The Tethered Self: Technology Reinvents Intimacy and Solitude

Abstract

When I first came to MIT, in 1976, at the very birth of the personal computer culture, even the most cutting-edge faculty did not know what the new “home computers” would do. It did not seem that many people would want them for writing; they could be used for tax preparation, certainly, and there would be a market for simple games. But beyond that? I have been a witness to the birth of the personal computer culture, with its intense one-on-one relationships with machines, and then to the development of the networked culture, with people using the computer to communicate with each other. In my most recent work on the revolutions in social networking and sociable robotics, I see a world of new possibilities as well as perils. Technology is the architect of our intimacies, but this means that as we text, Twitter, e-mail, and spend time on Facebook, technology is not just doing things for us, but to us, changing the way we view ourselves and our relationships. These days, we are on our e-mail, our games, our virtual worlds, and social networks. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we totally intrude on each other, but not in “real time,” some of us sending many thousands of texts a month. And that’s not counting our Twitters, e-mail, instant messages, or social networking messages and postings. When we misplace our mobile devices we become