We're Gonna Compute Like It's 1995

One of the textbooks I was assigned to read is Life on the Screen, by Dr. Sherry Turkle. She's a psychotherapist and taught at MIT for twenty years, so she's uniquely prepared at address the subject. I began reading it, interested to learn if (and if yes, then to what degree) computers were sucking out my soul.

Near the beginning of the book she describes the psychology involved in playing online multiplayer games. I'm with you, Dr. Turkle, I think to myself. World of Warcrft, I expect her to say next. But no, the games she begins describing are TEXT-BASED. Incredulous, I turned to the front of my ebook. Copyright 1995?

I couldn't believe a textbook involving computers that was printed 12 years ago could still be relevant. Fortunately I decided to press on, and was rewarded to see that Turkle had identified important insights that have actually become more relevant. (She accurately saw the direction computer dedvelopment was going.)

Here's a point of hers that I found interesting:

 From the days of Babbage's analytical engine and into the 1980s people had viewed computers with the philosophy of modernism. By modernism she means that assumption the Western world has had since the Renaissance that everything in the universe (and certainly our world) can be categorized, broken into its component parts, and fully understood if studied properly. The world was a system of gears, pulleys, and levers waiting to be discovered, cataloged, and manipulated.

But eventually we abandoned this straitforward, no-nonsense approach to computing for the idea of a simulated world in our computer. Apple introduced the desktop, a virtual space that allowed someone to interact with the computer as if it were a little world instead of a big calculator that prompted you to type in commands. We tried to see how real we could make computers. We built networks that allowed people to interact with each other(as their real selves or not.) We don't think about the 1's and 0's that snake through our every digital move. To summarize, we developed a postmodern outlook about the whole thing. We recognize that we're in a world that escapes perfect definition, that has characteristics we don't understand, that often gives us more questions than answers. And that's okay. We don't need to understand it perfectly to use it from day to day. In that way, the computer is like life itself, which we live each day without fully understanding its characteristics, meanings, or potential.

The modern/postmodern philosophies are new to me. So is the way Turkle describes our interactions with computers. But I think there's merit to this line of thinking and I'm glad to keep reading her book. Even if all the old school computer lingo she uses has me dreading that my ebook will start telling me things like, "You've got mail!"