a remove from their bodies. When their

burdensome technology cut into their skin, causing lesions and then scar tissue, they

were indifferent. When their encumbrances led them to be taken for the physically dis-

abled, they patiently provided explana tions. They were learning to walk and talk as

new creatures, learning to inhabit their own bodies all over again, and yet in a way

they were fading away, bleeding out onto the Net. Their experiment was both a re-

embodiment - a prosthetic consummation-and a disembodiment: a disappearance

of their bodies into still-nascent computational spaces.

Within a few years, the cyborgs had a new identity as the Media Lab's "Wearable

Computing Group," harbingers of embedded technologies while the rest of us clumsily

juggled cell phones, laptops, and PDAs. But the legacy of the MIT c-yborgs goes beyond

the idea that communications technologies might be wearable (or totable). Core ele-

ments of their experience have become generalized in global culture: the experience

of living on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others.

Today, the near-ubiquity of handheld and palm-size computing and cellular technol-

ogies that enable voice communication, text messaging, e-mail, and Web access have

made connectivity commonplace. When digital technologies first came onto the con-

sumer market in the form of personal computers they were objects for psychological

projection. Computers- programmable and customizable-came to be experienced as

a "second self" (Turkle 2005a). In the early twenty-first century, such language does

not go far enough; our new intimacy with communications devices compels us to

speak of a new state of the self, itself.

A New State of the Self, Itself

for the most part, our everyday languagefor talking about technology's effects assumes

a life both on and off the screen; it assumes the existence of separate worlds, plugged

122 I Sherry Turlde

and unplugged. But some of today's locutions suggest a new placement of the sub-

ject, such as when we say "I'll be on my cell," by which we mean "You can reach

me; my cell phone wi!ll be on, and I am wired in to (social) existence through it." On

my cell, online, on t he Web, on instant messaging- these phrases suggest a tethered self.

We are tethered to our "always-on/always-on-us"communications devices and the

people and things we reach through them: people, Web pages, voice mail, games, arti-

ficial inte lligences(non playergame characters, interactive online "bots"). These very

differe n t objects achieve a certain sameness because of the way we reach them. Ani-

mate and inanimate, they live for us through our tethering devices, always ready-to-

mind and hand. The self, attached to its devices, occupies a lintinal space between the

physical real and its digita l lives on multiple screens (Turner 1969). I once described

the rapid movements from physical to a multiplicity of digital selves through the met-

aphor of "cyc ling-through." With cell technology, rapid cycling stabilizes into a sense

of continual co-presence (Turkle 1995).

For example, in the past, I did not usually perform my role as mother in the presence

of my professional col]eagues. Now a call from my fiftee n-year-o ld daughter calls me

forth in this role. The presence of the cell phone, which has a special ring if my daugh-

ter calls, keeps me on the alert all day. Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I am psy-

chologically tuned to the connections that matter.

The Connections that Matte r

We arc witnessing a new form of sociality in which the connectedness that "matters"

is determined by our distance from working commun icationstechnolob 'Y- In creasingly,

what people want out of public spaces is that they offer a place to be private with teth-

ering technologies. A neig h borhood walk reveals a world of madmen and women, talk-

ing to themselves, sometimes shouting to themselves, little concerned with what is

around them, happy to have intimate conversations in public spaces. In fact, neighbor-

hood spaces themselves become liminal, not entirely public, n ot entirely private (Katz

2006, chapters 1 and 2).

A train station is no longer a communal space, but a place of social collection: teth-

ered selves come together, but do not speak to each other. Each person at the station is

more likely to be having an encounter with someone miles away than with the person

in the next chair. Each inhabits a private media bubble. Indeed, the presence of our

tethering media signal that we do not want to be disturbed by conventional sociality

with physically proximate individuals.

When people have personal cell phone conversations in put>lic spaces, what sustains

their sense of intimacy is the presumption that those around them treat them not only

as anonymous, but as close to disembodied. When individual hold cell phones (or

"speak into the air," indicating the presence of cells with earphone microphone),

Always-On/Always-On-You : The Tethered Self i 123

they are marked with a certain absence. They are transported to the space of a new

ether, virtualized. This "transport" can be signaled in other ways: when people look

down at their laps during meals or meetings, the change of gaze has come to signify

att ention to th eir BlackBerries or other small communications devices. They are fo.

cused on elsewhere.

