Alone Together

how technology is changing human connection

Brief: 

Create a full book cover (front, back and spine) using original imagery

Art Direction

Photography

Graphic DesigN

Typography

I came across MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle through watching an unsettling yet insightful TED Talk of her discussing the impact that technology has had on all of us:

Alone Together is Turkle’s third work after spending years studying the profound social effects of technology in the 21st century. Compared to her previous books, Alone Together stands apart because of its provocative and almost worrying insights. Much of this book is relatable to individuals who have grown up with technology. It explores two main facets of how technology is changing—and more specifically how it is changing us—through the rapid development of robots and our increasingly networked and mediated tendencies.

The title of this book (Alone Together) and its bold subtitle ("why we expect more from technology and less from each other") simply refers to how technology is infringing on the connection between human beings; it is introducing a new type of loneliness that is not the same as simple, quiet solitude. In a nutshell, Alone Together by Sherry Turkle is a powerful warning for us to contemplate how we really use our technology, and an encouragement for us to use it to enhance our human connections, as opposed to degrade it.

In response to the brief, I created an original, full book cover using self-created, provocative imagery to deliver a strong statement that goes with the content of Turkle's book. The tone and style of the image is robotic, ghostly and haunting. Two arms/people (in a reference to Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam) are being separated by a glowing screen of social media photographs—which is the spine of the book. Overall, the book cover gives both a sense of a longing for human connection, but also an eerie disconnection both physically on the book cover but also metaphorically.