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Feature essay: Controlled Change: the Politics of ICT and the NoösphereDrew WhitworthPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version Unless specified, all references on this page come from Sherry Turkle (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, Touchstone. Sherry Turkle: the online psychologistLife on the screen is one of the formative texts of "cyberculture". It has become a definitive work; virtually any book on the subject feels obliged to quote it. Many papers imitate it [11]. Yet it is deeply flawed. Admittedly an amount of hindsight is used in making this judgment. The book was first published in 1995, and therefore written and researched before the explosion of the WWW. Nevertheless there are reasons why it seems over-optimistic about the things it describes -- principally, Internet users' achieving a form of emancipation through shifting and manipulating online identities. These problems stem directly from Turkle's mode of analysis, and her failure to appreciate the links between the online "spaces" she describes and those aspects of offline life which constrain them. Turkle's main theme is the ability of users of Usenet, MUDs and chatrooms to play with identity. The computer has become a "new medium on which to project our ideas and fantasies" (p. 9). Gender, race and sexuality can be manipulated within online communication, and "identity in the age of the Internet" is therefore no longer the constraint to social interaction that it may be in offline life. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with analysing these developments. But it is a purely psychological approach, with Turkle herself acting as the psychologist, and even considered as psychology, her analysis is flawed. The idea of "disembodiment" is a key theme for Turkle, but this is an impossibility. The "personae" being constructed and then deployed in the online spaces represented by MUDs, chatrooms etc., remain tied to their owners. For example, on p. 185, she asks: "If a persona in a role-playing game drops defenses that the player in real life has been unable to abandon, what effect does this have? What if a persona enjoys success in some area (say, flirting) that the player has not been able to achieve?" Her meaning here is not made explicit. Is she merely referring to the manner in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) makes it easier to break down the psychological barriers in the path of identity-play? Or does she in fact imply that the online persona has some kind of life of its own? The general theme of her book would suggest the latter, particularly when she goes on (p. 192) to suggest that online, the boundaries between the "real" self and a simulated self have been blurred. But what is the real self anyway? On p. 14 she writes that "the self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times..." But surely this is exactly what is happening. If a person finds it easier to flirt online than offline, this is of psychological interest, but it does not mean that the online persona is doing things which the offline person cannot. Online selves are not "simulations", but the actual person themselves, their real thoughts and feelings at the time. If someone else wrote a computer program to pretend to be Drew Whitworth (or Sherry Turkle, or anyone else), or simply decided to impersonate me online, this might count as "simulation". But the facets of ourselves we present in CMC are merely another aspect of the multiple selves (parent, work colleague, socialite, sports fan) we present offline as well, depending on the circumstances of the interaction. Online, what is blurred is not the "self", but clues to identity that we are used to receiving in synchronous communication (yet have for millennia accepted as missing from other, asynchronous forms of written communication). ICT (and CMC) have not created the desire to "disembody", or to play with one's gender or identity. But they have made it easier and less risky. The only reason risks exist here is because of existing social norms. (Note how mediaeval masquerades or carnivals privileged these kinds of role-reversals for short periods of time, providing spaces where accepted social norms could be overturned without fear of censure; at the same time, note how these are licensed and temporary transgressions [12].) The "disembodiment" is purely figurative anyway, and is in fact no more than happens in ordinary communication. CMC merely takes place via a particular type of medium in which visual clues to identity are absent. These are problems, but minor ones. Despite them, Turkle's psychological approach is valuable for considering how some people play with identity on line. Her biggest problems come about through her generalisations. For example, on pp. 30-35 she writes of the "engrossing power" or "holding power" of computers, akin to addiction in some users. But her sample is limited, as she investigates only regular users of CMC. What of those who are alienated by computers, or at best dislike them [13], even as they may be "addicted" to other technologies, including ones with a family resemblance such as the mobile phone or television? Even amongst those who feel comfortable with computers, Turkle's chosen media of interaction (Usenet, MUDs and chat rooms) are relatively unimportant compared to e-mail and the WWW (and once again we should include mobile phones and texting here) [14].Nor is there any mention of the overwhelmingly white, middle-class bias of her sample, except in passing and almost sympathetically (pp. 238-241). "We are all dreaming cyborg dreams", she writes (p. 264) -- all of us? Single mothers on sink estates? Poor Bangladeshis? Let us accept, then, that Turkle's sample is limited. Even then there are difficulties. Turkle suggests that the online sphere can accommodate -- indeed encourages -- the kind of flexibility she is interested