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출처 | Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (1985): 520. |
-Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction to the MIT Press Edition (2004) 1
Introduction (1984): The Evocative Object 17
Part I
Growing Up with Computers: The Animation of the Machine
1 Child Philosophers: Are Smart Machines Alive? 33
2 Video Games and Computer Holding Power 65
3 Child Programmers: The First Generation 91
4 Adolescence and Identity: Finding Yourself in the Machine 131
Part II
The New Computer Cultures: The Mechanization of the Mind
5 Personal Computers with Personal Meanings 155
6 Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself 183
7 The New Philosophers of Artificial Intelligence:
A Culture with Global Aspirations 219
Part III
Into a New Age
8 Thinking of Yourself as a Machine 247
9 The Human Spirit in a Computer Culture 279
Epilogue (2004): Changing the Subject and Finding the Object 287
Appendixes
A On Method: A Sociology of Sciences of Mind 303
B Children’s Psychological Discourse: Methods and Data Summary 313
Notes 323
Index 359
Acknowledgments
2004
I thank Kelly Gray for being a close and dedicated reader, who along with Jen
Audley, Robert Briscoe, Deborah Cantor-Adams, Anita Chan, Michele Crews,
Olivia Dasté, and Rachel Prentice, offered helpful opinions about the direction to
take in preparing this new edition.
And I am grateful to my daughter, Rebecca Ellen Turkle Willard, who has
inspired, delighted, and given me permission to quote her.
1984
I have worked on this book for six years and I have accumulated many
debts. My first, of course, is to my informants who generously allowed me
to share in their lives. My second debt is not to individuals but to an institution.
This is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It was at MIT that I first met up with the computer culture and it
was at MIT that I found help and support to pursue my understanding
of it.
Two people gave me early encouragement that helped to get my project
underway: Harold J. Hanham, the Dean of the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, and Michael Dertouzos, Director of the Laboratory for
Computer Science. In the Laboratory for Computer Science, Hal Abelson,
J. C. R. Licklider, Robert Fano, Warren J. Seering, and Joseph Weizenbaum
were early guides to important issues, as were Patrick Winston, Marvin
Minsky, Seymour Papert, and Gerald Sussman in the Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, and Benson Snyder in the Division for Study and Research in
Education. I owe a special debt to Professors Abelson, Fano, Seering, and
Sussman of MIT as well as to Professor William H. Bossert of Harvard for
making it possible for me to study the progress of students in their
introductory programming courses. At MIT my academic home is in the
Program for Science, Technology, and Society. My colleagues there read the
earliest drafts of the research proposals and reports that grew into this
book; they helped me formulate my ideas. I thank all of them, with particular
thanks to Carl Kaysen, Kenneth Keniston, Leo Marx, and Michael
Piore. I have a special debt to Professor Keniston. For several years he and
I have taught the course “Technology and the Individual.” Some of the
material in this book was first presented there and gained enormously from
his reflections, as it did from the reactions of our students.
My students have played a very special role in this project, particularly
the students who have taken my “Computers and People” seminar through
the years. My work required me to learn many things about electronics,
computers, and programming languages, all of which were new to me. In
my students I found tireless teachers. Beyond helping me to learn what I
needed to know technically, they helped me to see the depth of feeling
and involvement that people develop when they interact with technical
objects: bicycles, radios, and model trains as well as computers. Without
this understanding I would not have been able to write this book.
My intellectual debts extend beyond MIT. This book is an outgrowth of
a previous project—a sociological study of psychoanalysis. What seemed
like a shift of interest to many of my friends and colleagues felt to me like
the pursuit of the same goal: to understand how ideas move out from a
sophisticated technical world into the culture as a whole and, once there,
how they shape the way people think about themselves. And so I owe a
debt to several sociologists who had a formative influence on my earlier
work—Daniel Bell, George Homans, and David Riesman, all of whom
encouraged me in this new project and supported my sense of its intellectual
continuity with what I had done before.
Listening was at the heart of this research, and I must thank my colleagues
in the Mental Health Service of the Harvard University Health
Service who helped me to become a better clinician, that is to say a better
listener.
