In The Empathy Diaries, clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle skillfully merges her intriguing personal history and impressive professional journey to deliver a thought-provoking reminder of how science and technology can cause people to forget what makes them human. Turkle is a distinguished professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her message is timely and persuasive. As she points out, technology treats humans as though we are objects, and we get into the habit of objectifying one another as bits of data. But only shared vulnerability and human empathy allow people truly to understand each other.
The Empathy Diaries offers beautifully crafted, animated accounts of an emotionally rich but curiously secretive Brooklyn childhood in which Turkle's biological father's identity and whereabouts were forbidden topics of conversation. Through an eventual relationship with this absent scientist father, and her marriage to artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert, Turkle witnessed firsthand how easily fascination with technology diverts well-intentioned people away from empathy's simple human truths.
Encouraged by a mother, aunt and grandparents whose courageous sacrifices propelled her soaring academic success at Radcliffe and Harvard, Turkle (Alone Together; Reclaiming Conversation) found her calling as an empathy activist who advocates for a restraint on technology dependence, despite her front-row seat to the digital revolution at MIT in the '70s. Readers will enjoy the anecdotes that chart her remarkable journey, especially Turkle's entertaining account of hosting a young Steve Jobs for dinner after he launched the Apple II computer. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer