More Brilliantly Halting Prescience…

I was researching something and came across this old interview with Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT (link to her personal site) in support of her 1996 book “Life On The Screen.” Some choice tidbits (Dr. Turkle noted where appropriate, otherwise it’s the author of the article, Pamela McCorduck):

“Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets.”

“In terms of technologies that have really changed people’s deepest conceptions of self, we’ve had a long run with print,” Turkle says. “Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn’t go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we’ve adapted from print as natural. But we’re in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don’t. Computers are central to this. I’m not saying that other technologies haven’t changed us, I’m just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to – this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer – this is new.”

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here