The many readers of my manuscript made important contributions.
Alice Mayhew offered a unique and disciplined perspective. At a crucial
point in the process of rewriting, Janet Sand encouraged me to go beyond
what I then thought were my best efforts. Cynthia Merman offered that
mix of moral support and practical suggestion that marks a fine editor.
Jaffray Cuyler, Craig Decker, Elaine Douglass, Erwin Glikes, Ann Godoff,
Sani Kirmani, Rob Kling, Michael Korda, Martin Krieger, Pearl Levy, Justin
x Acknowledgments
Marble, Artemis Papert, Christopher Stacy, Lloyd Tennenbaum, and
Deborah Wilkes all made suggestions that found their way into the
finished product.
This work is a field study based on many thousands of hours of interviews
and observations all over the United States. The freedom to work, to
travel, to transcribe, to write and rewrite is costly. I was in a position to
pursue this research because of the material support of three organizations:
the National Science Foundation, which funded the first three years of my
fieldwork, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, which provided
me with fellowship support in later phases of research and writing.
I have three final debts to acknowledge—to Nancy Rosenblum, whose
commitment to me and to this project has filled me with wonder and gratitude,
to John Berlow, a co-investigator in the Austen School study of children
and computers, and to Seymour Papert, who first encouraged me to
consider the proposition that when computers become expressive instruments
in the hands of children the machines enter into the process of
growing up. More than anyone else, he impressed me with the idea—an
idea that informs every page of this book—of how arbitrary are the lines
that we use to divide thought and feeling. These three worked with me,
with patience and tolerance, during long hours of brainstorming, writing,
and editing. Their contributions did more than increase the scope and
clarity of this book. Their presence decreased the loneliness and the doubts
that went along with writing it. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
Boston, Massachusetts
December 1983
Acknowledgments xi
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
Introduction to the MIT Press Edition (2004)
When writing this book about computers and people, I immersed myself
in a world that was altogether strange to me. Trained as a humanist, I took
a job at MIT in the late 1970s. There I was surrounded by people who spoke
about the mind in an unfamiliar language of bits and bytes, registers and
compilers. Many of them had strong, even passionate relationships with
digital machines. I had students and colleagues who claimed that building
and programming computers was the most powerful intellectual and emotional
experience of their lives, an experience that changed the way they
thought about the world, about their relationships with others, and, most
strikingly, about themselves. I first heard such extravagant sentiments
expressed by computer professionals, but in the course of my six-year study
I came across them in personal computer clubs and grade school classrooms.
“When you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind
and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind,” said Deborah, a sixthgrade
student in an elementary school that had recently introduced computer
programming into its curriculum. Her comment stayed with me and
inspired my title.
The Second Self documents a moment in history when people from all
walks of life (not just computer scientists and artificial intelligence
researchers) were first confronted with machines whose behavior and
mode of operation invited psychological interpretation and that, at the
same time, incited them to think differently about human thought,
memory, and understanding. In consequence, they came to see both their
minds and computational machines as strangely unfamiliar or “uncanny”
in the sense that Sigmund Freud had defined it. For Freud, the uncanny
(das Unheimliche) was that which is “known of old and long familiar” seen
anew, as strangely unfamiliar.1
Psychoanalysis shares with computation a subversive vocation: each in its
own way defamiliarizes the mind. In the Cartesian tradition, the mind is
taken to have immediate and privileged knowledge of itself. There is nothing
in nature that each of us, theoretically speaking, is in a better position to
comprehend than our own mind. Psychoanalysis called this transparency
of mind into question. It asserted that our conscious thoughts and actions,
our deepest feelings and our strongest moral convictions, are shaped by powerful
psychical forces of which we are not normally aware. It pointed to
serious, previously unrecognized obstacles to self-knowledge. According to
psychoanalysis, the mind—known of old and thought to be quite familiar—
was actually unexplored territory, an internal but expansive terra incognita.
