Life on the Screen

"With a book by a professor at MIT called Sherry Turkle: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, which was published in 1995. It was really one of the first academic and, even more, one of the first popular and accessible looks at how the web is transforming who we are, and how we view ourselves. Ultimately, what she postulates is that, because we’re interacting via computer-mediated communication, because this internet is in many ways a faceless medium, we use this as an opportunity to express ourselves and our identity in new ways: in ways that perhaps we’d wanted to express ourselves but, because of our being in communities and experiencing real world consequences, that we don’t. For example there was a research study done in the 1960s that identified that people will open themselves up to a stranger on a train and tell them deep personal information they would never tell their closest friends, partially because they have this sense that they can confess. This is something that has existed throughout history, of course – like the Catholic confessional, there’s a kind of human instinct to divulge your deepest secrets – so what Turkle did was to look at some of these online communities. And in this book she created a really compelling series of arguments and stories about how these spaces are transforming how we present ourselves, and what it is we are able to do with this anonymous environment. For that reason I just absolutely fell for it – it was so unbelievably eye-opening. Absolutely, although academics tend to be early adopters of new technologies, and the original internet connected academic institutions. Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even economists: anybody who was looking at human sciences really glommed on to this, and started to observe emergent community and communication experiences in these spaces, even pre-web – this is when people were using bulletin-board systems and not the nice shiny browsers that we’re using today. So people were already thinking about virtual group dynamics in this space at a very early stage. Interestingly, Turkle now seems to have fallen out of love with her old theories and when we interviewed her for The Virtual Revolution she was a lot more cynical and a lot less welcoming of many of the ideas that she presented in Life on the Screen."

"Life On The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Turkle is a brilliant observer of the online world, and what makes the Net incredibly interesting is that it was never intended to be a social medium. They created this kind of pipeline for trading hard data between scientists and sharing computer resources in the military and for some reason we insane people decide to start pouring other things down that pipeline, like, for example, our social lives, and Turkle is the best living observer of the way in which pushing your social life through that medium, that pipeline, distorts it. And in some way it distorts it in a way that’s very intoxicating, it’s very liberating – identity becomes much more of an elastic phenomenon over the Net. And yet it also attenuates it. There are ways in which interpersonal relationships over the Net are different from ‘RL’ [real life] relationships. There are ways in which they are richer and ways in which they are more impoverished. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."