Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, explores how our increasingly intimate interactions with technology are shaping us. In particular, the computer and the technologies extending from it are not merely tools, she says; rather, they are objects that are changing the way we see ourselves and our world in profound ways. We thus will have an increasingly "evocative" relationship with our machines, something for which we don't even have a conscious vocabulary. The advent of our "computer culture" has also created new possibilities for our engagement with each other. What is needed, Professor Turkle says, is a psychoanalytic theory to examine this along the same principles as the one attributed to Freud, which also dealt with "object relations," those objects being the roles that people play in our lives.

I have to say that thinking of robots as my "companions" in my old age pushed the limits of my imagination; this despite my love of Star Trek and its artificial but sentient characters. The kicker was considering the following:

The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents dramatic questions that are based on current technology...

This is an order of magnitude more profound than how the automobile changed our "relationship" with our social and cultural spaces. And what's more, before we can think of this, what should we make of the very idea of what we understand as a "machine" playing the role of a companion to living, breathing humans? One could say that Professor Turkle is being alarmist by drawing our attention to the challenge that this poses to our assumptions of "the irreducibility of human beings" since in all likelihood most of us are not going to have to deal with this in our lifetimes; besides, most people on the planet do have more basic needs that are going unmet. Well, technology in various forms is, for good or bad, making its way to the god-forsaken corners of the world (think satellite dishes on bull-drawn carts in Indian villages that do not have roads or running water).

Such a discourse in our often over-prejudiced cultures tends to veer into value judgements on the amorphous idea of "Technology." While judgement may very well be called for, it is premature before we have grasped what it is that we are judging. A way to get our hands around these emerging promises of technology is precisely what Professor Turkle is proposing.

Among the ways in which computers have changed our lives that we do know is the ubiquity of this vast, awesome network of information, ideas and, yes, communities of people to which we have all come to belong. When my hard-drive crashed a few weeks ago, I was told that sending it off to the manufacturer for repair or replacement would mean that I would not have a functioning machine for over two weeks. That was unacceptable, I had just begun to blog and I could not tolerate being cut off from the Internet for that long because I had barely begun to get noticed and such a protracted absence, in blog-time, could classify me as "churned." In contrast, if my car ended up in the shop for the same amount of time, I'd live with the inconvenience of a long commute to work by public transportation for those two weeks. You may judge me to be obsessed but the fact remains that my connection with the blogging "community" has come to provide enough fulfillment that I'd want to minimize my time away from it.

While I'm on the subject of blogging, here's one of the "right-on!" moments I had when reading Professor Turkle's lecture:

For some, computation offers the promise of perfection, the fantasy that "If you do it right, it will do it right, and right away." Writers can become obsessed with fonts, layout, spelling and grammar checks. What was once a typographical error can be, like Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter, a sign of shame.

I took up blogging in order to build my writing muscles but as soon as I started I found myself staying up every night making my templates look just right, which of course they never will. While I was doing that, I'd check out other blogs and lament to all who'd listen that most blogs out there valued form over substance and, by the way, I still think that.

My other "right-on!" moment was:

Cyberspace opens the possibility for identity play, but it is very serious play. People who cultivate an awareness of what stands behind their screen personae are the ones most likely to succeed in using virtual for personal and social transformation.

Many moons ago, when I first got on the Internet, I was excited about being online as someone I wasn't. I wanted to liberate those aspects of me that for some reason I had been unwilling to show the light of day. Turns out that I only needed to do that once. I ended up going along with someone else's game, playing someone I hadn't intended to play and doing so convincingly. That's all it took to begin getting used to those hidden aspects and incorporating them into my "real" persona. Yes, I'm making it sound too easy and no, I ain't gonna give any details but you get the point...

In the industrialized, urban cultures, we've now accepted the tinkering of our personalities through psychopharmacological agents. I know the argument that this ain't the tinkering of one's personality as much as it's bringing forth the personality that has been subdued due to chemical weirdness in the brain. I'll buy that too, which is to say that it is not evident which is the "real" personality, the pre or the post. As Professor Turkle mentions in her conclusion, does this amount to reducing the mind to a biochemical machine?

So there we have it. My own, little psychoanalytic investigation is underway. I was a (very unhappy) mechanical engineer in my previous life. I like to say that I prefer being a few degrees of abstraction away from the nuts and bolts of reality, which is what computer science offered me. This distance however does give me a clearer view of reality...I think.

--aslam

9:57:41 PM