User:Birgit bachler/readings2/turkle meanings

turkle: personal computers with personal meanings

• As opposed to children adults are more settled, but also locked into roles, afraid of the new and protective to the familiar.
• A relationship with a computer can influence people's conceptions of themselves, their jobs, their relationships with other people, and with their ways of thinking about social processes.
• The computer serves as a catalyst of cultural information.
• First generation computer users shared not only the obvious mutualities in using the same hard/software, reading the same magazines, attending similarly organized user groups but they also "shared a quality of relationship with the computer, an aesthetic of using the computer for transparent understanding."
• "Many people think of themselves as incapable of doing anything technical or mathematical, and learn from their interactions with a personal computer that this simply isn't true."
• "Tools are extensions of their users; machines impose their own rhythm, their rules, on the people who work with them, to the point where it is no longer clear who or what is being used."
• "We work to the rhythm of machines - physical machines or the bureaucratic machinery of corporate structures, the "system".
• "Carl (...) has recently built a small computer system for his home, and he devotes much of his leisure time to programming it. Although Carl works all day with computers, what he does with his home system is not more of the same.
• Machines have the potential to create worlds of transparency and intelligibility, coming in a time of hopes for making politics open and participatory.
• "Personal computers could be used to bring people together. Everything was in place for the development of a politically charged culture around them."
• People believed new kinds of social relationships would follow in their wake, a rebirth of ideas from the sixties, "knowledge cooperatives", "community memories" and electronic bulletin boards, an instrument for decentralization, community and personal autonomy.
• Hannah: "I have more control over my time, I can spend more of it with my family."
• The computer in the basement, living room or kitchen was a window onto a future where relationships with all technology would be more immediate."
• "The actual experience of using the machine offered a way to think about who one is and who one would like to be."
• "The first generation computer owners also used the computer experience to think about issues beyond the self."
• "Relationships with a computer became a depository of longings for a better, simpler and more coherent life."
• "People used to understand more about how things work (...) If people understand something as complicated as a computer, they will demand greater understanding of other things".