The human factor redux

Book review of The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

With millions of people confined to their homes today with their electronic and digital gadgets as the only means of dialogue with the outside world, one immediately thinks of Sherry Trukle and her pioneering works Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit ( 1985) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), which showed us how the intimacy with computers, screens and robots had a bearing on the identities that users came to acquire. As a freshly recruited faculty at a newly conceived programme in Science Technology and Society at MIT in the early seventies,