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From Amazon
Sherry Turkle is rapidly becoming the sociologist of the Internet, and that's beginning to seem like a good thing. While her first outing, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, made groundless assertions and seemed to be carried along more by her affection for certain theories than by a careful look at our current situation, Life on the Screen is a balanced and nuanced look at some of the ways that cyberculture helps us comment upon real life (what the cybercrowd sometimes calls RL). Instead of giving in to any one theory on construction of identity, Turkle looks at the way various netizens have used the Internet, and especially MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions), to learn more about the possibilities available in apprehending the world. One of the most interesting sections deals with gender, a topic prone to rash and partisan pronouncements. Taking as her motto William James's maxim "Philosophy is the art of imagining alternatives," Turkle shows how playing with gender in cyberspace can shape a person's real-life understanding of gender. Especially telling are the examples of the man who finds it easier to be assertive when playing a woman, because he believes male assertiveness is now frowned upon while female assertiveness is considered hip, and the woman who has the opposite response, believing that it is easier to be aggressive when she plays a male, because as a woman she would be considered "bitchy." Without taking sides, Turkle points out how both have expanded their emotional range. Other topics, such as artificial life, receive an equally calm and sage response, and the first-person accounts from many Internet users provide compelling reading and good source material for readers to draw their own conclusions.
From Publishers Weekly
The Internet, with its computer bulletin boards, virtual communities, games and private domains where people strike up relationships or emulate sex, is a microcosm of an emerging "culture of simulation" that substitutes representations of reality for the real world, asserts Turkle (The Second Self). In an unsettling, cutting-edge exploration of the ways computers are revising the boundaries between people and computers, brains and machines, she argues that the newest computers?tools for interaction, navigation and simulation, allowing users to cycle through roles and identities?are an extension of self with striking parallels to postmodernist thought. She also looks at "computer psychotherapy" programs such as Depression 2.0, a set of tutorials designed to increase awareness of self-defeating attitudes; hypertext software for creating links between related songs, texts, photographs or videos; and "artificial life," attempts to build intelligent, self-organizing, complex, self-replicating systems and virtual organisms.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
As I write these words, I keep shuffling the text on my computer screen. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
As I write these words, I keep shuffling the text on my computer screen. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Relevant & Important,
By A Customer
This review is from: Life on the Screen (Paperback)
Turkle's research findings are mind-boggling, exciting, terrifying, and (whether we like what we see or not) revealing. We see, here, glimpses of the future as a place where the real and virtual collide. Where who we are and how we think will differ markedly from all we've taken for granted in the old familiar pre-Info-Age. Anyone who works with children or adolescents of the Info-Age should read this book! I recommend it, along with the more up-to-date work by Don Tapscott.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lots on Bots,
By A Customer
This review is from: Life on the Screen (Paperback)
This book isn't for the newbie, but if you're already familiar with computers and what's possible on the Internet but haven't yet explored the world of MUDS and the like, this is one of the most informative and fascinating looks at the virtual world that you'll come across. Even more interesting are the questions that Turkle poses regarding self-identity and what the "self" is given the new "non"-environment we call cyberspace. Though offering few answers, the author introduces us to a future world of seemingly infinite possibilities for self-exploration and challenges us to ponder its implications for who we are, how we define ourselves, and how we interact with one another.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Postmodernist vagueries and mostly trivial observations,
By A Customer
This review is from: Life on the Screen (Paperback)
If reading postmodernist types of things turns you on, you'll like this book. The author talks a lot about how computers have moved from "modernist calculation" to "postmodernist simulation." Why there is a need to attach the modernist-postmodernist modifiers to calculation and simulation is never explained, and I suspect it is just done to give the book a tres chic intellectual veneer. As with nearly all authors who use the term, the author does not define "postmodernism" or explain what it has to do with anything in her book. Also a lot of vague talk about how "people didn't used to like to do" such and so a thing with computers but now "people like to do" such and so something other thing with computers a lot more. No data of course, that would offend the postmodernists reading the book. An important - VERY important - topic treated in a shabby manner.
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