Sherry Terkel founded and directs the intriguingly titled MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

She made waves with her book alone together. It was widely reviewed as a call to unplug our digital gadgets.

But as I've read her and listened to her speak, I hear Sherry Terkel saying something more thought-provoking

that we can lead examined lives with our technology.

Each of us in our everyday interactions can choose between letting technology shape us and shaping it towards human purposes,

even towards honoring what we hold dear. Engaging Sherry Terkel on this is full of usable ideas,

from how to declare email bankruptcy to teaching our children the rewards of solitude,

a core human experience more elusive for their generation.

And in technology as in life it seems, discontent can be the beginning of wisdom.

I'm optimistic because the people who I interviewed sense that there's something amiss.

There are a lot of people out there who they love their phones, they love their music,

they love listening to their books on there and be three players. I'm not as do I,

but there's something about this that has just tipped out of balance and they want to get it right.

Reflecting on our technology, I'm Christa Tippett, this is on being from APM American Public Media.

Sherry Terkel is Abby Rockefeller-Mase, professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

Her interest as she puts it is in the subjective side of technology.

How it affects our attention and relationships, our sense of reality, and even of aliveness.

I interviewed Sherry Terkel in 2011.

One of her early books, published in the Orwellian Year of 1984,

celebrated the potential synergy of computers, selfhood, and the human spirit.

That was followed by other writing on identity in the age of the internet and simulation and its discontents.

Sherry Terkel has studied human interaction with new generations of sociable robots

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