"You don't live for your communications with technology, you live for your communications with people," Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author, told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night's episode of "The Colbert Report."
Promoting her new book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other" (Basic Books, $28.95), Turkle gamely faced Colbert's devil's advocacy, telling him, "we need to put technology in its place."
In in an age when parents obsess on their Facebook profiles rather than engaging their children at the breakfast table and texting pedestrians are toppling into shopping mall fountains, Prof. Turkle makes a variety of valid points.
Colbert — who quipped that he's cool with texting at funerals and countered, "without the latest iPhone, what is there to live for?" — was way funnier.
More about technology and the way we live now:
- Jon Stewart says it all about the Verizon iPhone
- Internet not destroying society, Pew study shows
- Forget the news! Twitter is now a game
Helen A.S. Popkin writes about the Internet ... a lot. Meet her there on Facebook and/or Twitter— or skip the one-on-one and join the conversation at our Technolog Facebook page.
