“The Siren of the Web”: Getting Intimate with Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” (2010) is a powerful book that investigates the relationship between human beings — both as individuals and as a collective — with the contemporary technologies that have come to dominate our global culture.

While Turkle offers us something of a ‘history of the evolution of social technologies’ (from social machines to social networks and beyond) over the past thirty-some years, which is fascinating in itself, what makes “Alone Together” so compelling is how she, educated in the Freudian psychoanalytic school of thought, addresses the impact that such technologies are already having on individuals and their relationships with one another, and what the implications could be for the future.

The first half of the book focuses on the evolution of sociable and helper robots, from MIT’s human-esque ELIZA, Kizmet, Cog, Mertz and Domo, all programmed to respond to, ‘learn’ from, communicate with, and, to a certain extent, look like real humans, to their robotic pet ‘dog’ AIBO and Japan’s Paro (which was recently released in the US after huge acceptance overseas) Hasbro’s My Little Baby, Japanese sex robots that can be designed to look like anyone the purchaser choses, NurseBots, and so forth.

Turkle’s thirty-plus years of researching such technologies and the people that use them, along with her access to ‘behind-closed-doors’ content via her position at MIT, gives us a panoptic view of how these sociable robots are being designed, developed and tested, how both the designers and the users react and respond and relate to these robots, and what the future likely has in store for such technology on the societal, private and business level.

For Turkle, while she agrees (to a certain extent) that these new technologies may help fill a gap in such areas as caring for or serving as companions for the elderly, the lonely and for children, what is most important in the advancement and integration of these technologies into our everyday lives is that we must never forget what it means to be human.  More specifically, while these machines may appeal to our human side and thus appear to us being “alive enough” to satisfy a variety of our practical, emotional and social needs, while they may appear to us as distinct ‘Others’ through the mimicking of human social behavior, practices and even in their appearance (humanoid bodies, ’emotional’ eyes, capacity for facial expressions, etcetera), and while we may even feel as though they are ‘better’ than any real human could ever be — never disrespecting or deceiving, always attentive and ‘on call’, always willing (programmed) to ‘hear’ us out — that they are, in the end, only machines, and will thus never be able to replace the true ‘Other’.

This first half of the book calls to mind John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument” in where he argues that, no matter how intelligently a program (in this case, sociable robots) is made to behave, no matter how ‘deeply’ a program is made to compute, interpret and respond to a human in communication, even if that program is designed so expertly that it could fool even an intelligent speaker into thinking that it is in fact ‘understanding’ him or her, that the fact remains that the program does NOT understand, but that it merely is simulating understanding.  Since it does not actually understand, it can not be said to be ‘of thinking mind,’ and thus it will always be a completely alien Other, non-human and therefore foreign.  To summarize, Searle famously writes that “syntax is not semantics” — that to simulate a mind is not the same as to have a mind, to simulate understanding is not the same as to truly understand.

Turkle’s careful and considerate balance of highlighting the potential benefits of such technologies while warning us of their silent pitfalls is what truly holds this book together, and is what could even be said to be her overall message.  This theme is taken to a new and, at least for me, a more familiar and relatable level in the second half of the book.

While her investigation into how we relate to sociable robots was extremely interesting, I found that her examination of how we relate to ourselves and each other in the age of social media, CMC and the various digital devices that have become ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives, struck at the very heart of my interests and own concerns.  It seems that Turkle feels that this one of the major challenges of our time with regard to ‘advancement of the individual’, and if so, I would agree.

While the first half of the book, although certainly meant to serve as a ‘warning’ of what could become of us if we rely too much on such technologies, still seemed to have an essential optimism to it, discussing in some depth the positive role the social and helper robots could have for many different areas of life, the second half of the book was markedly more dark and pessimistic.