The director of a program that places American students in Greek universities com-

plains tha t students are not "experiencing Greece" because th ey spend too much time

online, talking with their friends from home. I am sympathetic as she speaks, thinking

of the hours I spent walking with my fifteen-year-old daughter on a visit to Paris as she

"texted" her friends at home on her cell phone. I worry that she is missing an experi-

ence that I cherished in my youth, the experience of an undiluted Paris that came with

the thrill of disconnection from where I was from. But she is happy and tells me that

keeping in touch is "comforting" and that beyond this, her text mails to home consti-

tute a diary. She can look back at her texts and remember her state of mind at different

points of her trip. Her notes back to friends, translated from instant message shorthand

include "Saw Pont D'Avignon," "Saw World Cup Soccer in Paris," and "Went to Bor-

deaux." It is hard to get in too many words on the phone keyboard and there is no cul-

tural incentive to do so. A friend calls my daughter as we prepare for dinner at our Paris

hotel and asks her to lunch in Boston. My daughter says, quite simply: "Not possible,

but how about Friday." Her friend has no idea that her call was transatlantic. Emotion -

ally and socially; my daughter has not left home.

Of course, balancing one's physical and electronic connections is not limited to

those on holiday. Contemporary professional life is ri<:h in examples of people ignor-

ing those they are physically "with" to give priority to online others. Certain settings

in which this occurs have become iconic: sessions at international conferences where

experts from all over the world come together but do their e-mail; the communications

channels that are set up by audience members at conferences to comment on speakers'

presentations during the presentations themselves (these conversations are as much

about jockeying for professional position among the audience as they are about what

is being said at the podium). Here, the public presentation becomes a portal to discus-

sions that take people away from it, discussions that tend to take place in hierarchical

tiers- only certain people are invited to participate in certain discossions. As a member

of the audience, one develops a certain anxiety: have I been invited to chat in the

inner circle?

Observing e-mail and electronic messaging during conferences at exotic locations

compels our attention because it is easy to measure the time and money it takes to get

everyone physically toget her at such meetings. Other scenes have become so mundane

that we scarcely notice them: students do e-mail during classes; business people do

e-mail during meetings; parents do e-mail while playing with their children; couples

do e-mail at dinner; people talk on the phone and do their e-mail at the same time.

Once done surreptitiously, the habit of electronic co-presence is no longer something

124 I Sherry Turkle

people feel they need to hide. Indeed, being "elsewhere" than where you might be has

become something of a marker of one's sense of self-importance.

Phoning It In

The expression "phoning it in" used to be pejorative. It implied a lack of appropriate

attention to what might be novel about a task at hand. Now, as pure description, it

provides a metric for status; it suggests that you are important enough to deliver your

work remotely. The location of the hig h-status body is significant, but with connectiv-

ity comes multiple patt erns for its deployment. In one pattern, the high-statusbody is

in intensive contact with others, but spreads itself around the world, traveling. In an-

other pattern, the high-status body is in retreat, traveling to face-to-face contact in or-

der to maximize privacy and creativity. However the traveling body chooses to use its

time, it is always tethered, kept in touch through technical means. Advertisements for

wireless technolo gy routinely feature a handsome man or beaUJtiful woman on a beach.

The ad copy makes it clear that he or she is important and! working. The new dis-

embodiment does not ask you to deny your body its pleasures, but on the contrary,

to love your body, to put it somewhere beautiful while "you" work.

Our devices become a badge of our networks, a sign that we have them, that we are

wanted by those we know , the people on our " contact lists" and by the potential, as yet

unknown friends who wait for us in virtual places (such as facebook, MySpace, or

Friendster). It is not surprising that we project the possibility of love, surprise, amuse-

ment, and warmth onto our communications devices. Th rough them we live with a

heightened sense of potentia l relationships, or at least of new connections. Whether

or not our devi.ces are in use, without them we feel adrift- adrift not o nly from our

current realities but from our wishes for the futu re.

A call to a friend is a call to a known (if evolving) relationship. Going online to a so-

cial networking site offers a place to dream, sometimes fostering a sense that old rela-

tionships are dispensable. People describe feeling more attached to the site than to any

particular acquaintances they have on them. In psychodynamic terms, the site be-

comes a transference object: the place where friendships come from. "I toss people,"

says Maura, thirty-one, an architect, describing how she treats acquai ntances on Sec-

ond Life, an elaborate online social environment. Second Life offers the possibility of

an o nline parallel life (including a virtual body, wardrobe, real estate, and paying job).

