Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Life on the Screenis a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity-- as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This treatise by the best-selling author of The Second Self (LJ 6/15/84) explores the world of virtual identity on the Internet by examining "Multi-User Domains" (MUDs). Turkle describes MUDs as a new kind of "virtual parlor game" and a form of online community in which one's identity (both physical and behavioral) is represented by one's own textual description of it. She portrays MUDs as "a dramatic example of how an activity on the Internet can serve as a place for the construction and reconstruction of identity." She discusses these computer-mediated worlds and their impact on our psychological selves, describing a virtual world in which the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections. In her concluding remarks, she points out that MUDs are not implicated in occurrences of multiple personality disorder (MPD); rather, manifestations of multiplicity in our culture, including MUDs and MPDs, are contributing to an overall reconsideration of our traditional views of identity. A provocative if somewhat esoteric study of virtual identity. For an informed audience.-Joe Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The Internet, with its computer bulletin boards, virtual communities, games and private domains where people strike up relationships or emulate sex, is a microcosm of an emerging ``culture of simulation'' that substitutes representations of reality for the real world, asserts Turkle (The Second Self). In an unsettling, cutting-edge exploration of the ways computers are revising the boundaries between people and computers, brains and machines, she argues that the newest computers‘tools for interaction, navigation and simulation, allowing users to cycle through roles and identities‘are an extension of self with striking parallels to postmodernist thought. She also looks at ``computer psychotherapy'' programs such as Depression 2.0, a set of tutorials designed to increase awareness of self-defeating attitudes; hypertext software for creating links between related songs, texts, photographs or videos; and ``artificial life,'' attempts to build intelligent, self-organizing, complex, self-replicating systems and virtual organisms. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

More than a decade after her groundbreaking study, The Second Self (1984), MIT psychologist Turkle returns to the subject of human views of and relationships with computers (and through computers, with each other and themselves). This readable if somewhat diffuse study draws again on a wide range of interviews with computer users--from children and graduate students to professional programmers and MIT physicists. Turkle explores what the rapid growth of the Internet has meant to our society. She's especially interested in ""MUDs"" and ""MOOs""--text-based virtual environments, accessed through the Net, where users can adopt online personas and interact with others, sometimes becoming so involved in this role-playing that it seems ""more real"" to them than their lives outside the screen. Turkle makes a convincing case that some MUDders get an effective form of therapy in these virtual worlds, that the freedom to adopt different characters (even different genders and species) allows them to explore parts of themselves that remain buried in the real world. But she unfortunately downplays the escapism and withdrawal from reality many MUDders display. She also offers a very interesting analysis of the transformation over 15 years of attitudes toward artificial intelligence, from repulsion to acceptance and even eager anticipation, arguing that the fledgling realm of ""artificial life""--creating lifelike ""organisms"" in computerized environments--represents the more pressing challenge to our cultural sensibilities today. Though many of Turkle's insights are nothing new, she makes a vital contribution to the study of Internet culture with her heavy reliance on the experience of actual users (often quoted at length). With that concrete grounding, her study stands out among the flock of recent Internet critiques--an informed and informative look at our ever-changing relationships with machines. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.