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. - A certain curiosity towards an object, but also a repulsion by that same object, which can lead into a rejecting of that object because we rather reject than rationlize.
Ubiquity = being everywhere
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 - first robotics in 1940 (william grey walter)
The computer provided this world and gave her categories more useful than ‘I am good’ or ‘I am bad’ – (SELFIES?)
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 to 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 by 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
People tend to perceive a ‘machine that thinks’ as a ‘machine who thinks’
CHILD PHILOSOPHERS
The child as a metaphysian
The computer is a new kind of object – psychological, yet a thing
Computers, as marginal objects on the boundary between physical and the psychological, force thinking about matter, life and mind
Marginal objects are not neutral presences. They upset us because they have no home and because they often touch on highly charged issues of transition
Sometimes children who would say computers were ‘not alive’ betrayed more complex feelings by treating them as though they were
All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put humpty together again. Computers belong to a different world. They offer an experience of restoring life as well as ending it
The idea of infinity is one of them. What constitutes being alive is another
We are drawn to what frightens us, we play with what disturbs us, in part of try to reassert our control over it
The ‘say it’ bug contradicts our most basic expectation of a machine. When you turn the switch to ‘off’, machines stop. The cliché response to peoples fears about computers ‘taking over’ is that you can always ‘pull the plug’
The tension in his answer shows him aware of the insects marginal status as a living thing, a marginality that gives ‘permission; to experiment with the taboo on killing
Like the ‘marginal’ insects, it can offer an occasion for what seems an almost ritual exploration of life and death: pulling out the batteries and putting them back again
Some would instantly reject the suggestion that computers are alive are drawn into behaving toward a computer though it were alive
The notion of life is built on progressive refinement of their concept of motion
An object drops out of the category of alive when the child discovers an outside force that accounts for its motion
Children perceive the relevant criteria not as physical or mechanical, but as psychological: are their electronic games aware, are they conscious, do they have feelings, do they play fair, or do they cheat?
The arguments children use most frequently to discuss whether a computer is alive do not refer to the computer as a physical entity but to the computer as psychological entity, to ways in which it seems or does not seem like a human being in the qualities of its ‘mind’
Intelligence, feelings, and morality -> computer
‘the television set isn’t alive. Ot doesn’t make up its picture. It only passes it on.’ A person, she explains, might have to tell a computer how to make a picture, but the picture doesn’t exist in the world before the machine gets involved: ‘the computer has to know how to do it. To make it up.”
‘its sort of alive’
but the machine differs from people and is not alive in that its intelligence and feelings com from ‘the outside’
(anthropomorphize) the machines but don’t grant them the dignity of life
computers are like people in their psychology but not like people in their origins ???
computer origins discussion -> free will and autonomy / programming and predetermination / (rote thinking), originality / distinction between brain and mind
the child’s version: the human is emotional. The adults version: the human is programmable
some within the artificial intelligence community, computer consciousness has become the ultimate criterion for deciding when one should judge the computer intelligent enough to deserve to be treated as alive
Ethics becomes a criterion for aliveness, just as whether something is alive becomes a criterion for whether an ethical discourse is appropriate to it
Children became biased toward seeing the machines as ‘sort of’ alive because in these cultures it becomes taboo to kill them, to ‘crash’ them, to interrupt programs running on them
These children know that the machines are not alive in the sense that people are alive. But the machines are talked about and thought about with a discourse appropriate to living things
Children are drawn into thinking psychologically about the computer because of its behavior
Opacity. In dealing with traditional objects, growing up out of animism meant entering a world in which things are explained in mechanical terms
Intellectual frustration: talk about something else. Another is to find an answer to one’s question that will put a dead stop to further inquiry
The batteries
Emotions to draw a line between computers and people
Emotion is the psychological quality most frequently used to separate the human from the machine. But it is not the only one. [Nuanced set of qualities]
Respond to the rational, logical nature of the computer by valuing in themselves what is most unlike it.