"l know it gives me something of a reputation, but there are alwaysnew people. I don't

stay in relationships long." Maura continues: "There is always someone else to talk to,

someone else to meet. I don't feel a commitment." People who have deployed avatars

on Second Life stress th at the virtual world gives them a feeling of everyday renewal. "I

never know who I'll meet," says a thirty-seven-yea-rold housewife from the Bosto n

suburbs, and contrasts this pleasurable feeling with the routine of her life at home

with two toddlers.

Always-On/ Always-On-You: The Tethered Self i 125

From the early 1990s, game environments known as MUDs (for multiuserdomains)

and then MMRPGs (massivelymultiplayer role playing games) presented their users

with the possibility of creating characters and living out multiple aspects of self. Al-

though the games often took the forms of medieval quests, the virtual environments

owed their "holding power" to the opportunities that they offered for exploring iden-

tity. (Turkle 1995). People used their lives on the screen to work through unresolved or

partly resolved issues, often related to sexuality or intimacy. For many who enjoy on-

line life, it is easier to express intimacy in the virtual world than in "RL" or real life. For

thos e who arc lonely yet fearful of intimacy, onlinc life provides environments where

one can be a loner yet not alone, environments where one can have the illusion of

companionship without the demands of sustained, intimate friendship. Online life

emerged as an "identity workshop" (Bruckman 1992).

Thro ughout our lives, transitions (career change, divorce, retirement, children leav-

ing home) provide new impetus for rethinking identity. We never "graduate" from

working on identity; we simply work on it with the materials we have at hand at a par-

ticular stage of life. Online social worlds provide new materials. The plain may repre-

sent themselvesas glamorous; the introverted can try out being bold. People build the

dreamhouses in the virtual that they cannot afford in the real. They plant virtual

gardens. They take online jobs of great responsibility. They often have relationships,

partners and what they term "marriages" of great emotional importance.In the virtual

is this world the crippled can walk without crutches and the shy can improve their

chances as seducers.

It is not exact to think of people as tethered to their devices. People are tethered to the

gratifications offered by their online selves. These include the promise of affec'tion, con-

versation, a sense of new beginnings. And, there is vanity: building a new body in a game

like Second Life allows you to put aside an imperfect physical self and reinvent yourself

as a wonder of virtual fitness. Everyone on Second Life can have their own "look"; the

game enables a high level of customization, but everyone looks good, wearing designer

clothes that appear most elegant on sleek virtual bodies. Wit h virtual beauty comes

possibilities for sexual en counters th at may not be available in the physical real.

Thus, more than the sum of their instrumental functions, tethering devices help to

constitute new subjectivities. Powerful evocative ob jects for adults, they are even more

intense and compelling for adolescents, at that point in development when identity

play is at the center of life.

The Tethered Teen

The job of adolescence is centered around experimentation-with ideas, with people,

with notions of self. When adolescents play an online role playing game they often

use it to recast their lives. They may begin by building their own home, furnishing it

to their taste, not that of their parents, and then getting on with the business of

1 26 I Sherry Turtde

reworking in the virtual world what has not worked so well in the real. Trish, a thir- teen-

year-old who has been physically abused by her father, creates an abusive family on

Sims Online-but in the game her character, also thirteen, is physically and emo- tionally

strong. In sim1Ulation, she plays and replays the experience of fighting off her

aggressor. Rhonda, a sexually experienced girl of sixteen, creates an online innocent. "I

want Lo have a rest," she tells me and goes on to recall the movie Pleasantville in which

th e female lead character, a high school teenager, "gets to go to a town that only exists

from a TV show where she starts to be slutty like she is at home, but then she changes

her mind and starts to turn boys down and starts a new life. She practices being a dif-

ferent kind of person. That's what Sims Online is for me. Practice."

Rhonda "practices" on the game at breakfast, during school recess, and after dinner.

She says she feels comforted by her virtual life. The game does not connect her to other

people. She is tethered to the game by a desire to connect to herself.

ST: Are you doing anything different in everyday life (since playing Sims Online]? Rhonda : Not

really. Not very. But I'm thinkin g about breaking up with my boyfriend. I don't want to have sex

anymore but I would like to have a boyfriend. My character [in Sims Online) has boyfriends but

doesn't have sex. They help her with her job. I think to start fresh I would have to break up with

my boyfriend.

