Life on the Screen

By Sherry Turkle

Book Overview

Life on the Screen is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity--as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684833484
• ISBN13: 9780684833484
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Relevant & Important

Turkle's research findings are mind-boggling, exciting, terrifying, and (whether we like what we see or not) revealing. We see, here, glimpses of the future as a place where the real and virtual collide. Where who we are and how we think will differ markedly from all we've taken for granted in the old familiar pre-Info-Age. Anyone who works with children or adolescents of the Info-Age should read this book! I recommend it, along with the more up-to-date work by Don Tapscott.

Lots on Bots

This book isn't for the newbie, but if you're already familiar with computers and what's possible on the Internet but haven't yet explored the world of MUDS and the like, this is one of the most informative and fascinating looks at the virtual world that you'll come across. Even more interesting are the questions that Turkle poses regarding self-identity and what the "self" is given the new "non"-environment we call cyberspace. Though offering few answers, the author introduces us to a future world of seemingly infinite possibilities for self-exploration and challenges us to ponder its implications for who we are, how we define ourselves, and how we interact with one another.

A Disquietingly Personal Book...More than I Expected

Turkle does a magnificant job in illustrating the human persona while online. As our culture becomes more and more internet dependent, and it becomes easier to be a "globalized" person, psychological changes are sure to take effect. "Life On the Screen" is illustrated with some wry humor, as well as vivid examples. Sometimes doing someonething online makes it seem less "real." For instance, carding something-aka using a fake credit card number-is less 'real' if you do it online, to order something, than it is to waltz into say, BestBuy and using a fake credit card there. Just because you do it in a non-physical area (what is Cyberspace made up of, anyway?) does not mean that it is still not a crime, and that it is still not capable of having reprecussions.Shirley Turkle captures precisely what someone, as a user and interacter with the internet, thinks, and does while online. She acknowledges the existance of the internet being a place where people are able to forge "cyber-identities"...or get more comfortable being who they are. She also outlines something that is perhaps one of the most secure things about the internet in this day and age-that on the internet, you are anonymous. Therefore, you can do what you wish (good or bad) and you can interact with others via MUDs or the like...or you can decide exactly how people will think of you as.The internet is a secure medium for an insecure person. It is where many people who feel unaccepted in life go as refuge, to seek friends and partners who are like them, and who understand. This is also recognized in this book. I highly recommend anyone, either the hacker, or the suit, or the working mother, or the teenager, to pick up this book and just to start reading. It is disturbing, almost, to find that there are so many people who interact with the internet, and so many different things that they do. The globalization that comes along with the net provokes you to start rethinking many things, and questioning many others....The internet, as portrayed in this book, also helps the reader to truly examine themselves as a whole.

An important anthropology of virtual life.

This is a crucial read for those who are interested in the intersections of postmodern thinking about human subjectivity, the anthropology of the online world(s), and modern psychological understandings of identity and the human mind. Turkle is balanced and insightful, humble and well-read, and provides a welcome space for the reader to come to her own insights and epiphanies. The best book I've read in several years.

Powerfully explores the social/psychological life of MUDs.

Turkle's work is without parallel. She is a sociologist working at the famous MIT information laboratories. From her vantage point, she has observed children learning the mechanics of programming robots to interfacing with knowledge bases. In this book she explores the dark and light side of multi-user domains (MUDs), and why individuals chose to live out alternative realities within the privacy of Internet chat rooms. This is discussion is the most powerful aspect of the book, and offers readers many anecdotes from Turkle's years of lecturing and researching the complexities of the human personality. Her essay explores the gender driven soft and hard side of programming, the world of children learning to navigate the personality of the computer, and the theological implictions of life on the internet: the search for God and meaning in alternative realities. As uncomfortable as discovery can sometimes be, we learn that we are much like the characters populating her study: we all have multiple personnae seeking to make sense of our lives