User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/turkle/

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Abstract

Author?: 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