The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit

by Sherry Turkle

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part
of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets
to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our
relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but
in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in
the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two
decades of computer culture--to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture
and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this
classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original
text.Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal
computer owners--people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new
way for us to think--about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal
that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an
extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between
traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to
this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I
thought I had lost my mind.") Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms--how
this happens, and what it means for all of us--is the ever more timely subject of The Second
Self.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Technology, Philosophy, Sociology, Computers, History

372 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle writes on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She has been named "woman of the year" by Ms. Magazine and among the "forty under forty" who are changing the nation by Esquire Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.

Reviews

[Saadia Carnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fascinating book. If you are doing any type of project on how the Internet and social media relate to people this should definitely be on your list. Very well written and an enjoyable read for a scholarly work.

[youzicha]

The book is about how people think about and interact with computers: Turkle interviews computer users and tries to tease out the conceptual frameworks that they use. It was originally published in 1984 and then re-issued in 2004 with a new preface/epilogue, and being 34 years old actually turns out to work to its advantage. The book is interesting because it shows that your own commensense assumptions are not natural or inevitable, so it's helpful that the interview settings are ancient and alien.

The first chapter of the book is a good example of how the book works: Turkle observes and interviews a group of 4-8 year old children, and analyses what criteria they use for classifying things as alive or not alive. Apparently Jean Piaget did a classic study on stages of conceptual development: a 6-year old may think that anything that moves is alive; an 8-year old may restrict aliveness to things that move without an obvious external cause; and by 12 they may consider notions such as growth or metabolism. However, when you give the children electronic toys (e.g. a Speak and Spell, a moving miniature tank, or a toy that plays Tic-tac-toe), a whole new set of criteria become relevant: whether something can talk, if it has feelings, if it can cheat in games, if it has a "brain" or only a "mind", if it was artificially produced by someone else, etc. Later in the book, Turkle turns to adult philosophers, and comments on Searle's Chinese Room:

Searle sticks tenaciously to the primacy of things over process. He looks for a man in the room, for a neuron in the brain, for a self in the mind. His AI opponents stick just as tenaciously to the primacy of process over things. A system might be made of silicon, Tinkertoys, or fluids—this is irrelevant. [...] For Searle the proposition “a room thinks” is definitionally absurd. In the AI culture, the conviction that it cannot is an archaic belief. For them, the idea that an agent in the room must be “doing the thinking” is just a modern echo of the idea that there must be a “soul” in the pineal gland.

To me the Chinese Room debate seems like a particularly bad failure of philosophy: both sides just listed hypothetical scenarios and asserted that it's intuitively obvious that they are right, and completely failed to convince the other side. Turkle's approach seems much better—she tries to figure out what underlying model generated those intuitions, and suggest that the basic models might be present already in childhood.

Turkle also does a lot of theorizing. Several times she defines a binary, and then explains the people she interviews in terms of that spectrum. For example, people may approach programming in a “hard” way (objective/mathematical/planned) or a “soft” way (empathising/tactile/improvising). Or people might consider computers as mechanical and predicable, or as kindof alive and magical, and which they prefer depends on they personality and appetite for risk. Sometimes these feel a little bit like insight porn, but they are often surprising and provocative. People deal with the computer in what at first feels like a self-evidently "wrong" way, and Turkle shows how it makes sense for them. But whether or not you trust the theories, the interviews are fun to read, because Turkle is perceptive and has a talent for noticing unexpected quotes:

❦ A four-year old boy announces that “Spiders are not alive. Because you can kill them.” That is, one of the criteria he uses for classifying something as alive or not is whether there is an ethical injuction agaist harming it.

❦ A fifth-grader from a poor, religious family, talks about her family's strict rules for her about religion, demeanor, playmates, etc, and comments: “I think that I am programmed like the computer. Other kids in the school aren’t as programmed as me. They have to do things, but they don’t have to do them in order. My mother did my programming. And the Pope. Well, not really, the priest did it. But the Pope did his.” Turkle first interprets this as a metaphor for being impotent and constrained, but the girl (who has been learning computer programming in school) continues: “Well, you know, you can change the program. Once you know how, you can change the program. I can’t do it now, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be able to someday.”

❦ Turkle runs into Marvin Minsky in the cinema after watching Tron, and it turns out Minsky really likes the move. “That was great. That’s a whole lot better than bits! I am in the middle of writing a paper which proposes to outlaw the whole idea of bits. It’s no way to think about what goes on inside of a computer.” The Tron setting is like his agent-based “society of mind”.

