The full quote (by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle) is: “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” I came across it near the end of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants. (More on that in a later post.) Mr. Kelly beautifully captures my own feelings about technology:

“I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the  web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo –a thing one plugs into– and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of hits human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smell like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.”

“In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown.” Who can ask for more.