Cybergrrl discusses this and more in Part 2 of our Interview with MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle. In our second of a two-part interview with Sherry Turkle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and author, she tackles these questions and more as she discusses her current work, her own daughter's foray into technology and the intimacy of a machine. The term addiction is most usefully saved for experiences with substances like heroin, which are always dangerous, always bad, always something to turn away from. The Internet offers experiences in which people discover things about themselves, good and bad, usually complicated and hard to sort out.
People grow and learn and discover new potential.
People also discover preoccupations and fantasies that they may have never dealt with before and which may be very troubling. If you call the Internet addicting, then you have to call all powerful, evocative experience addicting. I'm working on ways in which the computer is beginning to impinge on our notions of bodies, and what a body can be. I want to understand the changes in identity when people experience a much more fluid boundary between themselves and technology. I always thought of the computer as an intimate machine, but now, I see that intimacy becoming concretized in very dramatic ways.