As players participate, they become authors not only of text [which is how the game is played] but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. Since one participates in MUDs by sending text to a computer that houses the MUD’s program and database, MUD selves are constituted in interaction with the machine. Take it away and the MUD selves cease to exist: “Part of me, a very important part of me, only exists inside PernMUD,” says one player. Several players joke that they are like “the electrodes in the computer,” trying to express the degree to which they feel part of its space. (Turkle 1996, emphasis mine)
MUDs also give “people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self,” and so Turkle argues that “MUDs imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation” (Turkle 1996).
DO H<sub>U</sub>MANS STI<sub>LL</sub> EXIST?
The cyborg in the digital discourse represents a conflation of humans and technology and, in that sense, impinges on the modernist notions of the human as an autonomous entity, a subject and an agent. But, as we have seen above, there is another variant to that narrative where the equation of humans and computers brings up the possibility of a completely “humane” technology—that is, a technology that is human in the modernist sense: reflexive, autonomous, and having (at least the sense of) free will. As mentioned previously, this is not merely an exploration of a science-fictional fantasy world but an opportunity in the digital discourse to ponder what it means to be human in a networked, mediated civilization. That computers can be equated with humans, and may someday be just like humans, brings up a question that the following article asks in the most straightforward manner: “What’s it mean to be human, anyway?” (Platt 1995a).
At the background of this question are not only metaphorical comparisons between humans and computers but attempts at constructing intelligent machines, or artificial intelligence: computer programs that are as intelligent as humans. Such attempts have brought up a pragmatic question: how does one decree that such a program is indeed as intelligent as a human? The paradigmatic epistemology, and its corollary methodology in the digital discourse, is the Turing test, named after Alan Turing. Turing, a computing pioneer, suggested that a computer program can be said to be intelligent if its human interlocutor was unable to distinguish this program’s utterances from those of a human.
The Turing test and its underlying assumptions regarding the essence of what it means to be human are often contested (see Hayles 1999):
Network Human
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