THE CO-EVO<sub>LU</sub>TION OF H<sub>U</sub>MANS AND COMP<sub>U</sub>TERS
Turkle, according to the article, argues that as we interact with network technology we become more like it. Or rather, who humans are becomes entangled with what network technology is. This is the thrust of another article in Wired written by Turkle herself. Turkle’s main argument is that “computers are not just changing our lives but changing our selves” (Turkle 1996).<sup>2</sup> She begins her article with an answer to the question posed in the title—”Who Am We?”—that asserts her multiplicity: “There are many Sherry Turkle.” She explains how this multiplicity is reflected, facilitated, and augmented by network technology. Here, for example, she makes this point with reference to the Windows operating system: “Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system” (Turkle 1996). Later she adds, “Those boxed-off areas on the screen . . . allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time—in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail . . . The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered selfthat exists in many worlds” (Turkle 1996, emphasis mine) Turkle quotes one of her research subjects saying, “Now real life itself may be . . . just one more window” (Turkle 1996). Turkle, then, sees computers changing our identity in the direction of more versatility, flexibility, instability, and multiplicity and celebrates this transformation.
According to Turkle, as computers have transformed so did human identity. Today human identity is very different from the one produced under modernist conceptions of computing. Under modernism, the computer was seen as a “calculating machine,” as the essence of a “linear, logical model,” a model that, according to Turkle, also prevailed in the discourse of “economics, psychology, and social life” (Turkle 1996). This conceptual framework has now changed: “Programming is no longer cut and dried,” and it is no longer about “calculation and rules.” Instead, “The lessons of computing today have to do . . . with simulation, navigation, and interaction . . . Today’s computational models of the mind often embrace a postmodern aesthetic of complexity and decentering” (Turkle 1996).
Through the interaction of humans with computers, these technical and technological changes now bring to bear on the self-conception of humans as cyborgs and on their identities as networked and distributed. Referring to the culture of MUDs (multiuser dungeons—a type of multiplayer online game and one of the sites for Turkle’s empirical studies), Turkle says,
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age