Alone Together with Sherry Turkle: On Second Life, Online Identity, and Whether SL Undermines Post-Modernism

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other is the new book from Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor whose writing on Internet culture and virtual worlds have been enormously influential on their development and evolution.  (I cite her in my own book on SL.)  Coming to shelves next January (when she'll be a guest on the Colbert Report), much of her book is about Second Life, and the larger lessons she drew from that world:

“I use Second Life as an example of a shift from the 1990s, when people went into MUDs and MOOs and other virtual spaces to ‘cycle through’ into virtual worlds,” Proessor Turkle tells me via email. “Now, because of mobile devices in part, I argue that we live something closer to a continual co-presence, what one of the people I interview who has an active ‘second life’ in Second Life calls multi-lifing. So, I see a shift from cycling through to multi-lifing. I think it's an important one.”

I asked Sherry Turkle about Second Life and post-modernism: in a widely read and debated New World Notes post, sociologist grad student Robert Hooker argued that user activity in SL, which overwhelmingly centers on roleplaying traditional gender and sexual orientation categories, undermines post-modern thought, particularly as expressed by Professor Turkle herself. What did she think of that reasoning?

“I would say that the speaker makes a category error: he speaks about his experience and what he want to do on Second Life and on the Internet and draws conclusions about what ‘people’ want to do,” Sherry Turkle told me. “This leads him to conclude that ‘people’ want to find a unity, a wholeness in the Jungian tradition. His argument about hypersexuality does not take into account that some of these hypersexualized people are, in fact, being played by people of the other gender. Second Life is a place for identity play.

"What I think is fair to say, as the Internet comes into greater maturity, is that we see an interesting complexity and confusion -- the confusion that caused me to call my book Alone Together. We live in a state of continual confusion.”

For Professor Turkle, this disorientation extends across many modes of Internet expression: “When we go onto a game and play an avatar,” she says, “we end up playing ourselves more than we might have imagined; when we say we are just being ‘ourselves’ (say on Facebook) we play "roles" more than we ever would have imagined. Alone Together tries to capture this new circumstance.”

More when Alone Together hits the shelves; you can pre-order it here.

Hat tip: Andrew Sempere.

Comments

[Wizard Gynoid]

it may well be that i play my RL self more than i might have imagined, but the more interesting and intriguing thing to me is how my SL self differs and is independent of its typist. my SL persona has a personality and life of its own. i think that i am not the first and only one to make that observation.

[cube inada]

Its a Media Induced Psychosis.... and since we cannot truly multitask and produce "more than the sum of its parts"... people will find out very soon, that "multilifing" is just a new flavor of the delusion.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

It is amazing how much we bring, often unintentionally, into our SL selves - and also how much they bring, and sometimes challenge our RL.

[Anon]

Sherry Turkle's writing "on Internet culture and virtual worlds has been enormously influential on their development and evolution."
Say WHAT?

Would you like to back that statement up with some facts, Hamlet?

I cite her in my writing too, but that doesn't make her influential in the evolution of internet culture or the development of virtual worlds.

She's like you or me: a writer, a researcher. She doesn't influence or affect the process--she studies, reports, theorizes.

good grief. I really expect better from you
Raffila Millgrove

[Extropia DaSilva]

@ Wizard Gynoid. What you said about the SL personae reminded me of studies conducted by Marjorie Taylor. In a study of fifty fiction writers, it was found that forty six had invented characters who subsequently resisted their creator’s attempts to control the narrative. They even came to inhabit the writer’s home. The authors who described more frequent and detailed accounts of their creations seeming to ‘break free’ had more success in getting their work published.

Perhaps it is not too surprising to find this can happen in SL. After all, here one enters a world with a pretty complex society already in place (unlike a novel, which the author's imagination must build up from a more primative level). It is also aparrent that while SL bares some relation to RL, it nevertheless follows its own rules. The symbolic interactionism we encounter in SL reflects aspects of personality that perhaps do not come to the fore in RL, and that can blossom into full-blown personaes that feel as real as the imaginary characters in authors' minds evidently sometimes do.

[Extropia DaSilva]

I have read quite a few books and seen quite a few documentaries about the Internet, Internet culture and online worlds.

I would say that the majority cite Sherry Turkle's studies as sources of reference. Either the architects of the Internet read Turkle and consider her studies influencial enough to warrent citation in their own accounts, yet somehow are not at all influenced by her when it comes to their practical work...or Turkle's studies influence them when they are working, not just writing about the work they do.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

You can't observe and describe a process without affecting the process. I'm not certain if I learned that from studying quantum physics or from watching Star Trek.

[EileenK]

I'm not sure about the difference between "multi-lifting" and distraction. If there's a bus I need to catch, something on the stove, or a wall of feline fur between the screen and my eyeballs, even if that wall is purring, I'm can't be fully immersed.

On the other hand, the fact that Second Life requires its own browser and presses my buttons way below the rational level, works against it being more than augmentation. Lately I've been making turtle necks and thigh highs (You can't have pantyhose or tights in Second Life unless your avie gives up her panties) because much of Second Life in December has snow on the ground. When my avie is improperly dressed for the cold, I freeze with her. If my avie crosses a swaying bridge, I feel motion sick.

Though I do play Second Life casually (and instrumentally) to use it as a radio or to let the avie dance while I am in and out tending to other things, I get a lot less out of it when I do that. It doesn't augment anything except to add a sound track.

[c3]

The "writer" as expert-guru is one of the first signs of MIPS in culture.

What's it like to play pro football, dont ask Namath, ask Plympton.?

virtuality shows its reality again.

[Dnali]

Great! It comes in as an ebook too. I pre-ordered. Thanks for the article.