English 168.7
FT 98
Assignment #1
For Thursday, September 2:
Write an essay (2 - 3 pp.) about your own "identity" as a computer user, your sense of yourself as an individual and writer interacting with a machine – and perhaps interacting with other people through that machine.
But first, read the attached pages from Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen. Use a statement or idea of Turkle’s as a springboard or focusing device for your essay. Any topic that she brings up is eligible as long as it leads you to reflect on your relationship with computers and share your reflections with readers.
Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist who teaches at M.I.T., but she is also a real person and writes like one. She has been studying interactions between humans, computers, and networks since at least 1984. In Life on the Screen (1995), she proposes that, since the early ‘80s, people who use computers and the societies in which they live have moved from a "culture of calculation" to a "culture of simulation," and she explains it thus:
The lessons of computing today have little to do with calculation and rules; instead they concern simulation, navigation, and interaction. The very image of the computer as a giant calculator has become quaint and dated. Of course, there is still "calculation" going on within the computer, but it is no longer the important or interesting level to think about or interact with. Fifteen years ago, most computer users were limited to typing commands. Today they use off-the-shelf products to manipulate simulated desktops, draw with simulated paints and brushes, and fly in simulated airplane cockpits. The computer culture’s center of gravity has shifted decisively to people who do not think of themselves as programmers. . . .
Exactly how those people do think of themselves is the subject of her book, which we may well revisit.
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A suggestion (which may be blindingly obvious) and a question: Read Turkle’s essay and everything else you read in hardcopy form this semester with pen or pencil in hand, underscoring or highlighting key points and making note of words you don’t fully understand and expressions you think are noteworthy for their own sake. But what will you do about texts you read online – in the clear, frictionless, remote medium of the CRT?