Now we think about identity much more in terms of waking up as a lover, having breakfast as a mother and driving to work as a lawyer. Of course, switching hats this way is just part of juggling family, career and play, and has nothing to do with computers. But Turkle argues that in the private flicker of the computer screen, many people are slipping further out of their conventional roles, thereby creating new personae with radically different attitudes or genders.
Introverts play extroverts, people experiment with different things.
It's a little bit like going to Europe after your freshman year in college and having sexual adventures and coming back not a virgin. Her European reference is revealing. Turkle blossomed intellectually during the time she spent in the philosophical hothouse that was Paris in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There, she came under the spell of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, two of the gurus of a school of thought called poststructuralism or deconstruction. Books and courses have been dedicated to explaining these theories.