For teenagers and early twenty-somethings, many of whom text on average one to three thousand times per month, the whole experience of texting is a conundrum: On the one hand it offers continual connections with friends; on the other hand, it leaves the texter with a poignant sense of isolation. Says one high schooler in Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, “Texting feels lonely . . . just typing by oneself all day.” And so it seems with much of 2.0 messaging—not just texting, but short-emailing, IM’ing, and Facebook as well.  Web 2.0 does have its attractions: Chiefly, it allows people to communicate without the messiness of real-time interactions. The mediation also puts a screen up. On the one side, writers can carefully construct their image, choosing when they say it and editing what they actually say and then making it all look oh-so-casual. On the other side of the screen, the receivers don’t know fully what the senders mean—there’s the lack of expression that comes with face-to-face or voice-to-voice communication. And receivers often don’t know how much attention or effort a writer has  invested in the message, whether the sender was multitasking, driving, carrying on a conversation, etc. Much of the general context of interpersonal communication is lost.

From the letter to the telegram to the telephone, we progressed in our technology toward better, more direct, and faster means of communicating with one another. But, as newer technologies intervened, starting with the answering machine, followed by voice mail and caller ID, people gained more control. At first this was simply a matter of being able to screen messages and retrieve them remotely.

But then we got email, cell phones, instant messaging, Facebook, tweets, and texting. The result is that we have many and various options for staying in ever closer touch with everybody we know, wherever they are—we don’t even have to know where they are in order to contact them. That’s the good part of the story. However there’s a whole lot more to this revolution in communication that makes interactions more complicated. Many people have re-assigned the bulk of their social lives to the digital realm. Some shun the telephone—not just their landlines but their cell lines as well. “Voice-to-voice” has become passé. “Can you hear me now?” practically irrelevant.

Testing and IM’ing have actually affected how many compose emails, so that what one communicates becomes spare, even truncated, cryptic, verging on the primitive. And the emoticons, which have become another code for roughly expressing or boldly dictating the tone a message is meant to be written in and understood, seem to be no more than a half-hearted effort to make up for the failures of the little language that is left.  

One of the most disturbing stories about human-robot interaction I’ve come across lately is recounted by Sherry Turkle in her new book, Alone Together. It is the story of a fifth-grader named Tia, who has spent some time with robots called My Real Baby and AIBO, both of which were first built and introduced around ten years ago. The baby doll robot could mew, respond to being fed, ask for more to eat, and in general create a fairly realistic simulacrum of a baby. AIBO was shaped like a small dog and was designed to develop from puppy-like behavior to adult-dog behavior, learning and reacting based on how the person treats it.

As a psychologist, Sherry Turkle is of course most interested in how people respond emotionally as they interact with robots. Fifth-grader Tia thinks about what might be possible: she believes robots might someday be advanced enough to be babysitters. In this role, they would be more “efficient and reliable” than people. It seems that Tia knows, as did so many other fifth graders whom Turkle interviewed, that people can be unreliable and unpredictable. You can’t always plan on their being there. Tia herself talks of being at home alone with her pregnant mother when her mother suddenly went into labor and the immediate issue became who was going to take care of Tia (fortunately there was a grandmother nearby). Still, Tia had been frightened by the uncertainty of the situation. A robot would always be there in case it was needed to take over the tending of children. “Having a robot babysitter would mean never having to panic about finding someone at the last minute,” Tia said.

In this sense observing the interaction between humans and robots becomes more of a Rorschach test. It can be less about what actually happens to a person emotionally when in contact with a robot and more about what surfaces about what is missing in a person’s own life. Turkle found that, like Tia, many of the fifth-graders who spent time with robots focus not about immediate reaction to the robot but to other deep-seated  concerns. Turkle observes: “Children talk about working mothers, absent fathers, and isolated grandparents. There is much talk of divorce. Some children wonder whether one of this robot’s future cousins might be a reasonable babysitter; something mechanical might be more reliable than the caretaking they have.”

For the many children Turkle interviewed who spend time alone in empty homes after school, a humanoid robot is an attractive companion—far better than the television or computer they usually resort to when alone. Like so many stories of the elderly using robots for companionship, the story of Tia is a story of loneliness and fear of abandonment. But is building better machines to mask, or even to mitigate, this basic human loneliness really the solution we want to advocate?