A crystallized and systematic articulation of the conflation of network technology and human identity can be found in two articles focusing on the work of Sherry Turkle. The article “Sex, Lies and Avatars” (McCorduck 1996) asserts the compatibility of network technology with the essence of human identity. Both, it contends, are postmodern. In contrast to modernism, which is concerned with form and essences and “assumes that beneath any surface exists a timeless and placeless truth,” postmodernism, according to the article, presumes that “no unitary truth resides anywhere.” For postmodernists, “there is only local knowledge, contingent and provisional . . . The surface is what matters, to be explored by navigation, not by opening up the hood and peering inside . . . Postmodernism celebrates this time, this place; and it celebrates adaptability, contingency, diversity, flexibility, sophistication, and relationships—with the self and the community” (McCorduck 1996, emphasis mine).
That this language, capturing the spirit of postmodernism, bears such an uncanny resemblance to the discourse on network technology is hardly incidental (a resemblance that does not evade the author of the article, who comments that this list of characteristics “sounds like the World Wide Web? Like your favorite electronic game?” [McCorduck 1996]). Turkle’s argument regarding the fit of network technology to the spirit of the time underlies the article. Modernism, Turkle says, is “the spirit of the Tofflerian Second Wave“—that is, industrialism. Postmodernism, in contrast, is “the spirit of the Third Wave,” a wave, according to Toffler, brought about and defined by information technology.
Here the notion of a break within the history of information technology (discussed in Chapter 5) is reiterated: information technology sprouted from the industrial, modernist world and was reproducing its centralized, hierarchized, system-oriented characteristics, but it developed and was indeed revolutionized in such a way as to enhance personal freedom and unleash human potentialities (see Dean 2002, 79–113). As mainframes—that is, the large, centralized machines of the early days of computing—the article upholds, computers were modernist, but with the introduction of the personal computers, “computing slipped into postmodernism.” Now, with the advent of the Internet, “computing continues its postmodern odyssey . . . to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext . . . computing now is as postmodernist as it gets. It’s characterized, as Turkle puts it, by ‘the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the real, of play over seriousness’ . . . Computing also offers pluralism, different things for different people” (McCorduck 1996).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age