User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/turkle/

Abstract

Sherry Turkle: Personal Computers with Personal Meanings. Publisher, Year.

1. Introduction
   • children use the computer in their process of world and identity construction
   • development of fundamental conceptual categories, ways of looking at the world
   • children set apart from the generation that grew up without the technology
   • adults are more settled and might be afraid of the new, protected by familiar
   • computer can be a provocation to reflect this taken-for-granted status
   • stimulation to reconsider ideas and rethink the way to look at the world
   • relationship with a computer can influence people's conceptions of themselves
   • can be the basis for new aesthetic values, rituals, philosophy and cultural forms
2. Birth of a Personal Computer Culture, 1975
   • impersonal system considered as a threat (billing errors, lost airplane reservations)
   • small computer kit available for $420 leeds to increase in personal computers at home
   • first generation used for teaching French, helping with financial planning and taxes etc.
   • not so important what the computer can do, but how it made people feel
   • being a member of a technical culture instead of being afraid of mathematics etc.
   • lowers barrier between mathematical professionals and users interested in technic
3. Distinction between Tools and Machines (Marx)
   • new feeling of empowerment, crossing frontier that separates tinkering from technology
   • tools are extensions of their users
   • machines impose their own rhythm, rules, on the people who work with them
   • working with rhythms that we do not experience as our own (the system)
4. Fragmentation of Knowledge
   • programmers work as part of a large team and are only solving one part of a problem
   • lack of a feeling of wholeness in work translated to their hobby with home computers
   • structured programming: "good for business, death for the joy of the work"
5. Personal Computers and Personal Politics
   • personal computers appeared when hope for making politics open and participatory
   • personal computers were small, individually owned, and linked in networks
   • computer clubs all over the country stoked by new kinds of social relationships
   • instead of food cooperatives, there would be "knowledge cooperatives"
   • instead of encounter groups, there would be "computer networks"
   • instead of relying on friends, there would be "community memories"
   • computer used to be symbol of the power of the "big" (corporations, institutions, money)
   • computer began to be an instruments for decentralization, community, personal autonomy
6. Cottage Industry
   • allows you to work out of your home, gain personal autonomy, more time for family
   • decentralized technology would mean less waste because people would work from home
   • computer in living room as a window onto a future with more immediate relationships
   • hope that technology would be more immediate, without depending on big corporations
   • first-generation personal computer culture evolved a particular style of working
   • stile itself became a political metaphor, characterized by transparency, simplicity, control
7. Using the machine
   • computer experience used to think about society, politics, and education
   • culture whose values centered around clarity, transparency, and involvement with the whole
   • relationship with a computer as a depository of longings for a better, simpler, coherent life
8. Understanding the machine
   • people used to understand more about how things work
   • now we live in a world where we don't understand how anything works
   • computer as a chance to develop a depth of understanding
   • relationship with the machine as a standard for other things, e.g. politics
   • "Politics is a system, a complex to be sure, but a system all the same. If people understand something as complicated as a computer, they will demand greater understanding of other things."
   • but the satisfactions that the computer offers are essentially private
   • people will not change unresponsive government with a computer in the end
   • they will not change the world of human relations by retreating into the worlds of things
9. Conclusion
   • for the technical hobbyists part of what made the personal computer satisfying was that it felt like a compensation for dissatisfactions in the world of politics and the world of work