Focusing primarily on the age group that grew up learning with and dependent on these emergent technologies, Turkle paints a picture of a generation that is seemingly devoid of substance, lost in a fog of text messaging, chat rooms, IMing, Facebook and MySpace profiles, and ‘Second’ lives lived on the screen.  She tells numerous stories of young men and women, boys and girls, who dread face-to-face encounters, who know no solitude or genuine direct experiences, who have 1000 Facebook friends but no intimately close friends off the screen, who prefer to live as an Avatar in a sociable game than as a person in reality, and so on.

This darker, almost ominous theme might be best summarized by Turkle’s explanation of how individuals respond to Second Life (SL): “The joy of SL is the heightened experience.  Time and relationships speed up.  Emotions ramp up.  The time from meeting to falling in love to marrying to passionate break-ups… can all happen in a very short order… [and that] it is easy to get people to talk on SL about the ‘boredom of the everyday’,” and that  “life on the screen moves from being better than nothing, simply to better” (217-218).

The final sections of the book, with chapter titles like “Anxiety”, “Nostalgia of the Young”, “Reduction and Betrayal”, “True Confessions” and so forth, and quotations from teens about their sense of isolation and loneliness, their unsatisfied need for space and solitude, their sense of loss without ever ‘having had’, certainly help paint the picture of Turkle’s overall message (or warning rather) that if we continue on our current path with regard to our relationship to technology, and thus our relationships with ourselves and genuine Others, that we are destined for a dark and hollow future.

But, while we may be “consumed by that which we are nourished by,” to borrow from Shakespeare (a repeating quotation Turkle uses throughout the book), the author doesn’t leave us on a totally sour note, and instead uses her final chapter as a ‘call to action’: “Yet, no matter how difficult, it is time to look again toward the virtues of solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment…” [and that] “when it is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we shall have better” (298).

I could see a whole body of work that follows as a result of Turkle’s call — both in support of and against — and I hope that she will continue to lead the way in this line of thinking for years to come.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone, from professional scholars to passionate intellectuals, social philosophers to psychologists, teachers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, gamers, geeks, texters, bloggers, IMers, Facebookers, and everyone in between.

Filed under: Digital Humanities Capstone, Communication, Digital Age, Ethics, Identity, Social Philosophy, Technology

When the Self is Reduced to its Performance

I just finished my final draft of the proposal that I’m going to be submitting to AoIR’s “Internet Research 12.0: Performance & Participation” conference (due Tuesday), so I figured that I would share it with you.  Any thoughts or relevant literature that you think could influence me in building this paper would be much appreciated.

When The Self is Reduced to Its Performance: Toward a New Ethic of Being & Being with Each Other

The digital realm is a new space for performance and connectivity where “online language [is] a medium in which we project our existence” (Capurro & Pingel, 2003).  It is a space that is increasingly becoming a major part of many people’s lives to the extent that, especially for the younger generation, “some live half their lives in virtual spaces” (Turkle 2010).

Clearly, there are many benefits and conveniences in the migration of the global culture to the digital realm, from the political and societal, to the financial and social, and so on.  But, especially in terms of the latter, when ‘the social benefits of the global network’ come to include performance and negotiation of identity, there are many things that must be considered before we answer the questions:

Is this medium for performing and negotiating the self positive or negative for the individual?

Is it positive or negative for the human community?

As a new space, the digital realm has its own ontology, and this concerns our understanding of being: where once being human was exclusively considered in terms of bodily existence, the predominance of the digital casting of being has lead to the idea of not only displacing, but even replacing bodily existence (Kurzweil 1999, Capurro & Pingle 2003, Turkle 1997, 2010).

This idea is certainly intriguing, but the fact remains that bodily existence has not been replaced, for as John Searle (1995) reminds us, “we live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeen.”  Thus, in trying to weigh the value of the digital realm as a medium for performing and negotiating the self, it is crucial that the subjects of our investigation be viewed not merely as identities on the screen, but also identities in the physical world, as beings-in-body.

“Internet spaces have often been seen as distinct and separate from offline, or “real” social life, encompassing relations and practices of their own” (Markham 2008). This approach to studying beings-in-digital-space is hugely flawed, and it negates the very essence of what it means to be human.  For example, in a study on teen happiness, simply analyzing the use and nature of emoticons on message boards will only give a researcher a view of how these teens use language markers (in this case, ‘emotion markers’) to perform the emotion that they want to convey to a particular audience, rather than what they may actually be feeling.

