PLACE: EARTH ------- MEAT SPACE / CYBER SPACE - LANDSCAPE / CYBERSCAPE
MEAT SPACE TIME: AMERICA 1890 / 2007
INTERNET TIME: ISO Three months equals one year of ordinary time.
CONTEXT: INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TO PRESENT SPANS 5 GENERATIONS
and
Really Thinking About ThingsIT is heartening to learn that a member of the cyberelite cannot figure
out how to turn off her iPod, and that she sometimes fumbles new
programs on her laptop. “That’s why they invented 16-year-olds,” said
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and
M.I.T.
professor who has been studying the folkways of computer culture for
over two decades (since long before the rest of us knew to put
“culture” and “computer” in the same sentence).
She was using the objects in her 19th-century town house, which was
bought and renovated by Professor Turkle after her divorce from Becca’s
father 10 years ago, to explain the premise of her new book. “Evocative
Objects: Things We Think With” (M.I.T. Press) is a collection of
essays, edited and introduced by Professor Turkle, about how everyday
objects tell stories about their owners.
Objects and artifacts
have long been Professor Turkle’s stock in trade. When she arrived at
M.I.T. in the 1970s, fresh from Harvard, Paris and years of studying
French philosophy and psychoanalytic thought, Professor Turkle brought
a humanist’s eye to the device that her new colleagues had become
enamored of: the computer.
To her, it was an “evocative
object,” a “companion to emotion, and a provocation to thought.” She
looked beyond what the computer could do for us to what it might do to
us, as individuals and as a society. As a sociologist of science, she
spent years studying hacker culture, child programmers and gamers,
groundbreaking work collected in books like “The Second Self: Computers
and the Human Spirit,” published in 1984, and “Life on the Screen:
Identity in the Age of the Internet,” from 1995.