The computer, too, called longstanding assumptions about self-understanding
into question. From the earliest days, computer science borrowed
terms from everyday psychology to describe the operations of computing
machines just as psychology borrowed language from computer science to
describe the mind. Most strikingly, it was common to speak of a computer’s
“memory” at a time when behaviorism was insisting that all one could
study in people was the behavior of “remembering.” Computers helped to
relegitimate the notion of memory within academic psychology, and with
the introduction of computers into mainstream culture in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, people in their everyday conversation began to describe
human mental activity in computational terms. (“Excuse me, I need to
clear my buffer; I won’t be happy until I debug this problem.”)
While I was writing The Second Self, I introduced the idea of slips of the
tongue in my MIT classroom. At that time, one of my students recast the
idea of Freudian slips as “information processing errors.” We had read a text
in which Freud described the chairman of a parliamentary session opening
the session by declaring the meeting closed.2 My student, who thought of
her mind as a computer, saw the substitution of “closed” for “open” not as
a way to understand the chairman’s possible ambivalence, but as a “bit being
dropped,” perhaps due to a power surge. With the transition from a psychoanalytic
to a computational metaphor of mind, an explanation in terms
of meaning had shifted to an explanation in terms of mechanism. With this,
came an attendant question: If mind is program, where is free will?
By the mid-1980s, by the way it posed such questions, the computer had
become an evocative object, an object that provoked self-reflection. Philosophical
questions that had been traditionally confined to seminar rooms
were concretized in discussions about what computers could do. Computers
brought philosophy down to earth. Even children playing with the first
generation of computer toys and games were asking new questions about
the machine’s “life” and “mind” and then, by extension, wondering what
was special about their own.
2 Introduction to the MIT Press Edition
Twenty years later, the computer would seem secure in its role as an
evocative object for thinking about human identity. Cognitive science has
developed far more sophisticated computational models of mental
processes than were dreamt of two decades ago, and the Internet has
opened up new paths for the exploration of self and sociability. However,
with time grows a sense of familiarity. What was once exotic begins to
seem “natural.”
Today, we take for granted our lives with computation (our personal computers,
personal digital assistants, our cellphones that serve as organizers
and cameras) and within computation (our computer games, e-mail, instant
messaging, and online communities). And we show increasing nonchalance
about the idea of computation within ourselves. In the medical arena,
cochlear implants are a current reality, and we look forward to computational
implants that might help with epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
In 1984 the notion of mind as program was controversial. These days, the
use of computational metaphors to speak about the mind has become banal.
In the early days of the computer presence in the wider, nontechnical
culture, the time frame of The Second Self, it was commonplace to describe
the computer as “just a tool,” in a way that dismissed its effects on child
development and on our emotional lives. In The Second Self I was writing
against the common view that the computer was “just a tool,” arguing for
us to look beyond all the things the computer does for us (for example,
help with word processing and spreadsheets) to what using it does to us as
people. I was helped in this task by the very newness of the computer.
Most people could remember when it hadn’t been around. In the twenty
years that followed, the situation became more complex. The trend was
for new computational objects—personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellphones,
laptops—to become even more intimate partners to their users,
more like thought-prosthetics than simple tools. The subjective side to
computer technology became more apparent, even as the ubiquity of these
objects began to dull our sensitivity to their effects.
In this case there are virtues in learning to see the commonplace as
unfamiliar. Psychoanalysis relies on the analytic experience, the “talking
cure,” to defamiliarize the mind to itself and thus reveal what would
otherwise be hidden in the light. Anthropologists similarly address the
question of how to see one’s own culture in sharper relief by spending time
in another. They refer to this displacement as dépaysement, quite literally,
de-countrifying. Dépaysement need not involve travel. What matters is
immersing oneself in something foreign so that upon returning home the
familiar has become strange—and can be seen with fresh eyes.
Introduction to the MIT Press Edition 3
It is my hope that the republication of The Second Self will afford its readers
a chance to engage in an intellectual dépaysement: not only to (re)experience
the now almost-foreign computer culture of the late 1970s and early
1980s but to view our contemporary computer culture from a new perspective.*
Many of my readers may have forgotten (and younger readers
never knew) what it was like to experience the personal computer as a problematic
object, one that defied easy categorization and troubled the mind.
