Rethinking the Digital Self:

A Reply to Certain Issues Raised in Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen

Johnathan L. Wright

Journalism 705

Professor Travis Linn

November 30, 2001

Introduction

In his landmark cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson sets forth an obsessive vision of the fusion of flesh and machine. Case, the book’s hacker anti-hero, treats his body almost as “an alien entity with which he is not on friendly terms” (Brians, 1999, paragraph 6.). Through a hardware implant in his skull, Case “jacks in” to the cyberspace created by a network of computers that links the “social, commercial, and political institutions” (Turkle, 1995, p. 42) of his post-apocalyptic world. He surrenders himself to the incorporeal celebration of stimuli and free-floating signifiers that Barthes (1977) calls jouissance. Case communicates, investigates, steals, and even makes love online, his body merely a tiresome barrier which prevents his longed-for union with “digital forms of life” (Turkle, 1995, p. 42).

            Nowhere today has the virtual and the material merged to the extent contemplated by Gibson, Still, it is clear that new technologies—especially those enabled by or related to the World Wide Web—are changing the ways people think of themselves, their social contexts, and the ways they relate to each other. [1] A recent study conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles found that 72% of Americans go online in any given week (Klein, 2001). A February 2001 Nua survey of people in 16 countries revealed “that up to 70% of Internet users under the age of 24 use chatrooms frequently” (Nua, 2001, paragraph 3). Listservs allow people to conduct extended electronic discussions on everything from the history of Hungarian cabinet making to the history of the paper clip. Video games now encompass astonishing degrees of verisimilitude and interactivity; some games, such as Nintendo’s Pokémon Stadium, even incorporate adapters that enable players across the street or across the world to compete via the Internet. New programming techniques give Web pages much of the visual appeal and dynamism of television and motion pictures. And in the fulfillment of Foucault’s (1977) vision of the panoptican—a system of unceasing surveillance—the world’s five English-speaking democracies operate the shadowy ECHELON, a network of computers and satellites that intercepts and analyzes cellular telephone calls, e-mail, Internet downloads, and other electronic communication (American Civil Liberties Union, 2001, paragraph 1). ECHELON sifts through the world’s digital silt to find nuggets of interest for the mandarins of state security.

            Turkle (1995) provides one of the most visible and influential accounts of how certain of these technologies pierce the flesh of the world, to use Merleau Ponty’s (1962) famous phrase. Using a blend of psychoanalysis, postmodern literary theory, and field and clinical interviews, Turkle explores how “[w]e are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity” (Turkle, 1995, p. 26). One of Turkle’s main points—and one issue with which this essay is concerned—is that Internet communication “alters cultural processes by changing the basis of social identity,” liberating the individual from the body and allowing “the separate existence of multiple aspects of self” (Wynn & Katz, 1997, paragraph 1). Turkle further argues that

            [i]n the story of constructing identity . . . experiences on the Internet figure

            prominently, but these experiences can only be understood as part of a

            larger cultural context. That context is the story of the eroding boundaries

            between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the

            unitary and the multiple self . . . (Turkle, 1995, p. 10)

            Turkle proposes a fragmented, postmodern self diffracted through the lens of Internet technology, a subject leaping joyfully into Barthesian realms of disembodied bliss. This analysis of identity, while undeniably thought provoking, rests on the assumptions that the non-digital self is otherwise a unitary phenomenon, and that cyberspace interaction necessarily unfixes or unhinges normative social grounding.

Moreover, Turkle gathered her data primarily by observing and recording behavior found in multi-user domains (MUDs), an early form of Internet chatroom. She also observed and recorded behavior in computer laboratories, computer programming classes, personal computer user groups, and in her interactions with those who consulted her as a practicing psychotherapist. This “target community of computer users” (Wynn & Katz, 1997, paragraph 14) obviously does not form a scientifically random sample; indeed, the homogeneity of the sample limits the external validity of Turkle’s findings. Further, as Wynn and Katz (1997) point out, these users “exemplify the extremes of behavior” (paragraph 14)—online gender switching, chatroom addiction, a true confusion between the virtual and the material, and so forth. It is one thing to describe the behavior of such populations; it is quite another thing, as Turkle does, to uphold this behavior as indicating larger social trends.

