The Second Self - Sherry Turkle
THE SECOND SELF - SHERRY TURKLE
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INTRODUCTION
“when you program a computer, thee is a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computers mind” said Deborah, a sixth year grade student in an elementary school that had recently introduced computer programming into its curriculum.
For freud, the uncanny (das unheimliche) was that which is ‘known of old and long familiar’ seen anew, as strangely unfamiliar.
Ubiquity
Computational objects, poised between the world of the animate and inanimate, are experienced as both part of the self and the external world
One is tempted to speak not merely of a second self but of a new generation of self, itself
Programming a computer that quite literally –re-minds’ you of your mind
Turtle
The computer provided this world and gave her categories more useful than ‘I am good’ or ‘I am bad’ – (SELFIES?)
Rorschach effect (in relation to the experience of authorship)
Rule-based transparency
Specific instructions to a computer enabled one to ‘open the hood’ and ‘poke around’ its inner workings. But when macintosh users spoke about transparency, they were referring to an ability to make things work without going below a screen surface filled with attractive icons and interactive dialogue boxes.
Less like commanding a machine and more like having a conversation with a person
1995, people had moved away from a reductive and mechanistic view of how to relate to a computer and were ‘learning to take the machine at (inter)face value’
the macintosh carried the idea that it is more fruitful to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for mechanism, origins, and structure.
Darwin, who suggested that understanding proceeds by reducing complex things to simpler elements, but discovering the hidden mechanisms behind behavior
Believed that a transparent relationship with computers would be empowering, that once people could own and understand something as complex as a computer, they would demand greater transparency in political decision-making processes
Meetup.com
In 2004 the cultural message of digital technology is not about simplicity but complexity, not about transparency but opacity (difference)
A transition from the transparency of algorithm of the opacity of simulation
These days, computation offers far more immediate projective media
The aesthetic of transparency (common to the logo movement and the early generations of personal computer hobbyists) carried with it a political aesthetic that was tied both to authorship and to knowing how things worked on a level of considerable detail. This is a kind of understanding that is not communicated by playing off-the-shelf simulations
They ‘play’ simulations but don’t have a clear way to discriminate between the rules of the game and those that operate in a real city
In my view, citizenship in a culture of simulation requires that you know how to rewrite the rules
Inhabitants of simulated worlds
Are there as consumers rather than as citizens
To archive full citizenship, our children need to work with simulations that teach about the nature of simulation itself
Are the new generations of simulation consumers reminiscent of people who can pronounce the worlds in a book but don’t understand what they mean?
Living the tension between physical and virtual and between analysis and simulation, seems a permanent state of affairs, our permanent existence on the edge of things
Our displacement from the traditions of the physical by the shadow of the virtual has created a new kind of depaysement, providing the opportunity for a clearer view of both registers
With digital timekeeping devices, our notion of time is once more being touched y technical changes. Time is no longer a process; time is information
‘second nature’ as an evocative object, an object that fascinates, disturbs equanimity, and precipices thought
the computer is a ‘metaphysical’ machine
‘what is life?’
even the most technical discussions about computers use terms borrowed from human mental functioning. In the language of their creators, programs have intentions, try their best, are more or less intelligent or stupid, communicate with one another, and become confused
we are information systems
hardwired
buffer
default
debug
they seduce because they provide a chance to be in complete control, but they can trap people into infatuation with control, with building ones own private world
Metaphysics, mastery, and identity
It is described as a machine that lets you see yourself differently, as in control, as ‘smart enough to do science’, as more fully participant in the future
[me??][my method shares the advantage of using ‘ideal types’ – examples that present reality in a form larger than life. Ideal types are usually constructed fictions. My exampled are real. Yet they isolate and highlight particular aspects of the computers influence because I have chosen to write about people in computer cultures that amplify different aspects of the machines personality.]
the computer is a ‘thinking’ machine. Ideas about computation come to influence our ideas about mind. So, above all, what ‘moves out’ is the notion of mind as program, carried beyond the academy not only by the spoken and written word, but because it is embedded in an actual physical object: the computer
In the word of children and adults, the physical opacity of this machine encourages it to be talked about and thought about in psychological terms
Evocative objects
Is really not about computers. Its about determinism and free will
The Oedipus complex
The Freudian slip
People tend to perceive a ‘machine that thinks’ as a ‘machine who thinks’
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