In the 1980s many parents were concerned about putting children and
computers together; there seemed to be something unnatural about the
combination. Today, when school systems can afford them, computers are
taken to be a basic classroom tool: PowerPoint presentation software is routinely
taught to third graders with the approval of most parents. When
children were introduced to video games in the 1980s, there was serious
discussion of banning them using the same statutes that outlawed addictive
substances such as heroin and marijuana. These days, video games
have become a staple of home entertainment, and Internet-based multiplayer
games are a routine pastime for hundreds of thousands. The 2002
launch of The Sims Online, an Internet-based multiplayer game, made the
cover of Newsweek magazine in the anticipation that some day millions of
people would live parallel lives in virtual communities.
In general, we have come to accept current, specific applications of computer
technology as inevitable. We lose sight of the fact that things were
once different and might have developed along other paths if different
decisions had been taken by manufacturers and consumers, by educators
and governments. Yet, if we hope to construct the richest lives possible
with this technology, we must not lose our sense of its many potentials
and not see its current direction as inevitable or determined.
Looking back at the recent history of the computer culture should make
it easier to look critically at past decisions, sharpen the terms in which
decisions yet to be made are framed, and deepen our conversations about
who we are becoming in our increasing intimacy with our machines.
The View from Twenty Years
In the twenty years since the first publication of this book, computation
has become more complex, but fundamental aspects of how people relate
4 Introduction to the MIT Press Edition
* To this end, I have made only minor revisions—removing errors and making
clarifications—to the 1984 text and notes. Substantive additions, both in the text
and in notes, are indicated by the use of italics.
to the seductions of interactive media have stayed constant. In this sense,
The Second Self remains a primer in the psychology of people’s relationships
with computers. Computational objects, poised between the world
of the animate and inanimate, are experienced as both part of the self
and of the external world. This is as true today as it was for those early
adopters of computer technology I studied in the late 1970s and early
1980s. The remark about programming that inspired my title (thirteenyear-
old Deborah saying, “There is a little piece of your mind and now it’s
a little piece of the computer’s mind . . .”) has profound analogies with a
recent comment by a woman who spoke of her personal digital assistant
and said: “When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. It had my life on
it . . . I thought I had lost my mind.”
One step beyond the PDA that has one’s “life on it” is the development
of “wearable computing.” More recently, people who may refer to themselves
as “cyborgs” wear their computers: the central processing unit and
radio transmitter in one pocket, a tiny keyboard in another, their eyeglasses
serving as screens. The designers of such systems talk about new possibilities
for information access: one can be online all the time, for example,
in conversation with a faculty colleague while at the same time reading
that colleague’s most recent papers. The cyborgs, however, testify to
effects of the technology on a very different register: they say that
wearable computers change their sense of self. For one, “I become my computer.
It’s not just that I remember people or know more about them. I feel
invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I’m a
better person.” Over the past twenty years, there have been several
revolutions in computer hardware and software, but the projection of
self onto computational media is as consistent as it is dramatic. In 1984,
referring to that projection by calling computers a “second self” was
provocative. Today, it does not go far enough. To be provocative, one is
tempted to speak not merely of a second self but of a new generation of
self, itself.
Yet there are some things that have not been carried forward. Schoolchildren
learning to program under innovative educational initiatives of
twenty years ago, such as Deborah, are among this book’s central actors.
So, too, is a vibrant culture of personal computer owners who built and
bought home computers for the joy of understanding how they worked.
But in today’s cultural mainstream, these actors are no longer with us. The
socially shared activity of computer programming and hardware tinkering
has been displaced by playing games, participation in online chat and
blogs, and using applications software out of the box.
Introduction to the MIT Press Edition 5
What are the differences between programming a computer that quite
literally “re-minds” you of your mind—what Deborah was able to
accomplish even with her very primitive programming skills—and the
experience of externalizing your schedule or sensibility on the PDAs, computer
desktops, or Web sites, where “second selves” are constructed in contemporary
personal computing? Deborah was programming in the Logo
programming language, which enabled her to “drive” a screen cursor
known as a turtle. The turtle left traces of its path on the screen. Children
were taught to give explicit commands to the turtle (such as FORWARD 100;
RIGHT TURN 90) that caused it to trace geometric patterns that children
could then capture in a program. Deborah used her programming skills
to create a “microworld” on the computer, a rule-driven universe of her
own design.
