Sherry Turkle: Introduction in Life on the Screen

Turkle, Sherry. “Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet.” In Life on the Screen, 9-26. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

content/form:That Turkle's text look at subjectivities and sensibilities makes it apt that she writes from the perspective of the first-person singular. Highly anecdotal (she goes as far as mentioning her intimate experiences of netsex), Turkle’s style of writing is a model for my approach. On the one hand, she uses her own experience as a kind of case study for her findings; on the other, her plain-speak prose have an immediacy that draws the reader into her world.

keywords:distributed self/selves (self as a multiple, distributed system), cyberspace, virtual cycling through windows, post-structuralist self, life practice, real life (RL), MUDs, authorship, post-modernism, modernism, modernist computational aesthetic marked by calculation, postmodernist computational aesthetic characterized by simulation, Carrot, bots, interface value, cyborgs.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle’s introduction closes with the following statement: “We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity. How all of this is unfolding is the subject of this book” (26). Written in 1995, this account is now slightly dated, not only by its content but also by Turkle’s cyberutopist tone, which perhaps helps to explain her conspicuous lack of criticality about technological invasion.

After describing “cyberspace” as the place we go when we read email and make airline reservations (?!), Turkle explores what she terms the shift from a modernist computational aesthetic marked by calculation to a postmodernist computational aesthetic characterized by simulation through MUDs. A student of post-structuralism (what she affectionately calls “French Lessons”), Turkle embraces the Internet as a place where postmodern philosophy is concretized through lived experience (17). If hypertext enacts Derrida, our simultaneous presence in several different windows reifies the self as fluid and multiple. Indeed, Turkle unpacks this understanding through a reconsideration of self as performed through various roles (Goffman). Instead of being a mother at home and a lawyer at work, “The life practice of windows is that of a decentred self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time” (14). While one could certainly argue there has always been significant bleed between our different zones of existence, there is something to be said about Turkle’s conviction that “Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including to our way of thinking about ourselves and other people” (26).

Of particular interest to my project is Turkle’s discussion of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), not only as spaces built, navigated and conversed by their members (meaning, these constituencies consume their own creativity; they produce for themselves and their community first and foremost) but also as spaces requiring the self-conscious authoring of alternative/additional selves. Putting ourself/selves in new relationship with our own identities, computer technology is simultaneously forging news sensibilities and subjectivities, implicit in which is the negotiation between both “the real world” (RL) and “the virtual world” and “the human” and “the machine.” Indeed, Turkle organizes the final sections of her discussion using a series of headers, including “We have used our relationships with technology to reflect on the human”(24). She goes on to observe, “After several decades of asking, “What does it mean to think? The question at the end of the twentieth century is, ‘What does it mean to be alive?’” (24). Other subheadings include: “We have learned to take things at internet value” (23). “We have used our relationships with technology to reflect on the human” (24). And “We have sought out the subjective computer” (26). To this end, Turkle’s introduction identifies the complex of issues including technology, philosophy, subjectivity and life practice at play in our day-to-day computer-mediated realities.

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