Idea that computers closely resemble people in their ‘thinking’ and differ only in their lack of ‘feeling’ supports a dichotomized view of human psychology
ADOLESCENCE AND IDENTITY: FINDING YOURSELF IN THE MACHINE
They integrate their computer experience into their developing identities in ways that have nothing to do with becoming computer experts. they use programming as a canvas for personal expression and then as a context for working through personal concerns. They use the computer as constructive as well as a projective medium
Am I somebody who is afraid of machines and technical things? Am I somebody who can create something beautiful?
(cognitive style)
(turtle game)
in building her world, deborah built an environment in which she could be successful
computers also represent a threat to independence. You can get hooked on them
‘its like somebody’s there’
many people are lonely and isolated, but when they have a computer around it can feel like somebody is always there, always ready, always responsive, but without the responsibility of having to deal with another person. The computer offers a unique mixture of being alone and yet not feeling alone
Bruce and Deborah are not unsure of finding the inner resources to exert self-control
By restricting herself she put herself in a position to experience what it is like to exert a greater degree of control than she had ever known
He would refuse to take notes about what he did, or would leave with them lying around the classroom, perpetually ‘lost’
The child who begins to draw by taking up a pencil and asking for a ruler in order to draw ‘perfect’ stick figures, and the child who starts out by applying color in broad, sweeping strokes, the child who arranges dolls a neat circle and has them all sit down to afternoon tea, and the child who lines up toy soldiers in opposing camps for a battle – in each case there is projection that reveals something about hwo the child is thinking, feeling, and organization experience
Bruce would rather retype the whole program than use the automatic device. He used the moment to reassert his individuality
Superimposed shapes can produce illusions of dimensionality. The screen can be traced back in an intelligible way to the instructions in the program
(anathema)
bruce wants the machine to be predictable in spite of his most unpredictable programming
for bruce, concessions to the machines ability to carry out complex functions or , even worse, to produce artifactual effects outside his control seemed to confer too much ‘personhood’ on it. His response to the threat of what we might call the computers ‘automaticity’ illustrates its power to reflect the programmers personality
A person refuses dictated order. A person is not predictable. A person is emotional. In the sense that the computer is perfect, to be human is to be not-perfect. It is to be not-computer
(Kawasaki promotional film)
Externalization of self onto a canvas is a way of seeing who you are
(test tube baby)
(the story of narcissus)
narcissus fell in love with what appeared to him to be another. This image of that other person fascinated him because it objectified a sense of beauty of which he had felt only a vague inner sense. Mirrors, literal and metaphorical, play an important role in human development
We are all programmed / you can change the program
High level language -> logo, BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, PASCAL, LISP
Machines have different behaviors that are defined in the programming of the high level language
‘psychologies’ can be changed, reprogrammed
that your problem, not the computers. Its not a part of the computers ‘core identity’
neat hacking, really neat hacking. Had been able to get these two very differently structured machines to behave similarly
mind as a machine, personality as program
could go into the program and deal with the thing that wrong with it, deal directly with the rotten part. I could fix up the problems but leave things basically intact
He felt himself to be the recipient of continual feedback on his progress. And he could initiate the process that would get that information back it him
The program is basically sound; it simply needs to be debugged. Debugging is the search for errors that can be identified and isolated. And once isolated they can be dealt with in a ‘local’ way
The notion that painful emotional states- depression, inability to act, anxiety – are the result of purely local bugs ignores the complex and resistant structures behind the symptom. The ‘local fix’ may work in only a limited way: symptoms may shift or reappear, underlying problems persist
A set of concepts that offer guides for what is important in thinking about the self, for what is useful in thinking about personal experiences, has filtered out into the culture as a whole: repression, the unconscious, the superego, the Oedipal struggle with the father
They are stuck with the idea that their minds have something in common with the ‘mind’ of the computer before them
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