The Second Self, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Computers and the Human Spirit (Mit Press)

Thanks.

Sherry Turkle is brilliant. A brilliant mind and a brilliant heart. This is the primer for anyone who is interested in computers and the human spirit - the good, the bad and the ugly.

Written by someone who has an instinct about how the future will turn out to be. I used this book to write my own futurist novel. Post Singularity London, this book helped me like several others did in the same way.

A great help to understand not what what computers do to our minds but how we can understand our minds by using digital technology. A must for anyone interested in understanding the digital era.

A brilliant book filled with information that all should read. The result of excellent research.

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.

Has it already been twenty years since the first edition of this book came out?! When it did so, it was soon regarded as a classic. The intervening years have done nothing to diminish that assessment. Turkle has updated it to form this second edition.By and large, her analysis in 1984 proved on the mark. As computers have improved in power, and become smaller and more portable, their users tend to identify with them. And here it should be said that the cellphones of today are considered, and are indeed, computers in the context of this text. Certainly, a typical cellphone has a raw computational capacity exceeding the personal computers of 1984.To some readers, the most puzzling thing may be why some users so identify with their computers, or half-jokingly, attribute personalities to them. There seems to be some innate urge in many people for this.Needless to say, suppose we project out another 20 years. The trend is for more such behaviour. The sophistication and personalisation possible in those future mobile machines makes this inevitable. And this is even NOT assuming any breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, which might endow the devices with true personalities.

Turkle's seminal text examines the social implications of our increasingly computer-suffused lives. With a strong emphasis on individual interactions with computers, this ethnography describes an emerging post-modern computer culture, and goes on to interpret it in philosophical terms. A bit utopian, very smart, acts as a bit of a pre-quel to her recent work, Life on the Screen

Excellent!