Life on the Screen

Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and professor at MIT, examines how computers and the Internet are reshaping human identity. She argues that Western culture is shifting from a modernist "culture of calculation," in which machines were understood as transparent, logical devices whose inner workings could be analyzed, toward a postmodern "culture of simulation," in which people navigate opaque surfaces, inhabit virtual worlds, and construct multiple, fluid selves.

Turkle grounds the book in over a decade of research involving more than a thousand informants, nearly 300 of them children. She opens by describing Multi-User Domains, or MUDs, text-based virtual worlds descended from the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In these spaces, thousands of players create characters, build environments, and conduct social, romantic, and political lives entirely through typed text. Players cycle between multiple MUD characters and real life, or RL, using separate windows on their computer screens. A college junior named Doug, for instance, plays four characters across three MUDs, including a seductive woman, a macho cowboy, and a voyeuristic rabbit. For some players, RL becomes "just one more window" (13). Turkle frames this phenomenon through her own intellectual biography: In the late 1960s, she studied French poststructuralist thinkers whose ideas about the decentered, linguistically constituted self remained abstract to her. Now, she argues, life on computer screens makes those ideas concrete, bringing philosophy "down to earth" (17).

The book's first section traces a contest between two computing aesthetics. Turkle contrasts the early personal computer culture of the late 1970s, in which hobbyists valued understanding machines down to their simplest elements, with the 1984 Macintosh, whose icon-based desktop encouraged navigation and tinkering rather than analysis. She presents cases illustrating how operating system choice reflected cognitive style: a physicist who wanted his computer "as clear to me as my Swiss Army knife" (39) and a philosophy graduate student who found the Macintosh's opacity ideal. By the 1990s, the simulation aesthetic had won: Most computers sold were MS-DOS machines running Windows, which Turkle calls a "Macintosh simulator" (42), and "transparency" had come to mean ease of use rather than insight into a machine's internals.

Turkle argues that this shift validated a "soft," bricoleur style of computing, borrowing the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's term for a bottom-up, associative approach to problem-solving. She describes programming students whose relational, tinkering styles clashed with the canonical rule-driven method and who were told their approaches were wrong. Turkle traces a broader revaluation of concrete reasoning across fields, from Carol Gilligan's work on contextual moral reasoning to biologist Barbara McClintock's intimate relationship with her research materials. She examines the shift's ambiguous effects through MIT's Project Athena, where faculty debated whether computer-aided design liberated or alienated students, and through simulation games like SimCity, which teach systems thinking but accustom players to manipulating models whose core assumptions remain hidden.

The book's second section examines how encounters with "smart machines" have reshaped the boundaries people draw between themselves and technology. Turkle traces children's responses over two decades: In the early 1980s, children confronted with interactive electronic toys abandoned traditional motion-based criteria for aliveness and turned to psychological criteria, asking whether objects "know" or "cheat." Adults responded with a "romantic reaction," insisting that emotion and embodiment set humans apart. By the early 1990s, children simultaneously declared computers "just machines" and granted them psychological qualities previously reserved for living beings, creating a new category of objects that think yet are not alive.

Turkle examines Julia, a bot on MUDs created by Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University, that used pattern-matching and humor to pass as human. She describes Julia's extended encounter with a player who spent days trying to seduce the program without realizing it was not a person, illustrating how easily people project complexity onto machines. She connects Julia to a broader ecosystem of artificial agents, including Rodney Brooks's mobile robots, which learned by interacting with their environment rather than following pre-programmed plans. She then charts a growing "nonchalance" toward computer psychotherapy, tracing the evolution from Joseph Weizenbaum's dismay that people wanted to confide in his 1966 program ELIZA, which simulated a therapist through simple pattern-matching, to 1990s pragmatism in which people treated computer therapy as worth trying. Cultural factors driving this shift included the reconceptualization of therapy in cognitive-behavioral terms, the rise of self-help culture, and growing familiarity with computers as intimate machines.

Turkle's analysis of artificial intelligence focuses on the shift from rule-driven models to emergent approaches in which intelligence arises from interactions among simple agents. She argues that connectionism, which models intelligence on networks of artificial neurons that learn from experience, met the romantic reaction on its own terms by proposing machines that were unpredictable and biologically inspired. She warns, however, that emergent AI's humanistic metaphors function as a "Trojan horse," making computational models of mind seem compatible with humanistic thinking while subtly reducing emotional phenomena to cognitive engineering. Extending this argument to artificial life research, she describes programs like Thomas Ray's Tierra, in which digital organisms evolved parasites and immunity without human intervention. She finds children's responses to such objects "strikingly heterogeneous": Individual children cycle through multiple, coexisting definitions of aliveness, using terms like "sort of alive." This cycling through parallel frameworks, she argues, characterizes how people increasingly think about identity itself.

The book's final section turns to life on the Internet. Turkle presents MUDs as laboratories for identity construction, contrasting productive and unproductive uses. Gordon, a college dropout, experiments with multiple MUD characters and gradually incorporates their traits into his real personality. Stewart, a physics graduate student, builds an elaborate virtual life for his character Achilles but cannot integrate those social successes into his own self-image, describing MUDding as "an addicting waste of time" (196). Turkle distinguishes between "acting out," in which old conflicts are staged without insight, and "working through," in which safe experimentation enables genuine self-examination.

Turkle examines virtual gender-swapping as consciousness-raising about the social construction of gender. Case, an industrial designer, plays assertive female characters to access qualities he finds difficult to express as a man. Zoe, a Southern woman, plays a male wizard to experience authority on equal footing. She also examines virtual sex, noting that couples negotiate its boundaries differently, and recounts cases of deception, including a male psychiatrist who created a female persona on CompuServe and formed intimate relationships with women who believed the persona was real.

She describes a 'virtual rape' on the MUD LambdaMOO in which a player used a programming trick to force other characters to perform sexual acts, prompting debate about whether words constitute deeds and whether virtual personae carry real accountability. Turning to the political dimensions of virtual community, Turkle profiles young adults who find in MUDs the intellectual community their real-life economic circumstances deny them, while noting that one such player, deeply involved in MUD governance, had not registered to vote.

Turkle concludes by arguing that the Internet provides practical grounding for a postmodern understanding of identity as multiple, fluid, and constructed. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton's concept of the "protean self," she contends that healthy multiplicity requires coherence and moral outlook. She presents Ava, a graduate student who lost a leg in an accident and, through a one-legged MUD character and virtual romance, learned to accept her body, crediting the experience with enabling her to "make love again in real life" (263). Turkle argues that virtuality can function as a transitional space, powerful but ultimately in the service of the embodied self, and warns that multiplicity without self-knowledge risks fragmentation. The book closes by invoking the anthropologist Victor Turner's concept of liminality, a moment of passage when new cultural meanings can emerge, and argues that we must develop a moral discourse adequate to the contradictions of life on the screen.