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Similar a Life on the Screen explores identity in a digital age
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Life on the Screen explores identity in a digital age
- 5. MUDS
- 7. Mind-space: Fantasy and Imagination
- 8. Culture of calculation/culture of simulation Modernist Postmodernist Linear Decentred Logical Fluid Hierarchical Non-linear Transparent/with depth Opaque
- 9. Culture of calculation/culture of simulation 1980s (modernist) 1990s (Postmodernist) Limited to typing commands Products to paint, draw, fly in cockpits Centralised structures and programmed rules Characterised by complexity and decentring. Intelligence cannot be programmed in but emerges through interaction. Computers can extend a person’s intellect Computers can extend a physical presence
- 10. Are we living life on the screen or in the screen?
- 17. Virtual Selves?
Notas del editor
- ‘… the internet links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexualities, the form of our communities, our very identities’ (Turkle, 1995:187) Turkle uses the mirror metaphor to liken the computer to the looking glass that Alice stepped through Are we the new Alice? How has the computer and the internet tempted us to step through the looking glass What worlds have we discovered and how has the computer changed the ways we think of the mind, body, self and machine?
- 11/11/09
- 11/11/09 Identity simply answers the question, who am I/you? Or does it? Is it about the sort of person you are? In that case is it the same as ‘personality’? No: We may share personality ‘traits’ but sharing an identity involves some kind of active engagement. Personality describes qualities people have – being shy, outgoing (internal characteristics) Identity requires an element of choice – we choose to identify with a particular identity or group (external). And we need to be aware of that identification. E.g. I go to football matches because I enjoy shouting etc I go to see Man City and NOT Man Utd because I want to identify with that particular team. I wear a scarf that identifies me – it makes a statement about who I am. So, I actively take up that identity. Other examples: music, fashion, gender, student/staff The examples illustrate the importance of marking sameness and difference. E.g. Meeting new people. What do you want to know about them? Why Where they come from – what they do – i.e. what we have in common (sameness) and what we don’t (difference). Badges/books/clothes mark out identities and belongings. Maybe you were abroad this summer. Hear voices speaking the same language? If you did you probably felt a sense of recognition and of belonging – or maybe not if you’re trying to identify with another group (on the ferry back from France/in Nigeria with the ex-pats) E.g. on a train, someone reading a local newspaper from your home town. This provides a moment of recognition that might lead to conversation exploring those things you have in common. It works in negative ways too. Think of any examples? Denied access to credit (not creditworthy, not allowed to identify) Denied benefit payments (not worked enough, not poor enough) Denied a job (wrong accent) Denied entry to a club (wearing jeans/not a member) Denied access to the country (wrong nationality) Cont
- 11/11/09
- Multi User Dungeons Star Trek MUD/TrekMUSE LandaMOO MUDs allow users to create personas MUDs enable individuals to create a decentred self Participating in MUDS makes players not only authors of texts but also of themselves, constructing new selves through computer mediated interaction Turkle: Windows as a metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system. Life on the screen – entwines the human and technological.
- The experience of this parallelism encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising degree of equality.
- The self as reconstituted polymorphous and fluid A new world of fantasy and imagination Storytelling and playing become the foundation of the online self Cyberspace becomes ‘… the most tempting stage for the acting out of mythic realities, realities once confined to drug enhanced ritual…cyberspace can be seen as an extension… of our age old capacity and need to dwell in fiction, to dwell empowered or enlightened on other, mythic planes.’ (Benedikt, Cyberspace p6)
- Turkle explores the development of computer technology and use to compare modernist and postmodernist aesthetics
- From the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond
- We have become accustomed to opaque technology. We don’t have a desire to understand the inner workings of the machine we use, as opposed to the early counterparts which were considered “transparent” because users could “imagine that they could understand its ‘gears.’” We have learned to take things at interface value. Part of the idea of moving to a culture of simulation is the thought that we are becoming comfortable with “substituting representations of reality for the real.” (desktop, folder etc.) We have used our relationships with technology to reflect on the human. We don’t ask anymore “What does it mean to think?” but “What does it mean to be alive?” We have sought out the subjective computer. “Computers do things to us, including our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people.”
- Modern/Transparent POM/Opaque Apple II MacIntosh MS DOS Windows
- Dreams and slips of the tongue were the keys to understanding psychoanalysis The computer is the new ‘key’ to understanding postmodernism
- Turkle believes the Internet provides a “significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and deconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180). One woman writes that while online, she feels more “like who I wish I was.” Another writes “maybe I can only relax if I see life as one more IRC channel.” Perhaps the most potent post was “Can anyone tell me how to /join #real.life?”
- Turkle discovered that she was more comfortable being a virtual man than a virtual woman. She discusses that woman are not the only ones, however, who experiment with crossing gender lines. Turkle notes that both men and women must face the challenge of “understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience” (212). As virtual life becomes a way of life we must ask certain questions.
- Virtual communities offer an example of postmodern flexibility. We have learned to become fluid. Even if we don’t play on MUDs, we do often times create different login names as we participate on BLOGS (my inclusion since blogs weren’t around in 1995). Turkle includes a portion of a WELL discussion group who were dialoguing about how their virtual identities helped them “think about the self” (256). The following is an excerpt: Did you ever see that cartoon by R. Crumb about “Which is the real R. Crumb?” He goes through four pages of incarnations, from successful businessman to street beggar, from media celebrity to gut-gnawing recluse, etc. etc. Then at the end he says, “Which is the real one?”… “It all depends on what mood I’m in!” We’re all like that on-line. 257
- We become moulded by whom we know, our associations and connections. The Internet is simply another step in that development. Turkle likens this process to the building of a webpage - we are not limited to the links we include, the illustrations we incorporate, or the text we write. “ Home pages on the Web are one recent and dramatic illustration of new notions of identity as multiple yet coherent” (259).
- Derrida Student: "Derrida’s dense prose and far-flung philosophical allusions were incomprehensible" (17) Hypertext Writing is not created within a vacuum by the author; rather, the audience participates in the construction of the text. Student: Derrida was saying that the messages of the great books are no more written in stone than are the links of a hypertext. I look at my roommate’s hypertext stacks and I am able to trace the connections he made and the peculiarities of how he links things together...And the he might have linked but didn’t. The traditional texts are like [elements in] the stack. Meanings are arbitrary, as arbitrary as the links in a stack. 17
- Derrida Student: "Derrida’s dense prose and far-flung philosophical allusions were incomprehensible" (17) Hypertext Writing is not created within a vacuum by the author; rather, the audience participates in the construction of the text. Student: Derrida was saying that the messages of the great books are no more written in stone than are the links of a hypertext. I look at my roommate’s hypertext stacks and I am able to trace the connections he made and the peculiarities of how he links things together...And the he might have linked but didn’t. The traditional texts are like [elements in] the stack. Meanings are arbitrary, as arbitrary as the links in a stack. 17
- Foucault’s belief that knowledge is created not by the act of observing but through relations is explored in visual terms on Turkle’s homepage (linked on WebCT). It is a visualization of Turkle’s theory that we change with our interactions with the computer When we cross the boundary of the Internet and step into that new online personae, we come into a new knowledge about ourselves We could extend this with the idea of ‘bots’ and surveillance. Are ‘bots’ (for example ‘spyware’) the new manifestation of the panoptycon?
- Self/ Other Nature/culture Animate / Inanimate Human / machine Real / Virtual Unitary / Multiple Self Intersection between nature, culture and technology re-aligns traditional conceptions of identity and subjectivity.