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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Gain Access To Yourself Via Computer

Connie Koenenn Los Angeles Times

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we get information. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we view ourselves.

Despite all the hype and babble about the information superhighway, Turkle says, most people actually have underestimated the coming knowledge revolution. When we log onto a bulletin board, chat room, forum or other cyberspace sites, she says, we are entering a world of possibility. There, we can change our name, our appearance, even our sex, and test ourselves in that different persona. “We can easily move through multiple identities,” Turkle says, “and we can embrace - or be trapped by - cyberspace as a way of life.”

This is the theme of her new book, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet” (Simon & Schuster). It’s based on her studies, which started 20 years ago when she noticed the way MIT students used computer language (“Let’s debug this relationship”) in everyday life.

And although Turkle has been tracking the emerging computer culture for two decades, the exploding popularity of the Internet world has turned a new spotlight on her. Newsweek magazine listed her among “50 for the Future” for 1995 and Time dubbed her the “Margaret Mead of Silicon.”

“Sherry Turkle is an important thinker and very perspicacious - she was way ahead of the curve,” says Constance Hale, associate managing editor of Wired magazine, which is excerpting Turkle’s book in its January issue. “Her book is groundbreaking. Her theory - that the computer isn’t a tool but that it is giving you access to parts of yourself that you didn’t have before - is revolutionary.”

Like Gates, Turkle says we are on the brink of a revolution, now that computers inhabit life at every turn. But while Gates’ new book, “The Road Ahead” (Viking), focuses on the outward shapes of the computers and software (such as a wallet PC), Turkle is more concerned with the loosening of boundaries between people and their computers.

Turkle, 47, has seen how people, talking online in a low-risk setting, have slowly developed social skills or been able to discuss physical problems, such as weight or disabilities, that they previously repressed. She has watched men and women gradually move from virtual online worlds into real relationships (“Rush Limbaugh met his wife on CompuServe,” she says).

Turkle put six years into writing “Life on the Screen.” Despite its catchy title and rich use of case studies, the heavily footnoted book, interweaving psychological and social analysis with an overview of intelligent machine development, is not light reading.

“The meaning of the computer presence in people’s lives is very different from what most expected in the late 1970s,” Turkle writes. “One way to describe what has happened is to say we are moving from a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation.” In short, computers have moved from machines that do things for us (our tax returns or spreadsheets) to machines that do things to us, such as provide experiences that will affect our social and emotional life.

Describing e-mail as a “return to conversation over the backyard fence,” Turkle notes that in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where she works, she can log on any morning and scroll through the staff messages. “Someone has died, someone has a baby, someone has won an award - it’s like a small-town newspaper.”

Computers were not on the agenda when Turkle graduated in 1976 from Harvard with a double doctorate in sociology and personality psychology. She had spent a year in France analyzing how Freudian thought had been rejected and then accepted by the French.

She was hired because MIT wanted somebody who studied the cultural diffusion of scientific ideas. As technophobe Turkle began listening to the computer-savvy students, she realized they were using computer ideas (instead of “Freudian slip,” they would say “informationprocessing error”) to describe their lives. “It was like a ‘Eureka!’ experience to me,” she says.

And although she acknowledges a darker side of cyberspace (people can get stuck in the selves they have created on the screen, or hurt by an online relationship that turns out to be fraudulent, she says), Turkle has great hopes for the emerging computer culture.

“Here’s the good news,” she says briskly. “Being online can help you develop parts of yourself that have been underdeveloped and it can help your personal growth. Here’s the bad news: Some people find themselves just acting out the same problems they have in real life in virtual life. If they’ve been hostile, they become the ‘flamers’ on the Internet, using the anonymity to act out their hang-ups.”