How does this bring to bear on human identity? In the weak version, the article suggests that humans now form their identity through information technology. This is in line with the technology-shape-society argument (see Chapter 1). But one can also read a stronger argument, according to which human identity is always already informational and networked and has therefore found its match with information technology, since both share a common essence. This argument assumes an ahistorical, essentialist human nature. The author reflects on the compatibility of human identity and information technology through Turkle’s personal biography, thus exemplifying and affirming it: “In Life on the Screen, she [Turkle] describes a shy, English-speaking Sherry, who, to her astonishment, is replaced in Paris by a much more assertive and self confident French-speaking Sherry. This self-transformation was happening inside language . . . And it was language—slippery, ambiguous, elusive, potent—that would be the construction materials of the Internet, too” (McCorduck 1996). According to Turkle, information technology, specifically cyberspace, becomes the site through which human identity is both constructed and uncovered. Postmodern theory becomes the discursive glue that ties these two moments together. In multiple passages the fit among postmodernist philosophy, human identity, and network technology is asserted:
Turkle’s study of Lacan . . . was preparing her for a future she couldn’t anticipate: a future represented by computing. Computing would offer her endless moments of sweet epiphany, when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest . . . Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for the terms of Lacan’s manifesto . . . computing is what brings postmodernism down to earth . . . the computer has transformed the knotty difficulties of postmodern theory into the trivially obvious . . . [Turkle’s] findings—that identity isn’t fixed but variable and fluid—are very postmodern. And those findings are based on what’s actually happening [in cyberspace], not on philosophical speculations . . . What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism—decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)—is rendered clear at last . . . Postmodernism. Right in front of you. Your laptop embodies new ways of thinking, carries you to them (or them to you), and opens you to them. People use the Internet as “a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life”. (McCorduck 1996)
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