Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland speaks with Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR’s On Point, about his study examining friendship. “If you’re trying to lose weight…50 percent of the time you are likely to reach out to people who really actually aren’t going to help that much,” Pentland explains, adding that people should be looking to mutual friendships for support.
In an article for The New Yorker, Frank Rose features “The City of Tomorrow”, a new book by Prof. Carlo Ratti and graduate student Matthew Claudel. Rose writes that the city Claudel and Ratti envision is “a hybrid of the digital and the physical, a ‘triumph of atoms and bits’ that yields a sort of augmented urban reality.”
The Washington Post's Courtney Kueppers writes about the importance of disconnecting from technology, even if only briefly. She quotes Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book to emphasize her point: “To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, at least some of the time.”
Deepa Seetharaman writes for The Wall Street Journal about Prof. Sinan Aral’s research on the popularity of social media messaging applications. Aral found that people are three times more likely to try an app if invited by private message and 17 percent more likely to repeatedly use the application.
In an article for New Scientist, Liz Else writes about Prof. Sherry Turkle’s new book, in which she calls for people to put down their phones and talk to one another in person. Else writes that Turkle “is really making a passionate bid for us to remain human in the way we always have been.”
Boston Globe reporter Amy Sutherland speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her love of books and the importance of reading. “If you don’t read you lose the capacity for sustained concentration,” says Turkle. “We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour about her book, which explores how technology is impacting relationships. Turkle argues that people need to put down their phones and talk to each other “because it’s in conversation…that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.”