Computer mediated communication technologies allows global communication on a level never before experienced. But there influence on a personal level can be just as profound. Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen, suggests computers make an excellent metaphor for understanding the postmodern view of identity. Turkle is a professor of sociology at MIT who has written previous books about both French psychoanalytic theory and the subjective side of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. In Life on the Screen she attempts to combine these two aspects of her research, describing computers as "objects-to-think-with" - both an embodiment of and metaphor for postmodern life (47). She sees people as "using computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationship, sexuality, politics, and identity." Turkle recognizes the computer's ability to serve as a catalyst for boundary transgressions. She sees computers as aiding in the erosion of boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple. She suggests that by reaching a point where we describe the brain and the computer in terms of each other "we have reached a cultural watershed" (26).
Turkle's background is in sociology and psychology. Many of her theories derive from her personal experience with French psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Jacques Lacan. Turkle's "French lessons," as she called them, laid the groundwork for her abstract understanding of postmodernism and poststructuralism. These are philosophies that emphasize the world as fragmented, decentered, fluid, nonlinear, and opaque (17). The postmodernists believe that "the self is constituted by and through language" and that "each of us is a multiplicity of parts" (14). Postmodernists also recognize the power of play. It is through play that learning occurs. It is, therefore, not so ironic to Turkle that some of the most intriguing and evocative uses for computers have evolved through play.
Turkle divides her book into three parts, each examining a different aspect of technology and the influence is has had on the people she has interviewed. She then uses these examples to construct a general model of identity that has its roots in postmodern theory, but has found daily application by people using CMC. In the first section, "Seduction of the Interface," she deals with the evolution of computer interfaces and uses this as a jumping off point to explore key concepts of postmodern thought and how they differ from the modernist world-view. She compares modernism to DOS, the original interface for computers like the Apple II and postmodernism to the graphical interface of the Apple Macintosh, noting how this shift in interface is representative "of a larger shift in meaning of transparency." Using the interface metaphor, the traditional definition of transparency is represented by the ability to "open the hood" and interface with the early computers at a hardware level. The newer definition is represented by the interface of the Macintosh which is friendly and intuitive interface, suggesting there is no need to view what is happening below the surface. This movement from depth to surface is at the heart of both the shift in the definition of transparency and the shift from modern to postmodern thought (42).
Bricolage is another topic Turkle infuses into her discussion of interfaces. This is a term she adopted from Claude Levi-Strauss to describes the process "by which people use the objects around them to develop and assimilate ideas" (48). Bricolage can be used to describe the process of compiling facts on stacks of note cards to write a thesis or the way in which a computer, originally purchased as a tool, can turn into a tutor of new ways of thinking and interacting with machines. This abstract style of organization allows insight into a way of thinking that is not unitary but fragmentary, placing the individual in a relationship with the subject matter that "has more the flavor of a conversation than a monologue" (51).
The second section of Life on the Screen, "Of Dreams and Beasts" explores how people relate to machines that posses or seem to posses intelligence. By exploring the evolution of artificial intelligence and artificial life Turkle is also able to explore the evolution of psychological theory. Here rule-based AI, such as expert systems and original Eliza program, are paralleled with Cognitive and Behavioral theories of psychology that deal with intelligence as centered, logical, and rule-based (127). She differentiates this model with the "emergent" model of AI which "depends on the way local interactions among decentralized components can lead to overall patterns" (138). It is a model in which "intelligence [resides] in the interaction of multiple fragments ... figuratively ... in a society of mind" (130). This model is then used as metaphor for discussing the work of Jacques Lacan, who saw the idea of a centralized, unitary identity as a facade "we create with smoke and mirrors"(139). Turkle's final point is that much of AI's power to change perceptions of identity lies in its the language and images that surround it. Artificial intelligence is an appealing object-to-think-with, "[preparing] the way for the idea of mind as machine to become an acceptable part of everyday life" (142). With this warning Turkle enters into the "worlds" of Artificial Life. She explores the properties necessary for an object to qualify as artificial life then gives several examples from the chronology of A-life evolution. However, her main interest here is way that attempts to define artificial life are causing a redefinition of "life." She sees the language that frames AI and A-life as seductive, but warns that "calling a game Life does not make it alive" (156).
The final section of Turkle's book uses aspects of CMC and the Internet as springboards to construct a new, working model of identity. She describes people as being in a "complex dance of acceptance and rejection" in their relations to computers. As images of humans and computers come closer together, there is a blurring of borders in which computers become extensions of humanity in a sequence of "cyborg couplings." Turkle suggests that CMC's ability to extend our range of interaction is appealing in a society that "has become increasingly fragmented" (177-8). The majority of this section is dedicated the explanation and exploration of Multi-User Dungeons, commonly called MUDs. For Turkle, MUDs are appealing in both the freedom of constructed identity they offer and the aspect of play that is inherent to them. Turkle stresses the importance of play in "our individual effort to build identity" (184). She sees the anonymity and constructed identity of MUDs as "[providing] ample room for individuals to express unexplored parts of themselves," sometimes as multiple characters simultaneously. The experience is parallel to traditional role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, but MUDs do more to "blur the line between the game and real life" (186). Identity is divided in such a way that MUDders "come to experience their lives as cycling through the real world and a series of virtual ones" (189). This view of identity is multiple and fragmented in a way that contradicts the meaning, and even the very root, of the word "identity," which literally means "the same" (185). Real life and MUD life blur together along the boundaries "between self and game, self and role, self and simulation" (192).
The extended metaphor of MUDs as playgrounds for identity serves as the foundation for Turkle's final model for identity - a bricolage of concepts based in the abstract theory of postmodernism and the concrete objects-to-think-with she has presented throughout the book. She calls her construct the "flexible self" and argues it as the median between "the extremes of unitary self and [multiple personality disorder]" (261). This is a view of a self that is able to maintain the fluidity of multiplicity without losing the coherence perceived in unitary identity. She incorporates social psychologist Kenneth Gergen's concept of the "saturated self" in which individuals "colonize each others brains," adopting and influencing aspects of each others identity "in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction" where "the test of competence is not so much the integrity of the whole but the apparent correct representation appearing at the right time, in the right context, not to the detriment of the rest of the internal 'collective'" (256-7). The flexible self is made up of individual fragments that interact with each other and the outside world in state of continuous cycling and reconstruction. She stresses the importance of open communication between the different aspects of self in differentiating this model from multiple-personality disorder, which is defined by the rigid walls between identities that are inherently necessary to this defense mechanism (261). This is model of multiple self that is fluid and constructed but healthy. To Turkle this describes a new definition of mental health "described in terms of fluidity rather than stability."
The view of identity Sherry Turkle presents from her experience with computers is, in many ways, oppositional to the more traditional view Howard Rheingold has developed in his experience with virtual communities. However, neither can really be argued to be more right than the other. To deny the multiplicity of identity Turkle describes is to deny the power of language and play to advance our understanding of ourselves as humans. To deny the ties to the sensations of the body deny virtual identities their power to describe and affect the physical selves that construct them. The two realities exist in a relationship that shares the irony of Donna Haraway's cyborg myth of identity. They are "incompatible things [held] together because both or all are necessary and true" (267-8).
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