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Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

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Title: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
by Sherry Turkle
ISBN: 0-684-83348-4
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date: 04 September, 1997
Format: Paperback
Volumes: 1
List Price(USD): $14.00
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Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (17 reviews)

Customer Reviews

Rating: 4
Summary: High Quality - A Suggested Read
Comment: Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and a clinical psychologist. Her pioneering work has been done in the realm of computer mediated human interaction. One of her most commented on books is Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. This book is a serious look at the concept of identity and how identity is shaped on the Internet and through computer mediation.

Her major topic is how humans contain self on the Internet. She also spends a great deal of time discussing relationships on the Internet. With splintered selves involved, relationships become more complex. Her research on the way women and men view online sexuality is fascinating. Anyone interested in how the young people of the very near future will discover their sexual selves would do well to read this book. While Turkle is fairly straightforward in her findings, they may terrify some readers. This is a completely new sexuality, a completely foreign way of doing things. Her view is, of course, fairly clinical, but, in the end, I think she shows an amazing affinity with the people she has worked with. Turkle is not worried about the splintering of self. On the contrary, she thinks that some of these tactics: being able to play with and discover parts of yourself that you normally don't interact with is vital to development and mental health.

Another area that Turkle tackles is Artificial Intelligence. She considers AI to be the next frontier. These AI will be interacted with as a matter of course in the coming years, according to the author. Again, this area enthralls some readers and frightens others. Turkle is excited about what AI can do in terms of promoting dialog. Turkle sees the Internet challenging notions of what it means to be alive, notions of true identity, and the idea of community.

Turkle is at her best when she explores the concept of how people view themselves online. How they splinter off bits of their personality into different entities and play with and shape those identities. I can heartily suggest this book for anyone that works with K-12 students, for it is these students that are growing up on the screen. These are the students that are discovering community outside their immediate circle at younger and younger ages. These are the students that are discovering the meaning of identity online.

4 Stars out of 5.

Rating: 4
Summary: Constructing Identity in the Culture of Simulation
Comment: The author presents in her book many thoughtful and provocating ways computers are being used. Starting out with computer games as places for teenagers to hide out to scientists trying to create artificial life to children "morphing" through a series of virtual personae. On the Internet, confrontations with technology collides with ones sense of human identity. Ms.Turkle takes the reader into the text-based games where over ten thousand players can create a character or several characters specifying genders or any other physical and psychological attributes. This book presents stories of how artificial intelligence (AI) is being re-visited. Models are being designed to attempt to simulate brain processes. Furthermore, she presents her idea that AI is borrowed freely from the languages of biology and parenting, with examples such as the high school English teacher and basketball coach who tried using small connected programs to help him figure out what team to field. But readers may also find interesting is her discussion on the multi-users-domains (MUDs). The information the author has gathered from her research is very informative and yet somewhat disturbing. She presents insight on how and why individuals seek to take on new or different personas on line. Her findings point out the problems people face in life and then escape to the Internet as a release. One of the passages from her book readers might find to be very provocative. She says "Women and men tell me that the rooms and mazes on MUDs are safer than city streets, virtual sex is safer than sex anywhere, MUD friendships are more intense than real ones, and when things don't work out you can always leave! After reading her book, a reader should have a better understanding on why so many take to the MUDs in order to escape the pressures and the problems that the real world presents. One can only assume that these individuals would rather indulge in these activities than solve their problems. In summary, Ms Turkle has described "the computer as a tool, as a mirror and as a gateway to a world through a looking glass of a screen. In each of these domains we are experiencing a complex interweaving of modern and postmodern, calculation and simulation".

Rating: 5
Summary: Relevant & Important
Comment: 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.

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