in because there, the "self is constructed and the rules of social interaction are built, not received" (p. 10). But there is a problem here. This detaches the sphere from all previous, constraining rules. This may indeed be Turkle's intention, but she is wrong -- and even as a psychologist, should know this. Our very ways of thinking, the possibilities and alternatives we can conceive of, let alone accept, are constrained by inbuilt assumptions, conformity, educational practices and many other examples of cognitive manipulation. It is possible that the flexibility and adaptability evident in her subjects is a sign of "developmental plasticity" of the sort Dobzhansky described (see the supplementary essay), and therefore possibly a psychological reaction to the demands of the modern (or indeed postmodern) world. But Turkle, probably being unaware of this connection, never makes it. Turkle attempts to link her psychological approach to postmodernism, writing (p. 17): "...the mechanical engines of computers have been grounding the radically nonmechanical philosophy of postmodernism. The online world of the Internet is not the only instance of evocative computer objects and experiences bringing postmodernism down to earth." But she is, at best, a vulgar postmodernist, seeing only surfaces and simulations rather than the underlying realities from which different interpretations (and the need for them) spring. From such a perspective, all simulations have equal validity and equal force. Yet this is simply not the case. Decisions are taken about what simluations will take precedence over others, and these are political decisions, affected by power relations. It is true that postmodernism is "nonmechanical", but this means that when it is "translated" into mechanical form, it will take on board some of the features of the technology, and the values which have been encoded into that technology. It is not only wrong, but actively dangerous, to say as Turkle does (p. 47): "With computers we can simulate nature in a program or leave nature aside and build second nature limited only by our powers of imagination and abstraction." It is exactly those powers of imagination and abstraction that are themselves limited -- by the computer systems we use, by the reality we inhabit, and by the cognitive manipulation that dominant structures in that reality engage in every day. There is no online tabula rasa. Immediately, she goes on to say, "The objects on the screen have no simple physical referent". Nor does Romeo and Juliet, however. It acquires meaning because we can personally identify with its themes of love, loss, rivalry as these apply to our everyday "offline" lives -- and because it is an important cultural icon with objective value in the noösphere as a whole. But in a physical sense it does not exist, as the supplementary essay suggested. So it is with the noösphere. In the last sentence of this short but highly problematic passage she throws away the line, "...life on the screen is without origins and foundation." Without origins? Did it spontaneously emerge like a particle? This is, frankly, awful analysis, and while I am sure it is not meant to be as dismissive as it sounds, suggests a great lack of care in the construction of her arguments. To leave this discussion of what remains an important work of cyberculture on a positive note, Turkle does recognise (p. 71) that one way we can deal with the possibilities of simulation is as a challenge to existing, entrenched ways of thinking. We can and should be aware of the existence of simulation, and discriminate between different or competing simulations. She is right, but we need a much better political appreciation of the constraints under which the online sphere works in order to do so. Turkle is a classic example of social impact approaches to the analysis of cyberspace. She also believes herself a postmodernist (and the Net to be the technological harbinger of postmodernity) but she is at best a vulgar one. She is working at such an individualised level that everything seems fragmented. Yet this is classic "neo-Conservatism". By her total failure to recognise inbuilt structures in cyberspace, whether these emerge from its geographical (biosphere, material) roots or structures of thinking, methods of oppression and control already built into the noösphere, nothing she proposes will help anyone achieve emancipation. Where people seem to be achieving a level of this through identity-play, it is essentially reinforcing of the current system. What is being achieved is not self-awareness, let alone self-consciousness, but self-eradication. Footnotes11. e.g., O'Brien, Jodi (1999), "Writing in the body: Gender (re)production in online interaction" in Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, eds., Communities in Cyberspace, London, Routledge, pp. 76-104: Danet, Brenda (1998), "Text as Mask: Gender, Play and Performance on the Internet", in Steven G. Jones, ed., Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, London, Sage, pp. 129-158: many others. See David Gauntlett (2000), web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age, London, Arnold, p. 13-15 for a wry comment on the ubiquity of this academic sub-genre. return 12. See Stallybrass, P. and A. White (1986), The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. return 13. see, for instance, Selwyn, Neil (1998), "What's in the Box? Exploring Learners' Rejection of Educational Computing", Educational Research and Evaluation 4/3, pp. 193-212. return 14. Though this is only a small and in some ways unrepresentative sample, students on the Web Design course I teach, who are surveyed at the start of each academic year, regularly report near-universal regular use (95%+) of the WWW and e-mail. Regular (defined as weekly) use of chat rooms is around 20% and Usenet, 10%. This suggests these latter media come, at best, a distant third and fourth in importance. return | |