Rhonda is emotionatly tethered to the world of the Sims technology gives her access

to a medium in which she can see her life th rough a new filter, and possibly begin to

work through problems in a new way (Turkle 1995).

Adolescen ts create online personae in many ways: when they deploy a game avatar,

designa Web page, or write a profile for a social networking site such as Facebook. Even creating a playlist of music becomes a way of capturing one's personae at a mo-

ment in time. Multiple playlists reflect aspects of self. And once you have collected

your own music, you can make connections to people all over the world to whom

you send your songs.

Today's adolescents provide our first view of tethering in developmental terms. The

adolescent wants both to be part of the group and to assert individual identity, experi-

encing peers as both sustaining and constraining. The mores of tethering support

l,'I0up demands: among urban teens, it is common for friends to expect that their peers

will stay available by cell or instant message. In this social contract, one needs good

cause to claim time offline. The pressure to be always-on can be a burden. So, for exam-

ple, teenagers who need uninterrupted time for schoolwork resort to using their

parents' Internet accounts to hide out from friends. Other effects of the always-on/

always-on-you communications culture may be less easily managed and perhaps more

enduring.

Mark Twain mythologized the process of separation during which adolescents work

out their identities as the Huck Finn experience, the on-t he-Mississippitime of escape

Always-On/ Always-On-You : The Tethered Self i 127

from the adult world. The time on the river portrays an ongoing rite of passage during

which children separate from parents to become young adults, a process now trans-

formed by technology. Traditionally, ch ildren have internalized the adul ts in the ir

world before (or just as, or sho rtly after) the threshold of indepen dence is crossed. In

the technologically tethered variant, parents can be brought along in an intermediate

space, for example, the space created by the cell phone where everyoneis on speed

dial. In this sense, the generations sail down the river together_

When children receiveceil phones by theirparents, the gift usually comes with a

promise: children are to answer their parents' calls. This arrangement gives children

permission to do things - take trips to see friends, attend movies, go to the beach-

that would not be pcermitted without the phone-tethering to parents. Yet the

tethered child does not have the experience of being alone with only him or herself

to count on. There used to be a point for an urban child, usually between the ages of

eleven an d fourteen, when there was a "first time" to navigate the city alone. It was a

rite of passage that communicated "You are on your own and responsible. If you are

frightened, you have to experience those feelings." The cell phone buffers t his mo-

ment; the parent is "on tap." With the on-tap parent, tethered children t hin k differ-

ently about their own responsibilities and capacities. These remain potential, not

proven.

New Forms of Validation

I think of the inner history of technology as the relationships people form with their

artifacts, relationships that can forge new sensibilities. Tethering technologies have

their own inne r histories. For example, a mobile phone gives us the potential to com-

municate whenever we have a feeling, enabling a new coupling of "I have a feeling/

Get me a friend." This formulation has the emotional corollary, "I want to have a

feeling/ Get me a friend _" In eit he r ca s e, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be

alone, to reflect on and contain one's emotions. The anxiety that teens report when

they are without their cell phones or their link to the Internet may not speak so much

to missing the easy sociability with others but of missing the self that isconstituted in

theserelationships.

When David Riesm an remarked on the Amer ican turn from an inner- to an other-

directed sense of self by 1950 (Riesman 1950), he could not foresee how technology

coul d raise other -directedness to a new level. It does this by making it possible for

each of us to develop new patterns of reliance on others and transference relationships

to a suite of devices that makes the others available to us at literally a moment's notice.

Some people experienced this kind of transference to the traditional (landline) tele-

phone. The telephone was a medium through which to receive validation, an d some-

times the feelings associated with that validatio n were transferred to the telephone

128 I Sherry Turkle

itself. The cell phone takes this effect to a higher power because the device is always

available and there is a high probability that one will be able to reach a source of vali-

dation through it. It is understood that the validating cell conversation may be brief,

just a "check-in," but more is not necessarily desired.

The cell phone check-in enables the new other-directness. At the moment of having

a thought or feeling, one can have it validated. Or, one may need to have it validated .