What’s more troubling than the methodological issue here though, is that people of all ages, and young people in particular, are in fact using these emoticons, and language in general, in a space that is removed from the physical, removed from that face-to-face interaction with the Other.  Emmanuel Levinas (1969) writes of the Other as being unknowable, that which we cannot make into an object, and that which gives us an ethical obligation toward one another.  In the digital realm however, the Other is made into an object, as an individual’s blog, message board, or Facebook posts, and so on, become permanent data accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and “with the persistence of data there is the persistence of people” (Turkle 2010).

What happens to our relation to the Other when the face is removed, when people become objects?

Clearly this is an issue of concern. But this issue goes beyond simply how we relate to each other, for in a world that is ‘always on’ and able to be carried with us at all times through mobile devices, what happens when an individual becomes constantly ‘on call’ to uphold his or her performance of the self, when an individual always has a means of escaping into his or her face-less networks, and who thus has little opportunity to spend on actually developing and thinking about the self?

Solitude and stillness cannot be found in the digital realm (Lightman 2002, Turkle 2010) and thus self-reflection, the questioning of who we are, and life off the screen in the company of our own thoughts, or for that matter in the company of other humans-in-body, are threatened to become things of the past.

As the digital realm offers us new and exciting opportunities, it is an exciting time to be alive.   Before we get too far ahead of ourselves however, it is imperative that we learn to find a balance between our offline self and our online self, and, both as researchers and as individuals, to never forget that being-in-body precludes being-in-digital-space.

This paper will address the issue of performing identity in the digital realm and will serve as a model for the development of a new ethic of being and being with each other in the contemporary world.

Filed under: Digital Humanities Capstone, Studies in Philosophy & Ethics, Alone Together, Digital Being, Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics, Identity, Internet Research, Performance, Sherry Turkle

Treading in Murky Water: Ethics & Internet Research

Internet research is tricky business.

The digital environment (DE) as a new space/place provides Internet and digital writing researchers with a whole catalogue of new opportunities to explore communication and interaction in practice.  From blogs, chat rooms, IMs, forums, email messages, personal websites, and social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook, among many other online and digital media, the horizon is wide open and still mostly unexplored for the communication scholar.

But with these new opportunities comes a bevy of new ethical issues that each researcher must face, and, as McKee and Porter inform us in their article Researching Blogs, Chats, Discussion Forums and Social Networking Sites, such issues are not exactly cut-and-dry.

One such ethical question is whether to consider “materials in online spaces… as published works by authors — and thus available to be quoted? Or [as] communication among persons — and thus the researcher is not so much as reader as an observer, studying the real-time or archived interactions of persons to which different ethics apply?”  If the latter is the case, then in what situations does a researcher need informed consent, and what situations should be treated more as the equivalent of ‘street talk’?  (p. 75)

On the one side, individuals post highly personal information online: his/her name, age, birthday, photo(s), physical description, interests, mood, hometown, college, interests, brief biography, friends and family names, music and film tastes, religious, political and sexual orientation, and so much more.  Were a researcher to focus his or her study on these traits and personal attributes in a physical environment, the question of whether or not informed consent would be needed would be a big fat “YES, MOST DEFINITELY!”

However, as Mckee and Porter point out, the difference in the DE is that individuals (as users) knowingly post this information in what is essentially a public space, and thus, the implication is that they have already given their consent, or rather, already given up their right to the privacy of such information.  Or, as Heater Kitchin asserts through doing research on a newsgroup for recovering alcoholics:

“Using the NG [newsgroup] did not violate privacy, as participants had given up their privacy, and even their anonymity, by posting to a public NG […] Because NG postings are publicly available, largely archived, and easily reached by the public, the data released by the postings are available for public consumption.  Use of such ethics therefore no longer requires ethical approval.” (p. 83)

Kitchin calls for a “non-intrusive analysis” approach — “techniques of data collection that do not interrupt the naturally occurring state of the site or cybercommunity, or interfere with pre-manufactured text” — and “engaged analysis”, in which the researcher “plays a role in the generation of data” through interaction with research subjects.  (83)  She claims that IRB approval is not needed because the subjects knowingly ‘published’ their work (as ‘voice’) in a public setting (just as a radio jockey knowingly is speaking to a public beyond the sound booth).

