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Sherry Turkle on time and the pandemic: “a liminal time, a time out of time”

Sherry Turkle on time and the pandemic: “a liminal time, a time out of time”

Sherry Turkle, author and professor, spoke about her memoirs on Fresh Air. An astonishing story. She ended with a reflection on the pandemic that really resonated:

… this experience, you know, of the pandemic, it’s what the great anthropologist Victor Turner called a liminal time. It’s like a time out of time. It’s a time betwixt and between where you get a chance – the rules are broken and you get a chance to reassess what you really need. And I think that’s what we have now. We have a chance to come back and not be wowed by technology and reassess the virtue of the human and relationships and to act more deliberately in our relationship with them.

Another way I would put that is that we’ve had a chance to kind of step away from our country and see it at a distance in so many areas of life – in race relations, in political relations, in gender relations and also in our relationships with our technology. And seeing things fresh and seeing them anew gives us a chance to come back and act more deliberately in all of these areas. And that’s why, even though this has been such a frightening and alienating experience, I think it also is a chance to start fresh. And I end up feeling optimistic about the future.

You don't get what you expect, you get what you inspect.