User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Reading/Theory/Turkle Personal Computers with Personal Meanings

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Notes on Sherry Turkle's The Second Self – chapt V Personal Computers with Personal Meanings

Children: computers play a significant role in the process of growing up (vs previous generations)
The computer towards a development of something(s) 'new': social, professional, aesthetic, philosophic, cultural influence on people's lives.
-> the computer as a catalyst of culture formation
mid 70's: The threat from the computer was the threat from the impersonal system that knew you only as a number, now (mid 80's?) it's about (personal) addiction to the machine
Altair: popularization of the personal computer
Once people actually had a computer in their home, the most interesting thing about it became the computer itself, not for what it might do, but for how it made them feel.
What is most striking in the story of the revolution that began with the Altair personal computer is that for many people the computer at home becomes a tool that compensates for the ravages of the machine at work
The professional programmer works as a part of a large team and is in touch with only a small part of the problem being worked on ( ~ irrelevant today?)
-> Home computers as the solution to this feeling of programmers in terms of working on 'problems as a whole', 'independently'
Computers, long a symbol of depersonalization, were recast as tools for conviviality and 'dream machines'
Personal computers > populism
PC's as a tool to think about society, politics and education
For the technical hobbyists of that first generation, 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.