And further down a continuum of dependency, as a thought or feeling is being

formed, it may need validation to become established. The technology does not cause a

new style of relating, but enables it. As we become accustomed to cell calls, e-mail,

and social Web sites, certain styles of relating self to other feel more natural. The vali-

dation (of a feeling already felt) and enabling (of a feeling that cannot be felt without

outside validation) are becoming commonplace rather than marked as childlike or

pathological. One moves from "l have a feeling/Get me a friend" to "I want to have a

feeling/Get me a friend."

The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut writes about narcissism and describes how some

people, in their fragility, turn other persons into "self-objects" to shore up their fragile

sense of self (Ornstein 1978). In the role of self-object, the other is experienced as part

of the self, thus in perfect tune with the fragile individual's inner state. They are there

for validation, mirroring. Technology increases one'5 options. One fifteen-year-old girl

explains: "I have a lot of people on my contact list. If one friend doesn't get it, I call

another." In Kohutian terms, this young woman's contact or buddy list has become a

list of spare parts for her fragile adolescent self.

Just as always-on/always-on-you connectiv ity enables teens to postpone independ-

ently mamiging their emotions, it can also make it difficult to assess children's level of

maturity, conventionally defined in terms of autonomy and responsibility. Tethered

children know that they have backup. The "check-in" call !has evolved into a new

kind of con tac t between parents and children. It is a call that says "lam line. You are

there. We are connected."

In general, the telegraphic text message quickly communicates a state, rather than

opens a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Althoug h the culture that grows up

around the cell is a talk culture (in shopping malls, supermarkets, city streets, cafes,

playgrounds, and parks cells are out and people are talking into them), it is not neces-

sarily a culture in which talk contributes to self-reflection. Today's adolescents have

no less need than previous generations to learn empathic skills, to manage and express

feelings, and to handle being alone. But when the interchanges to develop empathy

are reduced to the shorthand of emoticon emotions, questions such as "Who am I"?''

and "Who are you?" are reformatted for the small screen, and are flattened in the pro-

cess. High technology, with all its potential range and richness, has been put at the ser-

vice of telegraphic speed and brevity.

Always-On / Always-On-You: The Tethered Self i 129

Leaving the Time to Take Our Time

Always-on/always-on-you communications devices are seductive for many reasons,

among them, they give the sense that one can do more, be in more places, and control

more aspects of life. Those who are attached to BlackBerry technology speak about the

fascination of watching their lives "scroll by," of watching their lives as though watch-

ing a movie. One develops a new view of self when one considers the many thousands

of people to whom one may be connected. Yet just as teenagers may suffer from a me-

d ia envi ron ment that invites them to greater dependency, adults, too, may suffer from

being overly tethered, too connected. Adults are stressed by new responsibilities to

keep up with email, the nagging sense of always being behind, the inability to take a

vacation without bringing the office with them, and the feeling that they are being

asked to respond immediately to situations at work, even when a wise response re-

quires taking time for reflection, a time that is no longer available.

We are becoming accustomed to a communicationsstyle in which we receive a hasty

message to which we give a rapid response. Are we leaving enough time to take our

time?

Adults use teth ering technologies during what most of us think of as down time, the

time we might have daydreamed during a cab ride, waiting in line, or walking to work.

This may be time that we physiologically and emotionally need to maintain or restore

our ability to focus (Herzog et al. 1997; Kaplan 1995). Tethering takes time from other

activities (particularly those that demand undivided attention), it adds new tasks that

take up time (keeping up with e-mail and messages), and adds a new kind of time to

the day, the time of attention sharing, sometimes referred to as contin uous partial atten-

tion (Stone 2006). In all of this,we make our attention into our rarest resource, creating

increasingly stiff competition for its deployment, but we undervalue it as well. We deny

the importance of giving it to one thing and one thing only.

Continuous partial attention affects the quality of thought we give to each of our

tasks, now done with less mind share. from the perspective of this essay with its focus

on identity, continuous partial attention affects how people think about their lives and

priorities. The phrases "doing my e-mail" and "doing my messages" imply perfor-

mance rather than reflection. These are the performances of a self t ha t can be split

into constituent parts.

