Cultural Identities

postmodernism brought down to (virtual) earth

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Life on the Screen

Sherry Turkle (1995) Life on the Screen

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MUDS

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Doug

‘I split my mind…I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window. I’m in some kind of argument in one window and trying to come onto a girl in a MUD in another, and another window might be running a spreadsheet program …and then I’ll get a real time message, and I guess that RL - it’s just one more window.’ (Turkle: 291)

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Mind-space: Fantasy and Imagination

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Culture of calculation/culture of simulation

Modernist Postmodernist

Linear Decentred

Logical Fluid

Hierarchical Non-linear

Transparent/with depth

Opaque

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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

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Are we living life on the screen or in the screen?

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The Seductions of the Interface

“When I want to write and don’t have a computer around, I tend to wait until I do. In fact, I feel that I must wait until I do” (29).

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Of Dreams and Beasts

“Children, as usual, are harbingers of our cultural mindset” (82).

And as children become more and more immersed in the computer

culture, their original question has changed. Today’s children no

longer ask "is it (the computer) alive?" They recognize that the

machine is not alive, however, they have begun to see that

computers can “both think and have a personality” (83). But they

are comfortable with the idea that "inanimate objects can both think

and have a personality" (83). Where adults might balk at the idea

that computers could/can be conscious, we have gradually become

“accustomed to talking to technology, and sometimes, in the most

literal sense” (85).

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Talking

Eliza The Turing Test

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On the Internet

“a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and deconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180).

“[I am] like who I wish I was.” “maybe I can only relax if I see life as one

more IRC channel.” “Can anyone tell me how to join@real.life?” Interview with Sherry Turkle

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Gender Trouble

Choosing Choices Crossing Passing

Questions …

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Virtual Sex

What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and

virtual bodies? And is it different in cyberspaces? What is the nature of our social ties? What kinds of accountability do we have for our

actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind on society or societies are we creating,

both on and off the screen?

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Virtual Identities?

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Virtual Selves?

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Turkle’s Conclusion

Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be a raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don’t have to reject life on the screen, but we don’t have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for growth. Having literally written our online personae into existence, we are in a position to be more aware of what we project into everyday life. Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to the real world better equipped to understand its artifices. 263

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism

Writing is not created within a vacuum by the author; rather, the audience participates in the construction of the text.

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism

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.

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism

knowledge is created not by the act of observing but through relations

power is the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.

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Poststructuralism/Postmodernism

Power rangers

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Erosion of traditionally stable boundaries what are the binaries?

– Self– Nature– Animate– Human– Real– Unitary

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So, utopia or dystopia?

Sennett or Turkle? Embracing a new world or rejecting an old

one? A (postmodern) crisis of identity? A banal distraction from reality?

Or simply, business as usual?