IN years to come, the Internet book may be thought of as the literary genre most typical if the 1990s. In her latest foray in the area, Sherry Turkle borrows a system of classifying, previous Internet books into sub genres that first appeared in an article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times. Out there, in the hierarchically structured expanses of info space known as the bookshelves, there are three dominant versions of the digital technology the Apocalyptic, the Utopian, and the Utilitarian.
Writers of these books tend to have used their experience in Silicon Valley, or at a big league American university's technology department, as the basis for a vision of the world to come. Whether convinced that an Orwellian nightmare is just around the corner, or that a new era of hyper democratic virtual decision making is dawning, all seem happy to share their chunky insights for just under £20. Every one, it seems, has at least one Internet book in them.
What most of these authors have in common is a habit of talking about things that cannot be known, offering sexy, saleable predictions of events just over the horizon virtual pie, virtually tomorrow. Sherry Turkle's book, by contrast, makes no attempt to predict the future. Instead, the Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT uses her long experience as both a researcher into psychology (her first book was on Jacques Lacan) and an academic (her second looked at human technology interaction) to tell us what has already happened.
By bridging the gap between her twin interests of contemporary psychology and technology, Turkle sets out to chart the journey of post modernism out of the seminar and into the social structures of the world at large. This journey, she suggests, has been fuelled by the growth in personal computers, the Internet, and digital culture in general.
As Turkle sees it, computers, and particularly the Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI), have provided a way for the world at large to think through that packet of ideas called post modernism, and even discover ways in which the term accurately describes the everyday experience of the late 20th century.
Instead of learning lumps of knowledge, Macintosh users were offered a way to interact with computers which was symbolic. There was no need to write instructions to move a file users simply dragged it across the screen, dropping it where they, wanted it. Their movements, of course, still relate to complex computer code, but for the average user the symbolic level is all they know, and all they need to now.
This shift, to a purely symbolic level, to the apprehension of surfaces rather than the search for structure, was closely related `to' theories which had been circulating through college arts faculties since the late 1960s. However, as, the shadow of Freud began to recede from 20th century and, indeed, Turkle's life, a new digital paradigm for thinking about the self emerged. With the aid of computers, Turkle's students suddenly began to see that the writings of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Jameson and even Baudrillard were describing something that they were experiencing in their everyday lives.
One student even apologises to his ex-lecturer for dropping out of her class on Derrida. He has, it seems, met a Macintosh hypertext programme and now realises what Jacques had been saying. "The cards in a HyperCard stack, he concluded, get their meaning from each other. It's like Derrida. The links have a reason but there is no final truth behind them."
For Turkle, ever the psychoanalyst, this is just one of several ways that computer culture offers to help "think through" the puzzles of the contemporary world. It allows people not just to model the implications of post modernity, to form relationships with ideas such as multiplicity and simulation, but, in Turkle's view, to build new, less structured, social identities for themselves. However useful computers may prove in engineering a better world, what they still do best, it turns out, is help people to pretend. A bit like books, really.