When media does not stand wamng in the background but is always there, waiting

to be wanted, the self can lose a sense of conscious choosing to communicate. The so-

phisticated consumer of tethering devices finds ways to integrate always-on/always-on-

you technology into the everyday gestures of the body. One BlackBerry user says: "I

glance at my watch to sense the time; I glance at my BlackBerry to get a sense of my

life." The term addiction has been used to describe this state, but this way of thinking

130 I Sherry Turkle

is limited in its usefulness. More useful is thinking about a new state of self, one that is

extended in a communications artifact. The BlackBerry movie of one's life takes on a

life of its own - wit h more in it than can be processed. People develop the sense that

they cannot keep up with their own lives. They become alienated from their own ex-

perience and anxious about watching a version of their lives moving along, scrolling

along, faster than they can handle. It is the unedited version of their lives; they are

not able to keep up with it, but they are responsible for it (Mazmanian 2005).

Michel Foucault wrote about Jeremy Benth am's Panopticon as emblematic of the sit-

uation of the individua.J in modern, "disciplinary" society (Foucault 1979). The Panop-

ticon is a wheel-likestructure with an observer (in the case of a prison, a prison guard)

at its hub. The architecture of the Panopticon creates a sense of being always watched

whether or not the guard is actually present. For Foucault, the task of the modem state

is to construct citizens who do not need to be watched, who mind the rules and them-

selves. Always-on/alway-son-you technology takes the job of self-monitoring to a new

level. We try to keep up with our lives as they are presented to us by a new disciplining

techn ology. We try, in sum, to have a self that keeps up with our e-mail.

Boundaries

A new complaint in family and business life is th at it is hard to know when one has the

attention of a BlackBerry user. A pa.rent, partner, or chlld can be lost for a few seconds

or a few minutes to an alternate reality. The shift of attention can be subtle;friends and

family arc sometimes not aware of the Joss until the person has "returned." Indeed,

BlackBerry users may not even know where their attention lies. They report that their

sense of self has merged with their prosthetic extensions and some see this as a new

"high ." But this exhilaration may be denying the costs of multitas king. Sociologists

who study the boundaries between work and the rest of life suggest that it is helpful

when people demarcate role shifts between the two. Their work suggests that being

able to use a BlackBerry to blur the line is problematic rather than a skill to be cele-

brated. (Clark 2000; Desrochers and Sargent 2003; Shumate and Fulk 2004). And cel-

ebrati ng the integration of remote communications into the flow of life may be

underestimating the importance of face-to-face conn ections (Mazmanian 2005).

Attention-sharing creates work environments fraught with new tensions over the

lack of primacy given to physical proximity. Face-to-face conversations are routinely

interrupted by cell phone calls and e-mail reading. Fifteen years ago, if a colleague

read mail in your presence, it was considered rude. These days, turning away from a

person in front of you to answer a cell phone has become the norm. Additionally, for

generations, business people have grown accustomed to relying on time in taxis, air-

ports, trains, and limousines to get to know each other and to discuss substantive

matters. The waiting time in client outer offices was precious time for work and the ex-

Always-On/A lways-On-You: The Tet hered Self I 131

change of news that created social bonds among professional colleagues. Now, thi ngs

have changed: professionals spen d taxi time on their cell phones or doing e-mail on

their PDAs. In the precious moments before client presentations, one sees consult-

ing teams moving around the periphery of waiting rooms, looking for the best place

for cell reception so that they can make calls. "My colleagues go to the ether

when we wait for our clients," says one advertising executive. "I think our presenta-

tions have suffered ." We live and work with people whose commitment to our pres-

ence feels incre<1si ng ly tenuous because they are tethered to more important virtual

others.

Human beings are skilled at creating rituals for demarcating th e boundaries between

the world of work and the world of family, play, and rel<1Xation. There are special times

(the Sabbath), special meals (the family dinner), special attire (the "armor" for a day's

labor comes off at home, whether it is t he businessperson's suit or the laborer's over-

alls), and special places (the dining room, the parlor, the bedroom, the beach). Now

always-on/always -on-me technology accompanies people to all these places, unde r-

mini ng the traditional rituals of separation.

There is a certain push back. Just as teenagers hide from hiends by using their

parents' online accounts to do homework, adults, too, find ways to escape from the

demands of tetheri ng: BlackBerries are left at the office on weekends or they are left in

locked desk drawers to free up time for family or leisure (Gan t and Kiesler 2001). "It

used to be my home was a haven; but now my home is a media center," says an archi-

tect whose clients reach him on his Internet-enabled cell. No longer a safe space or ref-

uge, people need to find places to hide.' There are technically none except long plane

rides where there is no cell or Internet access, and this, too, may be changing.

