Life on the Screen

Sherry Turkle (1995)

Life on the Screen

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 But first …
• What is identity?
– How are identities formed?
– Do we have any control over our identities?
– Theories – Concepts - Explanations
 Key features
• Identity links the personal and the social
• Identity combines how I see myself and how others
see me
• Identities involve being the same as some people
and different from others, as indicated by symbols
and representations
• Identity involves some active engagement
• There is a tension between how much control I have
in constructing my identities and how much
control/constraint is exercised over me.
 What to wear …
• When I rummage through my wardrobe in the morning I am not
merely faced with a choice of what to wear. I am faced with the
choice of images: the difference between a smart suit and a pair
of overalls, a leather skirt and a cotton skirt, is not one of fabric
and style, but one of identity. You know perfectly well that you
will be seen differently for the whole day, depending on what
you put on; you will appear as a particular kind of woman with
one particular identity which excludes others. The black leather
skirt rather rules out girlish innocence, oily overalls exclude
sophistication … often I have wished I could put them all on
together – just to say, ‘how dare you think any of these is me.
But also, see, I can be all of them’.
• Williamson, 1986: 91
MUDS

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 Doug
• ‘I split my mind…I can see myself as being
two or three or more. And I just turn on one
part of my mind and then another when I go
from window to window. I’m in some kind of
argument in one window and trying to come
onto a girl in a MUD in another, and another
window might be running a spreadsheet
program …and then I’ll get a real time
message, and I guess that RL - it’s just one
more window.’ (Turkle: 291)
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Mind-space: Fantasy and
Imagination

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Culture of calculation/culture of
simulation

Modernist Postmodernist
Linear Decentred

Logical Fluid
Hierarchical Non-linear
Transparent/with depth Opaque

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 Culture of calculation/culture of
simulation

1980s (modernist) 1990s (Postmodernist)

Limited to typing commands Products to paint, draw, fly in
cockpits
Centralised structures and Characterised by complexity
programmed rules and decentring. Intelligence
cannot be programmed in but
emerges through interaction.
Computers can extend a Computers can extend a
person’s intellect physical presence

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Are we living life on the screen or
in the screen?

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 The Seductions of the
Interface
• “When I want to write and
don’t have a computer
around, I tend to wait
until I do. In fact, I feel
that I must wait until I do”
(29).

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 Of Dreams and Beasts
“Children, as usual, are harbingers of our cultural mindset” (82).
And as children become more and more immersed in the computer
culture, their original question has changed. Today’s children no
longer ask "is it (the computer) alive?" They recognize that the
machine is not alive, however, they have begun to see that
computers can “both think and have a personality” (83). But they
are comfortable with the idea that "inanimate objects can both think
and have a personality" (83). Where adults might balk at the idea
that computers could/can be conscious, we have gradually become
“accustomed to talking to technology, and sometimes, in the most
literal sense” (85).

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 On the Internet
• “a significant social laboratory for
experimenting with the constructions and
deconstructions of self that characterize
postmodern life” (180).
• “[I am] like who I wish I was.”
• “maybe I can only relax if I see life as one
more IRC channel.”
• “Can anyone tell me how to join@real.life?”
• Interview with Sherry Turkle

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 Gender Trouble
• Choosing
• Choices
• Crossing
• Passing

• Questions …

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 Virtual Sex
• What is the nature of my relationships?
• What are the limits of my responsibility?
• And even more basic: Who and what am I?
• What is the connection between my physical and
virtual bodies?
• And is it different in cyberspaces?
• What is the nature of our social ties?
• What kinds of accountability do we have for our
actions in real life and in cyberspace?
• What kind on society or societies are we creating,
both on and off the screen?

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Virtual Identities?

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Virtual Selves?

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 Turkle’s Conclusion
• Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be a raft, the
ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is
discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don’t
have to reject life on the screen, but we don’t have to
treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a
space for growth. Having literally written our online
personae into existence, we are in a position to be
more aware of what we project into everyday life.
Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign
culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to the real
world better equipped to understand its artifices. 263

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism
• Writing is not created within a vacuum by the author; rather, the
audience participates in the construction of the text.

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism
• Derrida was saying that the messages of the great books are no
more written in stone than are the links of a hypertext. I look at
my roommate’s hypertext stacks and I am able to trace the
connections he made and the peculiarities of how he links
things together...And the he might have linked but didn’t. The
traditional texts are like [elements in] the stack. Meanings are
arbitrary, as arbitrary as the links in a stack.

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism
• knowledge is created not by the act of
observing but through relations
• power is the multiplicity of force relations
immanent in the sphere in which they operate
and which constitute their own organization.

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 Erosion of traditionally stable
boundaries
• what are the binaries?
– Self
– Nature
– Animate
– Human
– Real
– Unitary

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 So, utopia or dystopia?
• Embracing a new world or rejecting an old
one?
• A (postmodern) crisis of identity?
• A banal distraction from reality?

• Or simply, business as usual?

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