“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Winston Churchill observed about the symbiotic relationship between our architecture and ourselves. The same may be said for how we interact with our technologies.

Take a look at texting. The numbers seem to grow all the time but as of the Kaiser Foundation Study published in January 2010, young people were sending on average 3000 texts per month and were spending four times the amount of time texting than they were actually talking on their phones. And texting has created has influenced communications in several ways:

First of all, because people text on their cellphones, most must use a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen (Blackberry owners get to use the tiny physical keys, which is slightly more user friendly, I suppose.). In either case, the keys are much smaller than the average computer keyboard’s keys, so it’s easy to make mistakes. Plus, using the virtual keyboard also creates another level of awkwardness because you have to shift to a second (and on some cellphones a third) view to access all the characters on the QWERTY keyboard. In addition texting has the “short message service” limitation of 160 characters.

Then there’s the speed at which the communication is sent. Texts are delivered pretty much instantaneously. This leads people to think that they must respond at roughly the same speed. Delaying a response seems for many to imply that you’re ignoring the person contacted you.

The combination of a virtual awkward keyboard, the limited length, and the pressure to rapidly respond engenders the kind of shorthand of contracted words (Xlnt for excellent, rite for write), pictograms (b4 for before, @om for atom), initializations (N for no, LOL for laughing out loud, CWOT for complete waste of time), and nonstandard acronyms (anfscd for and now for something completely different, btdt for been there, done that, hhoj for ha, ha, only joking. Notice how the shorthand becomes more and more cryptic and we haven’t even talked about the emoticons—those variations on the ubiquitous smiley face using strings of punctuation

I know I’m old—way over thirty—but texting seems to me like the new pig Latin—another code designed to communicate secretly and to exclude others. In the case of pig Latin, the aim was to exclude parents. And for some ages the same may be true to today’s texting. It’s a silent and secret form of communication one can do in one’s lap under the dinner table. So essentially the technology of sending written messages via cell phones creates private languages.

Texting can be a convenient way to quickly notify someone, but the effects, especially for younger people, can be more far-reaching and burdensome and hardly convenient. Sherry Turkle met with one sixteen-year-old named Sanjay during her research for her new book Alone/Together. He expressed anxiety and frustration around texting. He turned off his phone while he spoke with Turkle for an hour. Turkle writes: “At the end of our conversation, he turns his phone back on. He looks at me ruefully, almost embarrassed. He has received over a hundred text messages as were speaking. Some are from his girlfriend, who, he says, “is having a meltdown.” Some are from a group of close friends trying to organize a small concert. He feels a lot of pressure to reply to both situations and begins to pick up his books and laptop so he can find a quiet place to set himself to the task. . . . “I can’t imagine doing this when I get older.” And then, more quietly, “How long do I have to continue doing this?” Sounds more like he’s facing a prison sentence rather than the joy of continuous connection  . . .

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?