Content area
Full Text
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
Sherry Turkle.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995
Virtually at the very end of her book, Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a licensed clinical psychologist who knows about practice of psychotherapy by doing it, states that her "work on cyberspace to this point is conservative because of its distinctly real-life bias" (324). When translated into a realm of methodology, that implies that on-line interviews conducted for this complex psycho-techno-ethnography were used only after, and if, the researcher met the Internet user in person, and not only in persona. When translated into the project's "substance," that suggests that its focus is neither the machine nor the user but rather the question of how experiences in virtual reality affect real life-what is the relationship between the virtual and the real. Thus the conservatism that Turkle feels willing or obliged to assign to herself rests on a precise premise: virtual and real are not the same. In fact, not only are they not the same, but even in the general framework of culture of s(t)imulation, in between "no sense of place" (J. Meyrowitz) and "becoming digital" (N. Negroponte), we live in one of them longer (if not necessarily more intensely or more profoundly). Despite the paradoxically same social desire that we bring to the virtual and to the real-desire to "retribalize" (M. McLuhan)-real and virtual do have different histories.
Turkle is aware that the "cybernetization" of modern-post-modern life has its systematizers and critics, ranging from utopian to apocalyptic, and is unwilling to allow for any neat and ready-made compartment in which her thinking is to be stored: "We don't have to reject life on the screen, but we don't have to treat it as an alternative life either...the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its artifices" (263). By choosing a psychoanalytic stance...