This exposes a whole new problem however, namely the question of defining what is private versus what is public space in the DE.  Is there a difference between the way a researcher should treat a seemingly more public space like MySpace or Facebook against that of a political or religious forum, or the recovering alcoholic NG that Kithin studied?  Should researchers be required to get informed consent for one and not the other?  And how is this to be determined?

McKee and Porter cite Lange, who concludes that there “are emerging patterns of online behavior that are neither strictly public or strictly private.”  Lange’s research on YouTube postings (and extended into social networking sites) revealed that some posts are “publicly private” while others are more “privately public.”

With regard to the former, some YouTube users were found to have posted videos to the site that were meant for a small in-group (of friends, family and peers), and did so by tagging the video(s) in a manner which made it only searchable by those who knew what to look for — kind of like using a secret code to access a 1920s speakeasy located in the middle of downtown in the back of a butcher shop (publicly private).

Conversely, a ‘privately public’ space might be an individual’s personal MySpace or blog page in which they reveal intimate details about their lives through diary-type entries, self-disclosing posts and biographical information, and do so without using any privacy settings which otherwise would keep the ‘unknown passerby’ from viewing such information.  Suddenly, this person is on display for the world to see, whether they’re conscious of it or not, and thus they’ve put their private lives on public display.  If you bring in the different views of public versus private space as seen from different cultures (for example, the more homogenous East views private as being ‘of the family’ whereas in the individualistic West private is ‘of the self’), the discussion takes on a whole new dimension.

Clearly, the difference between public and private space is not easily defined, and, as discussed before, the distinction between ‘the person and the author’ is equally as hazy. In addition however, the sensitivity of topic is also an ethical issue that must considered.  Just as in the physical space where different cultures (and even within cultures) view different issues as more sensitive (taboo) than others, so it is in the DE.

The participants of a discussion forum that focuses on ‘LGBTQ issues, rights and experiences’ or one that brings together ‘suicidal teens’ will necessarily be more sensitive than a discussion forum that’s focus is ‘the best beers in America’ or ‘the Hollywood relationship scene.’  In this sense, it is not merely the ‘space’ that dictates the research ethics (i.e. blog vs. social network), but it is the topic, namely the sensitivity of the topic, and thus scholars are presented with yet another challenge in conducting their research.

Researchers have a choice in this type of situation.  One studying communication and interaction within the LGBTQ community of practice who agrees with Kitchin that all online content is necessarily public would likely study such a discussion forum as a non-participating observer, simply recording and analyzing the different voices (as text) from a removed position.  On the other hand, one that would disagree with Kitchin and see such communication practices (given the context of sensitivity) as private, would likely inform the discussion board participants of his or her research intentions and thus attempt to become a participant observer.  In the case of the latter, “trust is a key element of online interactions.”  If a researcher asks the community for inclusion into their forum as a researching observer and they deny him or her, than s/he has no choice but to step off and respect their desire for privacy.  If, on the other hand, they allow him or her to stay, participate and observe, s/he must learn the group norms and try to interact without compromising the communication practices of the group (group norms).

“In general, researchers work with dichotomies such as public versus private and published versus unpublished.  Works on the Internet, however, turn these dichotomies into continua” and thus the Internet or digital writing researcher is constantly trying to balance between the two ends of this complex continuum.  As the DE continues to grow and as community continues to migrate to digital platforms for expression and interaction, such ethical issues will only multiple and likely become far more complex before being made simple.  For McKee and Porter, they recommend the following “Three-part frame to examine ethical issues researchers might encounter: (1) negotiating access for a research project (2) collecting data and potentially interacting with participants, and (3) writing up the study.” (p. 7)

As for my own research project, I have a lot of thinking to do as I’m already sure that I will be faced with each and every one of these issues.

