This is the meat of the book. And it is well done. She writes of MUDs, of people discovering that you really are whoever you pretend to be, and of people who transfer or fail to transfer that knowledge back to real life. If you haven't heard these stories of life on and around the Internet, you certainly should do so. Turkle's book is a very good introduction.
Chips get cheaper every year.
They have a very exciting time, as every year their machines can do more and more things that used to lie on this side of the boundary between mechanical action and cognition or adaptation. For those of us who use computers to leverage our intellectual skills, the meaning is one of greatly expanded power. But I think it virtually certain that the computer has greatly amplified her intellectual power and capability as it has amplified mine. My work is processing information. My computers give me a lot more information to process, and make processing it faster.