In addition to random observations, Turke pursues an overarching theme, namely that computing metaphors will give people new ways to think about their own psychology, much like Freud did:

We live in a “psychoanalytic culture,” which has little to do with how many people have been psychoanalyzed, are in therapy, or even have read Freud. A set of concepts that offer guides for what is important in thinking about the self, for what is useful in thinking about personal experiences, has filtered out into the culture as a whole: repression, the unconscious, the superego, the Oedipal struggle with the father. In everyday conversation, when people talk about their problems, they make reference to these.

To that end, Turkle interviews people who talk about being “stuck in a loop”, or “debugging” themselves, or use “machine language” versus “high-level language” as a metaphor for overcoming your genes and upbringing. And she describes several cases where learning programming was itself theraputic by providing a new set of concepts, much like going to a therapist might. You can certainly find similar isolated examples today, but it doesn't seem that it developed into a generally shared “programming culture”—I guess because (contrary to expectations in the 1980s) people in general never learned to program. Turkle mentions the success of Gödel, Escher, Bach as evidence that academic ideas about AI had reached the mainstream, but (sadly) it's now largely forgotten, and the ideas themselves didn't really survive the AI winter. On the other hand, reading this book it is striking how much less common psychoanalytical thinking has become today. It's jarring when Turkle describes the gender gap in computer science, and goes on to explain that, ultimately, school boys are more interested in computers than girls because boys suffer from the Oedipus complex.

There is another social change which is dramatically visible in the book: our relationship with software. One gets the impression that the years in the early 1980s was a brief golden era. Before, authoritarian companies and governments used big mainframes to track you, and computers were opaque and frightening. By the end of the 1980s, we had established a similarly opaque and imposing IBM PC/Microsoft Windows monoculture. But the scenes in this book are very different:

❦ Microcomputer hobbyist talk about finally being able to understand something in detail, hope this will spill over into more interest in the the economic/politicals “system”. They dream of eco-friendly decentralized “knowledge co-ops”.

❦ A 12-year-old boy plays computer games which are distributed as source code listings in magazines, and experiments with changing them to create new effects. He laments a new trend where manufacturers put games in cartridges so the user cannot change them “There are so many great games and they’re really protected. They’re trying to not let people copy them. It’s really frustrating, because there are so many exciting things you can do with a game.”

❦ School kids learn to program, not through teacher-led instruction, but by free access to microcomputers so they can discover new tricks and share them with their friends. Turkle tells moving stories about how disadvantaged kids learn math or writing or self-discipline through their computer play.

❦ Places like the MIT AI Lab do not use commercially bought software, but instead employs groups of “hackers” who get a salary and control over the computers, with a vague job description of “continually improving the system by adding features to it (improvements on its editor and mail and message programs) that test the limits of his knowledge”. (One of these hackers was Richard Stallman, who launched the free software movement.)

I guess this only ever existed in small bubbles, but today it sounds as utopian as something from The Dispossessed, even though this book is shelved under non-fiction. Even if you don't care about the folk psychology, the book is a fascinating guided tour through these now-lost subcultures.

[Saima Iqbal · Rating 5 out of 5]

keeping in mind that i skipped around / read chpts relevant to writing i want to do, this book struck me as a paragon of academic writing. turkle asks a fascinating q — what culture are computers producing? — at just the right time: the dawn of the computer age. her analysis still resonates, and her writing is sharp but clear and simple; even moving at times. the last line of the book clarifies the stakes: computers are a “second self” we compare ourselves to and sometimes seek to merge w. they are the new dominant frame, no longer psychoanalysis. as a writer + aspiring thinker™️ this book makes me jealous

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has been on my to-read shelf for a while, but how relevant it is to today! The AI discussed here is the AI of the 1980s, my college days, when most folks knew computers weren't capable of actual thought - today seems to be the exact opposite.

Yes, this is a psychology book, but the revelations are more fascinating anecdotes than detailed case studies. Children from the first chapter make determinations on whether electronic toys are "alive", sometimes based on whether they "cheat". Chapters follow on slightly older kids, video games and then early programming, and then adolescence and "finding yourself" in the machine. The observations of these youngsters ring true, and kids today seem less sophisticated.

Part II, new computer cultures and the mechanization of the mind looks at high schoolers and college young adults, with discussions of AI and hackers and early adopters of personal computers. This is my generation and this was my reality, well investigated by the author. The chapter on artificial intelligence compares well with today's LLM and Dall-E, both completely unknown in the 80s. The learning checkers and chess playing programs are especially relevant.

