Sherry Turkle (b. 1948) is professor of the social and cultural studies of science and technology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). She has written extensively about about psychoanalysis and culture and about the psychology of people’s relationships with technology, especially computer technology. Her books include Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978) and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984). This selection is from the introduction to her recent book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which is described on the book jacket as "a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities."
"Identity in the Age of Internet: Living in the MUD" (Composing Cyberspace p. 5) is
not available online.
1. Turkle introduces in this selection a number of terms that may be new to you but that we see increasingly in newspapers, magazines, and on TV -- terms such as (in the main text) cyberspace, virtual community, morphing, MUD, RL, cycling through, bot, windows, and (in the footnotes) wizard and flame war. Pick one or more terms unfamiliar to you and, after reviewing Turkle’s explanations or uses of them, try writing brief definitions. Compare your definitions with those offered fro some of these terms in the Cyberspace Glossary.
2. According to Turkle, what seem to constitute the "fundamental shifts in the way we create and experience human identity" in the age of the Internet (¶ 5)? How does computer technology contribute to those shifts?
3. What advantages and disadvantages do you see for the kinds of splitting of the mind or
distributing of the self discussed by Turkle? Based on this selection and your own
experience or other reading about computer technology, to what extent do you agree with
"Doug," the college junior who plays several different MUD characters, that RL (real
life) "is just one more window" (¶ 16)?
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