Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What is emerging, Turkle argues, is a new sense of identity, one which is de-centred and multiple. She describes the trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experience of virtual environments.
Going further back, Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner talks about the beginning of the Internet, which was created some time before the WWW?
If you want to go all the way back, Janet Abbate’s Inventing The Internet really takes it all the way back to the Eisenhower administration and the very beginnings of electronic computers.
Where Wizards Stay Up Late has a sort of Harry Potter-type ring to it. Is Katie Hafner talking more about the dark origins of the Net?
Yeah, well, it all gets pretty dark. But I would characterise the difference more as Abbate being more technically fluent and Hafner more interested in the human story of the personalities that gave rise to the Internet. Abbate really pursues it all the way back, and Hafner picks it up more in the 60s. Both of them emphasise what a mixed bag the Internet was; this bizarre collaboration between the military, academia and telecommunication industries produced something that we perceive as a natural resource almost, but which, in fact, was cobbled together in a very happenstance way, and there are a lot of accidents that contributed to the way it’s set up right now.
Tell us about Sherry Turkle’s Life On The Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet.
Turkle is a brilliant observer of the online world, and what makes the Net incredibly interesting is that it was never intended to be a social medium. They created this kind of pipeline for trading hard data between scientists and sharing computer resources in the military and for some reason we insane people decide to start pouring other things down that pipeline, like, for example, our social lives, and Turkle is the best living observer of the way in which pushing your social life through that medium, that pipeline, distorts it. And in some way it distorts it in a way that’s very intoxicating, it’s very liberating – identity becomes much more of an elastic phenomenon over the Net. And yet it also attenuates it. There are ways in which interpersonal relationships over the Net are different from ‘RL’ [real life] relationships. There are ways in which they are richer and ways in which they are more impoverished.
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Lev Grossman is an American writer of fantasy fiction and thrillers. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling fantasy novels, The Magicians and The Magician King, and is a senior writer and book critic at Time magazine
Where would you like to start?
With a book by a professor at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] called Sherry Turkle: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, which was published in 1995. It was really one of the first academic and, even more, one of the first popular and accessible looks at how the web is transforming who we are, and how we view ourselves. Ultimately, what she postulates is that, because we’re interacting via computer-mediated communication, because this internet is in many ways a faceless medium, we use this as an opportunity to express ourselves and our identity in new ways: in ways that perhaps we’d wanted to express ourselves but, because of our being in communities and experiencing real world consequences, that we don’t. For example there was a research study done in the 1960s that identified that people will open themselves up to a stranger on a train and tell them deep personal information they would never tell their closest friends, partially because they have this sense that they can confess.
This is something that has existed throughout history, of course – like the Catholic confessional, there’s a kind of human instinct to divulge your deepest secrets – so what Turkle did was to look at some of these online communities. And in this book she created a really compelling series of arguments and stories about how these spaces are transforming how we present ourselves, and what it is we are able to do with this anonymous environment. For that reason I just absolutely fell for it – it was so unbelievably eye-opening.
Isn’t 1995 pretty early for this kind of a study?
Absolutely, although academics tend to be early adopters of new technologies, and the original internet connected academic institutions. Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even economists: anybody who was looking at human sciences really glommed on to this, and started to observe emergent community and communication experiences in these spaces, even pre-web – this is when people were using bulletin-board systems and not the nice shiny browsers that we’re using today. So people were already thinking about virtual group dynamics in this space at a very early stage. Interestingly, Turkle now seems to have fallen out of love with her old theories and when we interviewed her for The Virtual Revolution she was a lot more cynical and a lot less welcoming of many of the ideas that she presented in Life on the Screen.
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Aleks Krotoski is a television presenter and journalist, who writes about technology and interactivity. She wrote a column on technology for The Guardian, and now presents their weekly technology podcast and blogs on guardian.co.uk. In February 2010, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC2, and she is also the New Media Sector Champion for the government’s business arm, UKTI. She completed her PhD thesis in social psychology in 2009, which examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web.