A Self Shaped by Rapid Response

Our technology reflects and shapes our values. If we think of a telephone call as a

quick-response system enabled by always-on/always-on-you technology, we can forget

there is a difference between a scheduled call and the call you make in reaction to a

fleeting emotion, because someone crossed your mind, or because someone left you

a message. The self that is shaped by this world of rapidrespones measures success by

calls made, e-mails an swered, and contacts reached. This self is calibrated on the basis

of what the technology proposes, by what it makes possible, and by what it makes

easy. But in the buzz of activity, there are losses that we are perhaps not ready to

sustain.

One is the technology-induced pressure for speed, even when we are considering

matters over which we should take our time. We insist that our world is increasingly

complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time

available for us to sit and think uninterrupted. BlackBerry users describe that sense of

132 I Sherry Turkle

encroachment of the device on their time. One says, "I don't have enough time alone

with my mind." Other phrases come up: "I have to struggle to make time to think." "I

artificially make time to think." "I block out time to think." In all of these statements

is the implicit formulation of an "I" that is separate from technology, that can put it

aside and needs time to think on its own. This formulation contrasts with a growing

reality of our lives lived in the continual presence of communications devices. This re-

ality has us, like the early MIT "cyborg" group, learning to see{)urselvesnot as separate

but as at one with our the machines that tether us to each other and to the informa-

tion culture. To put it most starkly: to make more "time" in the old-fashioned sense

means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture . But this is not

a simple proposition since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense

of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.

In the 1990s, as the Internet became part of everyday life, people began to create

multiple online avatars and used th em to shift gender, age, race, and class. The effort

was to create richly rendered virtual selves through which one could experiment with

identity by playing out parallel lives in constructed worlds. The world of avatars and

games continues, but now, alongside its pleasures, we use always-on/always-on-you

technology to play ourselves. Today's communications technology provides a social

and psychological GPS, a navigation system for tethered selves. One television pro-

ducer, accustomed to being linked to the world via her cell and Palm device, revealed

that for her, the Palm's inner spaces were where her self resides: "When my Palm

crashed it was like a death. It was more than I could handle. I felt as though I had lost

my mind."

Tethered: To Whom and to What?

Acknowledging our tethered state raises the question of to whom or to what we are

connected (Katz 2003). Traditional telephones tied us to friends, family, colleagues

from school and work, and commercial or philanthropic solicitations. Things are no

longer so simple. These days we respond to humans and to objects that represent

them: answering machines, Web sites, and personal pages on social networking sites.

Sometimes we engage with avatars that anonymously "stand in" for others, enabling

us to express ourselves in intimate ways to strangers, in part because we and they are

able to veil who we "really are." And sometimes we listen to disembodied voices-

recorded announcements and messages-or interact with synthetic voice recognition

protocols that simulate real people as they try to assist us with technical and adminis-

trative problems. We no longer demand that as a person we have another person as an

in terlocutor.On the In ternet, we interact with bots, anthropomorp hic programs that

are able to converse with us, and in online games we are partnered with nonplayer

characters, artificial intelligences that are not linked to human players. The games re-

Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self 1133

quire that we put our trust in these characters. Sometimes it is only these nonplayer

characters who can save om "lives" in the game.

This wide range of entities-human and not-is available to us wherever we are. I

live in Boston. I write this chapter in Pa.ris . As I travel, my access to my favorite avatars,

nonplayer characters, and social networking sites stays constant. There is a degree of

emotional security in a good hotel on the other side of the world, but for many, it can-

not compare to the constancy of a stable technological environment and the interac-

tive objects within it. Some of these objects are engaged on the Internet. Some are

interactive digital companions that can travel with you, now including robots that are

built for relationships.

Consider this moment: an older woman, seventy-two, in a nursing home outside of

Boston is sad. Her son has broken off his relationship with her. Her nursing home is

part of a study I am conducting on robotics for the elderly. I am recording her reactions

as she sits with the robot Pa.ro, a seal-likecreature, advertised as the first "therapeutic

robot" for its ostensibly positive effects on the ill, the elderly, and the emotionally

troubled. Paro is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human

voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is

treated- for example, it can sense if it is being stroked gently or with some aggression.

In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment,

comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him,

and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." And then

she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing,

she tries to comfort herself.