Part III is the most speculative section, looking at humans as machines and investigating the human spirit, and I suspect this is the section that will have updates in the revised edition. I have the original on hand and no nearby libraries or book stores had the new version (published 20 years later, but still 20 years ago!), so it will have to wait for another time.

I've read other works by this author and all have impressed me so far. A few years ago Forbes listed her in their list "America's Top 50 Women In Tech". I look forward to reading more from her soon!

[Abner Rosenweig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turkle offers some good commentary on the relationship between humanity and computers, and how computing is, in essence, a new category of being that is redefining our humanity. I was disappointed by the heavy amount of ethnographic research early on. While interviews may support sociological claims, they make the writing feel dated. Also, I was reading this book for a more abstract and philosophical consideration of the topics. This philosophical discussion does come in the latter part of the book and is brief but insightful. The book also includes an interesting analysis of hackers as examples of humans with extreme relationships to computers.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find this quite fascinating, and I'm only on the first few chapters, asking children "Are computers alive?"
The answers she gets are very interesting.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

probably the only review that kicks it a little


Kirkus

Computers as models of the self, as artificial minds, as responsive partners, as expressive medium, philosophical matrix, social sacrament, you name it: a relaxed, readable study whose many suggestive arguments don't quite fuse into a strong thesis.

MIT psychologist/sociologist Turkle (Psychoanalytic Politics) shows a lot of acumen in exploring the interaction between children, adolescents, and adults and their computers; she's less adept at mapping the "computer culture" all this supposedly adds up to.

In the book's first half, she reports on her Piagetian dialogues with some 200 children aged 4 to 14. The youngest members of this group (working with Speak and Spell, Merlin, and similar educational toys) seem to go through a ""metaphysical" stage when bewilderment over whether computers think and feel helps them fashion categories for understanding the world.

Older children are more interested in mastery, in what they can make computers do; and adolescents use computers to define their identity, whether by gaining a sense of microcosmic control or exercising their creativity.

In Part Two, Turkle investigates the subcultures populated by hackers or "virtuoso programmers" (who sound much like any other group of highly enthusiastic, analytically-inclined male misfits), artificial intelligence researchers (who stress, and sometimes overstress, computer-brain analogies), and owners of personal computers (a still somewhat amorphous bunch).

In her concluding section, Turkle speculates on the mind as program and the computer as both a threat to complacent notions of human intellectual superiority and a heuristic device for describing the self.

Turkle is good at detailed local analysis, weaker at framing the big picture, e.g., when she claims that the mind-machine relationship is becoming a "central cultural preoccupation," as sex was to the Victorians.

And she never satisfactorily explains the uniqueness of computers vis-a-vis other machines or their concrete effects on contemporary mass culture.

Nevertheless, a sensitive, insightful contribution, to set alongside Patricia Greenfield's Mind and Media and recent others.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was more interesting than I thought and less outdated than I thought. Some highlights are the explorations of different ways to engage with computers are a tool for creativity, the description of a mastery- and abstraction-oriented hacker culture and the outline of different influences of psychology from the field of artificial intelligence. It seems that the culture that Turkle analyzed is still there. Sure, AI changed towards less symbolic approaches but the ideas of abstraction, emergence and disembodiment are still staple ideas of what knowledge and thinking is and the hacker culture still emphasizes individual empowerment and mastery.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book about people's relationship with computational technologies. I was surprised by how well it held up even being almost 40 years old at this point. Turkle describes 3 phases of relation with computers that children go through: metaphysics, mastery and identification.
In metaphysics, the children wonder if the machine is alive. In mastery, the children try to win games. In identification, the machine and thinking about it becomes part of how one thinks about themselves. It's a fascinating book. There are a lot of cute scenes of kids arguing about different computer toys. It's funny at parts, but it's also seriously philosophical. Really enjoyed it.

[Infrastructure Logistics · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Where we once were rational animals, now we are feeling computers, emotional machines.” — Turkle

[Aron Ambrosiani · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Freudian psychology is a bit dated, but the real-world examples of personal connections to computers are still fascinating to read.

[Annie Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah fair enough

[Helen Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting study on how we place value and human attributes onto electronic things like computers and Tamagotchi. A bit dated now however, children these days (that I know) of 9-11 do not cry when their Tamagotchi dies, they know it isn't alive.

[Irati Azpeitia · Rating 5 out of 5]

doneeeee omg se la sacó la Turkle u did that !!! aunq te has repetío un poco con lo de Freud q te he visto un poco obsesionada pero no pasa nada está bien tú a lo tuyo