Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

In The Second Self(1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) Turkle is centrally

concerned with the self–other relations in New Media environments. In her

earlier work, Turkle (1984) explores the way in which many computer users

relate to computers as though they have a mind and conversely view them-

selves as machines. For Turkle it is the very opacity of digital technologies,

the fact that, if you were to open one up you would not see tangible mov-

ing parts, gears, levers or wheels, but rather, simply, ‘wires and one black

chip’ (22), that encourages us to speak of them in psychological terms. The

computer is an evocative object with which we can develop an almost spir-

itual relationship (306): ‘For adults as well as children, computers, reactive

and interactive, offer companionship. They seduce because they provide a

chance to be in complete control, but they can trap people into an infatua-

tion with control, with building one’s own private world’ (19).

For Turkle, making the computer into a second self, finding a soul in

the machine, can substitute for human relationships, a path dependence

which can come to be both cause and effect of a new kind of hysteria:

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread

feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here

the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compro-

mise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never

feel vulnerable to another person. (307)

In her later work, Turkle (1995) turns away from the object-narcissism

of the PC to the decentred and multiple identities of the Internet. In cyber-

spatial worlds, rather than the virtual world of face-to-screen, it is possi-

ble to reveal ourselves in new ways. The Internet has achieved in practice

what psychoanalysts have long been trying to achieve in theory: the real-

ization that the autonomous ego is a fiction (see Turkle, 1995: 15). With

much relief, Turkle revisits the insights of psychoanalysts whom she studied

many decades earlier, simply by ‘tinkering’ with the Net:

In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted

in interaction with machine connections, it is made and transformed by lan-

guage; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and an understanding

follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis. And in the

machine-generated world of MUDs I meet characters who put me in a new

relationship with my own identity. (15)

Media equations

From an entirely different direction, and without recourse to psychoana-

lytic theory, it is significant that media–object relationships are also being

researched by computer corporations. Microsoft commissioned one such

study, ‘Social Responses to Communication Technologies’, written by Reeves

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