The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit

Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948. Professor Turkle is also the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is widely considered one of the most distinguished scholars in the area of how technology influences human identity.

Other than The Second Self, Turkle has published a couple of other books.
Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution, first published in 1978. It was the first important and substantial book about Lacan and his influence on psychoanalytic culture, according to Stuart Schneiderman, Ph.D.
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, first published in 1995. It is a study of how people interact with machines, and some of the consequences for the way people use these computers, according to Wikipedia.
Turkle is currently working on Falling for Science: Objects in Mind and The Inner History of Devices: Technology and Self, they will both be released during 2008.

The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit, was originally published in 1984 but in this, the one I red, Twentieth Anniversary Edition Turkle has wrapped her work with a new prologue and epilogue. The book itself covers her 6 year work where she interviewed about 400 children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers and personal computer owners with the objective to discern how the "evocative object", as she likes to describe the computer, affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another and of our relationship with the world. In the introduction of the book Turkle compares this new "evocative object" with a 12 year old boy called Victor of Aveyron that was found in wandering the woods of France in 1797. The boy became a concrete image of the views on nature versus nurture.

The book is written during a time period when computers no longer were confined to expert subcultures but had found it's way out into the lives of regular people. It was also a time when some elementary schools had put programming on their syllabus which presented Turkle with an opportunity to study children's interaction and reactions to the machine when using it in a similar way to an adult. Her goal with her study was to learn about computer cultures by living with them, participating when possible and help her understand things from the inside. She does this in an ethnographic style and perhaps is it that that leads her to write a book filled with anecdotes about people she has met during her years of research. According to the introduction from 1984 she uses her examples, which I choose to call anecdotes, to highlight specific aspects of the computer's influence of the people she interviews.

The book follows a kind of chronological order where she starts out with studying children between the age of 4-14 and how they interact with 3 different electronic toys. She does this in a similar way to how Jean Piaget studied children in the 1920s, but her goal is to find out whether the children considers the machines to be alive or not. Something that she finds many of the children say is that it must be alive since it is cheating. This is something that she comes back to several times through out the book when she later on meets men who are playing video games that comment on the machines in the same way as the 6 year old children.

From the children she moves on to adolescents and young adults who play video games. Turkle also seem to digress into an other sort of game called roleplaying. Both the video games and the roleplaying games part of the book have the objective to describe people lost in a simulated worlds though and thus fill an important function in the ongoing description of the "evocative object". In this part of the book she also describes her interviews with the adolescent programmers at a school she calls Austen. At Austen programming wasn't treated as a "school subject", as Turkle describes it, but rather the children had liberal access to the computers and with the help of a program called LOGO they managed to express, and sometimes even find, themselves with the help of the computers. Her she also describes the difference between the soft and hard master, a comparison she returns to when she describes the hackers she interviews at MIT.

In the next part of the book we have reached the adult computer users, both the expert and the not so technically expert users. Of course this was a time when there was no Windows so to what level the home PC owners were not technical experts is in my opinion questionable and especially considering most of the users Turkle spoke to used their computers to program on at home too. However Turkle describes how these users view the machine and how the machine reflects them to her. In this section Turkle also describes the hacker community at MIT and how they interact with the machines and gets absorbed by it while they flee the rest of the world and dive into the subculture that is active during the nights and practically lives in the computer labs.

Turkle ends the book with a look towards the future and the computer can sometimes be used as a psychological tool or instrument to describe our psyche. The book also covers the area of AI, artificial intelligence, and how the scientists at MIT view AI and how others might fear it.

Personally I must say I really enjoyed the book. It is written "in a clear and lively way", as the NYT's review from 1984 describes it, and is filled with anecdotes (as I mentioned earlier) which makes for an easily red, inspiring and interesting book. But, also as the NYT's review says, it lacks in one major thing and that is a view in to the massive amount of data she must have collected during her 6 year study that preluded this book. She mentions at several places in the book how many people she has studied to come to the conclusions she describes in a chapter and she also lets the reader know how many of those people she has selected to study more closely but to me, as a layman in sociology and psychology, it seems odd that she doesn't mention how representative the group she chose to study is or how large the group she studied is compared to other similar groups.

Still, she manages to stay somewhat neutral (even if the NYT reviewer does not think so) in her observations and descriptions of the people she has studied, which is a good thing. In that way she leaves much to the reader to decide and she does not judge on what is good or bad behaviour or what is good or bad regarding how people are reflected by the machine.

Considering I myself am a Gamer and have a very close "bond" to my computer and computers as a whole I sometimes found her reflections about peoples use of games as odd but at the same time very interesting. I also found myself wishing that I could have experienced the late 70s so that I could have had a chance to be one of the hackers she describes in the book. This might seem as odd, especially considering some would probably say that the only place Turkle doesn't hold her neutral distance to her "subjects" is when she writes about the hacker community and describes them as mechanical, unwashed and distant from the world the rest of us live in.

So all in all the book gave birth to many a thought about many different things and that I believe was one of the purposes of the book to begin with. If nothing else it "is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation" as it states on the back.

When writing this post I tried to find what other people on the internet might have thought about the book but considering it's so old it quickly became clear that if something has been written about it it can't be found on the internet today. I did however manage to dig up and old blog post by Neal Grigsby that mentioned the book in passing as he tried to read it before a guest lecture by Turkle. I also found the title of the book nested into this blog post by boyhowdy, a blogger who describes himself(?) as a Cybersociologist, a title that Turkle has been granted in different parts of the internet and most likely in other written texts too.

Much more has been written about her latest book Life on the Screen and aside from books there are also several interviews with Turkle that can be found around the internet, like the one on Powerpoint, Robomanagers, and You or the one over at open|DOOR's or why not this one that covers women and computers something that professor Turkle seem to have a very different view on compared to many other women.

Lastly, I want to add that this has been an assignment in the course "Information retrieval and new new media", just as many other posts on this blog has and will be.