Deborah restricted the commands she could give to the turtle: she would
allow herself only one turning command—a right turn of thirty degrees.
Once she had her rule, she got down to serious work, an explosion of creativity.
Most important was how her rule made her feel. Away from the
computer, she felt out of control. She was struggling with overeating and
the temptations of smoking. While on the computer she felt herself in a
situation simple enough for her to feel in control yet varied enough for
creative exploration. In chapter 4, when I tell Deborah’s story, I stress that
her need was for a world apart in which she could build a new set of distinctions
that she could then transfer to thinking about herself. The computer
provided this world and gave her categories more useful than “I am
good” or “I am bad.” With the thirty-degrees world she had a new way to
think about her problems. She was able to go beyond thinking of herself
as bad, to thinking, “I am in trouble because I have no rules. I am not in
control. And I should be. I can be.” The computer, quite literally, became
Deborah’s object-to-think-with for thinking about herself.
The experience of authorship in programming gave children like
Deborah a sense of control that enabled them to construct microworlds
that were exquisitely tuned to their own developmental needs. Programming
provided a medium for projection—in The Second Self I refer to it as
a “Rorschach effect.” But unlike the Rorschach inkblots, programming also
provided a means for people to work through personal issues, as Deborah
had been able to do with her thirty-degrees world.
These days, if a child such as Deborah tried to work out her need for
structure with a computer, she would more likely turn to the activity of
building personal avatars in virtual space or joining a team of online
adventurers in a rule-based multiplayer universe—in the past ten years the
6 Introduction to the MIT Press Edition
most popular of these have included EverQuest, Ultima II, and Asheron’s
Call. In these contexts, she would have a large canvas for identity play. She
could choose a new name—say, “Rule_Girl”—and develop a play pattern
that made her feel safe, perhaps by joining a player class that could only
function in highly constrained ways. In a medieval online game, she might
not play a magician but a serf or a knight who operated under an elaborate
code. There would be rich possibilities for experimenting with identity;
she would be playing with other people, yet the game would be of
someone else’s creation. When Deborah created the thirty-degrees world she
had the sense not only that it was all hers, but that she understood how
it worked. From her perspective, if not perhaps from a computer scientist’s,
Deborah’s microworld was both self-authored and transparent.
Transparency and Opacity
For me, among so many changes to the landscape of twenty years ago, the
shift in expectations about technological transparency stands out as particularly
striking. Early personal computers, like their mini and mainframe
cousins, used operating systems and programming languages that gave
users a feeling of contact with the “bare machine.” I wrote The Second Self
on an Apple II computer that had, quite literally, been torn bare. Its cover
had been removed and its operating system replaced with another called
CP/M. In order to communicate with my computer, for example, to ask it
to summon the word processing program called Scribble, I had to give it
specific symbolic commands that I understood as my means of addressing
the machine “below.” And once I was dealing with Scribble, I was still in a
world of commands, this time to format my text. For example, to indicate
that I wanted a flush left heading, “Transparency and Opacity,” printed
in bold face, I would type “@left[@b(Transparency and Opacity)].” Every
command I issued was a line of text, a neat string of symbols—requirements
that kept me in touch with the idea that I was directly addressing a
machine, speaking to it in its language. I felt that I had to use symbols and
a formal language of nested delimiters (parentheses and brackets) because
my machine needed to reduce my commands to something that could be
translated into electrical impulses. The fact that my Apple II’s printed circuits
were physically exposed only reinforced this notion.
Although I did not build my own personal computer from a kit or learn
to program in assembly language as did many of the early home computer
enthusiasts I interviewed, my experience with CP/M and my naked Apple
II provided a reference point for my understanding the aesthetic of
Introduction to the MIT Press Edition 7
technological transpare
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