Identity in the age of the internet.

Turkle explores our quest for identity and to make meaning in the computer age. From their early computational meanings – the transparent embodiment of rapid ones and zeros – to the present; where our machines are both an extension and an expression of ourselves, and almost a friend. Through the domestication of the computer and modem, we have overcome our fear that one day Kubrick’s HAL will warmly tell us he “can’t do that” and eject us into open space. On reflection, even my appointing a feeling to HAL’s speech – that he spoke warmly – is an example of how humans instinctively invest objects with feelings, emotions and in terms of modern computers, independent thought.

The deconstruction age

Turkle’s paper sets the scene through her study of MUDs (multi-user domains) and MUD users: fully text-based internet environments, where people interact through multiple virtual characters in communally created virtual environments. Although she later reflects that the increased popular comfort with personal computers can be linked to the use of GUI (graphic user interface) technology as a portal to software usage, MUD users create the graphics solely in their imagination and all that actually exists is multi-authored text. Turkle smoothly slots her findings into her past research along with philosophical notions of identity and scientific concepts of individual. Her article asks new questions of identity, have we come full circle? Where once humanity was indecipherably complex so that only a ‘god’ could have created us, now computer technology is invisible beneath a GUI veneer and we are laid bare in an endless rotating strip of DNA – simpler than machine – for a stem cell can give birth to any human part but machine parts are now specialised.

As we search for meaning, and as I, the reader assimilate the article, my mind throws up previous symbiotic experiences; of internet love, online chat, pre and post GUI desktops, the day my father bought our first computer home and never using windows, my first email account. I strain for connection, for integration. This is the only way I believe I will discover my destiny and answer the eternal question, through integration into the three-dimensional whole that is ‘me’. But for an experienced MUD user, the process is one of de-centralisation. Switching between windows, personalities, RL (real life) and virtual life, their personality is a democracy of sorts, although this suggests a kind of balance which many of the users in Turkle’s study seem to lack. Where as I, a Luddite perhaps, would judge negatively their choice of channelling their passion and effort into a world that doesn’t exist instead of trying to make the best of their 3D lives, they would question my devotion to an existence over which I have so little control and so much invested. In fact when a MUD user asks ‘why am I here?’, they don’t need to bother with the answer because here is any place they have chosen to be.