Filed under: Digital Humanities Capstone, Blogs, Communication, Ethics, Internet Research, Pedagogy

Spatial Conquest & the Death of Time

“Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space.  It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely time…  To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more.  The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time… [for] time is the heart of existence.”

-Abraham Heschel, from The Sabbath: Its Meaning for the Modern Man

As I’ve briefly discussed in a couple of recent posts, the digital environment (DE) is a new spatio-temporal platform.  With regard to the spatio element, we refer to it using a wide range of metaphors implying ‘destination’ (i.e. space) — we visit websites, search cyberspace, enter a domain, go online, research the digital realm, and, as I’m doing with this study, explore the digital environment — and quite rightly so, because we are projecting our consciousness into that which, although not bound or defined by physical elements, transcends or otherwise separates us from of our immediate physicality.  The DE as a space is an externalized consciousness: external from both the physical environment from which it (consciousness) usually draws its data, as well as external from the pedestal on which it typically stands (the Mind).

Concerning the DE’s temporal structure, we step into a world in which the ephemeral becomes the permanent, the transitory becomes the persistent, and the moment, once fleeting, becomes consistent.  No longer does the high thought or fruitful conversation disappear with the passage of time as it does in the physical, for in the DE it remains as though a perfect footprint of the mind, a cogitative fossil that is left for any passerby to view, ruminate upon and even respond to as though they were there when that very mental step was taken. But ‘the stepper’ is no longer present in the form of ‘speaker’, which therefore begs the question: to whom does this thought, this expression, this utterance, belong? If the DE is a construct of consciousness-es, a collective of thoughts and half-thoughts suspended in static time simply waiting to be discovered, revived and built upon, then what does that mean for the dialogical self?

If, according to Heschel’s view from Judaism , “time is the heart of existence” (an idea which can be found in almost all religions and spiritual belief systems), than what happens to the self in an environment that is of static or unmoving time?  For Heschel:

“Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space: even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thingness is our blindness to all of reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.  This is obvious in our understanding of time, which, being thingless and insubstantial, appears to us as if it had no reality.”

Considering the above, what we have done in constructing the DE is made a world that is ‘pure thingness’ that, quite paradoxically, exists without any things.  It is a place that we feel that we can visit, project our consciousness (i.e. a part of our dialogical self) and thus escape time the aging, time the destroyer, time the pain of memory and loss, and, perhaps most unconsciously, Time as God (divine time).  In place of material things that make up our corporeal world, we’ve turned consciousness (represented by text-based language) into things.  We’ve ‘thinged consciousness,’ so to speak, and in doing so have developed an environment that only human beings can exist in, free from the frightening unknown and reality that we have always strived to escape.

How have we ‘always strived to escape reality’ (which we view as spatially bound)?  Think about it.  From the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals, the development of trade and of money to the ‘invention’ of language and scientific theory, and the creation of ‘civilization’, law and religion, we have, for centuries, worked to rise above our natural disposition to prove to ourselves that HUMANS ARE SUPERIOR and are not simply of the beasts and subject to the natural forces.  The construction of the DE is the greatest accomplishment in this regard.

Suddenly, humans have their own environment that they can escape to where we can exist as the very consciousness that we feel separates us from all other living creatures.  We’ve thinged consciousness because (1) it is that which gives us our ‘power’ of our natural disposition, (2) because we have a natural inclination to view reality as a construct of things, and perhaps most significantly, because (3) we, in the postmodern world of spiritual uncertainty and the essentially fragmented (dialogical) self, we have lost our connection with God, divine time, and/or the spiritual flow of existence.  As Heschel writes:

“To gain control of the world of space [is our main objective]. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit our aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.  Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things in space, becomes our sole concern.”

Filed under: Studies in Philosophy & Ethics, Computers and Internet, Ethics, Philosophy, Research, Space & Time, Spirituality