She is a researcher who studies the ways in which people interact with and react to computers. At the time of her lecture, she had just completed her first book, The Second Self . The following are notes from her lecture, which was shown in class on Tuesday, April 11, 2000. She talks about the psychological impact computers can have on people, especially children. You can present yourself as a different person when on the Internet through chatrooms, etc.
Computers provide a way of giving oneself several different identities.
People use ISP s like AOL where it s possible to set up 5 different profiles, presumably for 5 family members, but some individuals use all 5 for themselves. This provides a way to show numerous sides of one identity. This technical experimentation is the dominant way people interact with the computer, which is very different from how people approached computers 10 years ago. She spoke of how computers are transparent in the sense that we can see past the magic of the machine to the mechanism. Dr. Turkle spoke of how we can t really classify human attraction to the Internet as an addiction because if we did, this would not allow us to explore the psychological affects of the human-computer relationship.