Alone Together Read Online Free PDF Page B

about humans. So, each Furby is an anthropologist of sorts and wants to relate to people. They ask children to take care of them and to teach them English. Furbies are not ungrateful: they make demands, but they say, “I love you.”
    Furbies, like Tamagotchis, are “always on,” but unlike Tamagotchis, Furbies manifest this with an often annoying, constant chatter. 1 To reliably quiet a Furby, you need a Phillips screwdriver to remove its batteries, an operation that causes it to lose all memory of its life and experiences—what it has learned and how it has been treated. For children who have spent many hours “bringing up” their Furbies, this is not a viable option. On a sunny spring afternoon in 1999, I bring eight Furbies to an afternoon playgroup at an elementary school in western Massachusetts. There are fifteen children in the room, from five to eight years old, from the kindergarten through the third grade. I turn on a tape recorder as I hand the Furbies around. The children start to talk excitedly, greeting the Furbies by imitating their voices. In the cacophony of the classroom, this is what the robotic moment sounds like:
    He’s a baby! He said, “Yum.” Mine’s a baby? Is this a baby? Is he sleeping now? He burped! What is “be-pah?” He said, “Be-pah.” Let them play together. What does “a lee koo wah” mean? Furby, you’re talking to me. Talk! C’mon boy. Good boy! Furby, talk! Be quiet everybody! Oh, look it, he’s in love with another one! Let them play together! It’s tired. It’s asleep. I’m going to try to feed him. How come they don’t have arms? Look, he’s in love! He called you “Mama.” He said, “Me love you.” I have to feed him. I have to feed mine too. We love you, Furby. How do you make him fall asleep? His eyes are closed. He’s talking with his eyes closed. He’s sleeptalking. He’s dreaming. He’s snoring. I’m giving him shade.
    C’mon, Furby, c’mon—let’s go to sleep, Furby. Furby, shh, shh. Don’t touch him. I can make him be quiet. This is a robot. Is this a robot? What has this kind of fur? He’s allergic to me. It’s kind of like it’s alive. And it has a body. It has a motor. It’s a monster. And it’s kind of like it’s real because it has a body. It was alive. It is alive. It’s not alive. It’s a robot.
     
    From the very first, the children make it clear that the Furby is a machine but alive enough to need care. They try to connect with it using everything they have: the bad dreams and scary movies that make one child see the Furby “as a monster” and their understanding of loneliness, which encourages another to exhort, “Let them play together!” They use logic and skepticism: Do biological animals have “this kind of fur?” Do real animals have motors? Perhaps, although this requires a new and more expansive notion of what a motor can be. They use the ambiguity of this new object to challenge their understanding of what they think they already know. They become more open to the idea of the biological as mechanical and the mechanical as biological. Eight-year-old Pearl thinks that removing the batteries from a Furby causes it to die and that people’s death is akin to “taking the batteries out of a Furby.”
    Furbies reinforce the idea that they have a biology: each is physically distinct, with particular markings on its fur, and each has some of the needs of living things. For example, a Furby requires regular feeding, accomplished by depressing its tongue with one’s finger. If a Furby is not fed, it becomes ill. Nursing a Furby back to health always requires more food. Children give disease names to Furby malfunctions. So, there is Furby cancer, Furby flu, and Furby headache.
    Jessica, eight, plays with the idea that she and her Furby have “body things” in common, for example, that headache. She has a Furby at home; when her sisters pull its hair, Jessica worries about its pain: “When I pull my hair it really