Psychoanalyticallytrained, I believe that this kind of moment, if it happens between

people, has profound therapeutic potential. What are we to make of this transaction as

it unfolds between a depressed woman and a robot? The woman's sense of being un-

derstood is based on the ability of computational objects like Paro to convince their

users that they are in a relationship. I call these creatures (some virtual, some physical

robots) "relat ional artifacts" (Turkle 1999; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005b;

2005c; 2006b; Turkle et al. 2006a). Their ability to inspire a relationship is not based on

their intelligence or consciousness but on their ability to push certain "Darwinian"

buttons in people (making eye contact, for example) that cause people to respond as

though they were in a relationship.

Do plans to provide relational robots to children and the elderly make us less likely

to look for other solutions for their care? If our experience with relational artifacts is

based on a fundamentally deceitful interchange (artifacts' ability to persuade us that

they know and care about our existence), can it be good for us? Or might it be good

for us in the "feel good" sense, but bad for us in our lives as moral beings? The answers

to such questions are not dependent on what computers can do today or what they are

likely to be able to do in the future. These questions ask what we will be like, what kind

134 I Sherry Turkle

of people are we becoming, as we develop increasingly intimate relationships with

machines.

In Comp11ter Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote about his experi-

ences with his invention, ELIZA, a computer program that engaged people in a dia-

logue similar to that of a Rogerian psychotherapist (Weizenbaum 1976). It mirrored

one's thoughts; it was always supportive. To the comment "My mother is making me

angry," the program might respond "Tell me more about yom mother," or "Why do

you feel so negatively about your mother?" Weizenbaum was disturbed that his stu-

dents, fully knowing they were talking with a computer program, wanted to chat with

it , indeed, wanted to be alone with it, Weizenbaum was my colleague at MIT; we

taught courses togethe:r on computers and society. At the time his book came out, I

felt moved to reassure him about his concerns. ELIZA seemed to me like a Rorschach;

users did become involved with the program, but in a spirit of "as if ." The gap between

program and person was vast. People bridged it with attribution and desire. They

though t: "I will talk to this program 'as if' it were a person"; "I will vent, I will rage, I

will get things off my chest." At the time, ELIZA seemed to me no more threatening

than an interactive diary. Now, thirty years later, I ask myself if I underestimatedthe

quality of the connection . Now, computatio na l creatures have been designed tha t

evoke a sense of mutual relating. The people who meet relatiortal artifacts are drawn

in by a desire to nurture them. And with nurturance comes the fantasy of reciproca-

tion. People want the creatures to care about them in return. Very little about these

relationships seems to be experienced "as if."

Rel.itional artifacts are the latest chapter in the trajectory of the tethered self. We

move from technologies that tether us to people to those that are able to tether us to

the Web sites and avatars that represent people. Relational artifacts represent their pro-

grammers but are given autonomy and primitive psychologies; they are designed to

stand on their own as creatures to be loved. They are potent ob jects-to -th in k-with for

asking the questions, posed by all of the machines that tether us to new socialities:

"What is an authentic relationship with a machine'!" " Wha t are machines doing to

our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship"?"

Methodology Note

I have studied relational artifacts in the lives of children and the elderly since 1997, be- ginning with the simple Tamagotchis that were available at every toy store to Kismet

and Cog, advanced robots at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Paro, a

seal-like creature designed specifically for therapeutic purposes. Along the way there

have been forbies, AIBOS, and My Real Babies, the latter a baby doll that like the Paro

has changing inner states that respond to the quality of its human care. More than two

hundred and fifty subjects have been involved in these studies. My investigations of

Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self I ns

computer-mediated communication date from the mid-1980s and have followed the

media from e-mail, primitive virtual communities, and Web-based chat to cell technol -

ogy, instan t messaging, and social networking. More than four hundred subjects have

been involved in these studies. My work was done in Boston and Cambridge and their

surrounding suburbs. The work on robotics investigated children and seniors from a

range of ethnicities and social classes. This was possiblebecause in every case I was pro-

viding robots and other relational artifacts to my informants. In the case of the work

on communications technology, I spoke to people 1 children, adolescents, and adults,

who already had computers, Web access, mobile phones, BlackBerries, et cetera. This

necessarily makes my claims about their lives in th e always-on/always-on-you culture

not equally generalizable outside of the social class curren tly wealthy enough to afford

such things.

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