Objectives: Today we will discuss Sherry Turkel's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Focusing on recent popular trends such as computer games, internet chat rooms, and artificial intelligence, we will assess how Americans' increasing reliance on computers has affected our definitions of humanity, machinery, and the connections between the two.

Questions:

1) What do you think of Turkel's claim that the computer has become a projection of the self?

2) Turkel talks about the different PC and Macintosh aesthetics that predated the advent of the 1995 Windows operating system. Even though the advent of Windows made PC and Macintish operating systems more alike, aren't some people still avidly devoted to Macintoches, and others avidly devoted to PCs? What do such loyalties mean?

3) How does Turkel distinguish between modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the machine? What does she mean when she says that "we are moving from a modernist culture of calculation to a postmodernist culture of simulation"? (20).

4) Turkel discusses video games, including war games, at great length. How do you view such games? Are they "safe," as their proponents maintain, because users understand that they are not real? Or are such games dangerous because they skirt reality too closely?

5) Turkel talks about computer psychotherapy. What does she say about this? What do you think of the notion that a human patient could be helped by a computerized therapist?

6) Throughout the semester, we have looked at variuous examples of artificial intelligence. What new forms of artificial intelligence does Turkel discuss? How does her discussion of artificial intelligence add to what we already know about it?

7) Turkel makes intriguing observations about the different ways that children and adults respond to advanced computers. What does she say about this? What do children's responses to the life-like characteristics of computers suggest about adult's possible future acceptance of computer-based artificial life?

8) Turkel notes that, just as advances in computer technology are making computers seem more human, advances in genetic research and pharmacology are making humans seem more like machines. In your opinion, how have recent advances in medical research such as the Human Genome Project affected our sense of what it means to be human?

Passages

In the story of constructing identity in the culture of simulation, experiences on the Internet figure prominently, but these experiences can only be understood as part of a larger cultural context. That context is the story of the eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary aand the multiple self, which is occurring both in advanced scientific fields of research and in the pattersn of everyday life. From scientists trying to create artificial life to children "morphing" through a series of virtual personae, we shall see evidenc eof fundamental shifts in the way we create and experience human identity. (10)

The development of windows for computer interfaces was a technical innovation motivated by a desire to get people working more efficiently by cycling through different applications. But in the daily practice of many computer users, windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system . . . (14)

[T]echnology is bringing a set of ideas asscoiated with postmodernism -- in this case, ideas about the instability of meanings and the lack of universal and knowable truths -- into everyday life. . . [I]n this book we shall see that through experiences with computers, people come to a certain understanding of postmodernism and to recognize its ability to usefully capture certain aspects of their own experience, both online and off. (18)

We have learned to take things at interface value. We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real. We use a Macintosh-style "desktop" as well as one on four legs. We join virutal communities that exist only among people communicating on computer networks as well as communities in which we are physically present. We come to question simple distinctions between real and artificial. . . (23)

We have used our realtionships with technology to reflect on the human. A decade ago, people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that their own minds might be similar to a computer's "mind." This reactions against the formalism and rationality of the machine was romantic. . .

In the mid-1980s, this romantic reactionwas met by a movement in computer science toward the research and design of increasingly "romantic machines." . . . The researchers who worked on them said they sought a species of machines that would prove as unpredictable and undetermined as the human mind itself. The cultural presence of these romantic machines encouraged a new discourse; both persons and objects were reconfigured, machines as psychological objects, people as living machines.

But even as people have come to greater acceptance of a kinship between computers and human minds, they have also begun to pursue a new set of boundary questions about things and people. . . . 24