It is the goal of this essay, then, to question the assumptions underlying Turkle’s project by proposing alternate readings of her account of the formation of online identity. [2] In developing my argument, I will draw generally on the tools of social science research and specifically on the compelling work of Wynn and Katz (1997), who find that Internet behavior is more continuous with the “embodied world” (paragraph 8) than the “futurist sensationalism” (paragraph 1) of Turkle and others admits (see, for instance, Haraway, 1991; Poster, 1990; Stone, 1996).

Problematizing identity

            The question of what constitutes the self—like questions about death or art or religion—envelops vast swaths of human experience with a terrifying catholicity. Discussions of selfhood could conceivably concern everything from the first homo sapiens gazing heavenward on the African veldt—who are we?—to the various social roles adopted by middle-class Americans to the ways in which neurotransmitter chemicals in the brain construct aspects of personality. What makes Turkle’s project so rhetorically slippery is that she never supports her contention that the “traditional” self is unitary, embodied, and localized. Instead, she sets up an opposition between this traditional self and the fragmented self the Internet supposedly calls forth:

            From scientists trying to create artificial life to children “morphing”

            through a series of virtual personae, we shall see evidence of

            fundamental shifts in the way we create and experience human identity.

            But it is on the Internet that our confrontations with technology as it

            collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. In the

            real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold

            between the real and the virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing

            ourselves as we go on . . .[creating] an identity so fluid and multiple

            But Turkle’s dyadic assertion undoes itself once we realize that the notion of the non-digital self as inherently unitary is not a settled idea. As Wynn and Katz (1997) demonstrate, social scientists have theorized identity as “a product of group membership (Schegloff, 1972), as distinctions between social groups (Gumperz, 1971), or as class and caste (Berreman 1962, 1972), to give only the briefest of references” (paragraph 19). Suler (2000) emphasizes that “identity embodies multiplicity. You possess many sectors within your personality and play numerous roles in your life—child, parent, student, employee, neighbor, friend” (chapter 2, paragraph 2). The great American psychologist William James conceived of consciousness as an endless interplay of variegated emotions, ideas, feelings, urges, and memories (in Suler, 2000, chapter 2, paragraph 2)—a formulation akin to the Barthesian jouissance. And both Goffman (1959, 1971, in Wynn & Katz, 1997) and Schechtman (1996, in Henrickson, 2000) argue that the self comprises collections of “narratives”—about ourselves, about others, about our place in the world—that we variously call upon and present in the course of daily life.

            My point here is not merely to march across the textual stage a cast of theorists who oppose Turkle’s conception of the unitary non-digital self. Rather, following Wynn and Katz (1997), I want to make plain that the variegated self is an enduring trope of accepted social theory. We are always already divided, multiple, a concatenation of various social roles “put forth as a viable means of negotiating normal social life” (paragraph 19). And if the Cartesian, liberal humanist, New Critic notion of the subject—“that self-sufficient agent of unique thought, speech, and action” (Schlee, 1993, p. 69)—has been transformed into a more nuanced conception of identity, it does not follow that this transformation has occurred only with the advent of Internet communication. Cyberspace does not exist independent of the social fabric that gave rise to it, as Turkle sometimes seems close to suggesting. New technologies, no matter how radical, are both informed by and make reference to prior social formations (Henrickson, 2000).

The MUD

            Broadly, Internet communication comprises e-mail, listservs, MUDs and other chat spaces, and Usenet (Wicks, 2001). “These applications create virtual communities in which people exchange ideas, debate issues, participate in virtual games, and find information” (p. 168). The gratifications people receive from Internet communication—companionship, entertainment, convenience, and so on—are the same “gratifications they receive from older media such as newspapers and television” (p. 165). Interpersonal connections flourish on the Internet (Kraut, Mukhopadhyay, Szczypula, Kiesler, & Scherliss, 1998, in Wicks, 2001), especially in MUDs, in chatrooms, and on Internet Relay Chat. Because Turkle structures her arguments about identity around behavior observed in MUDs, I now turn to a specific consideration of these cyberspace formations rather than to a broad consideration of all chat technologies.

            MUDs are software programs that can be accessed through the Internet. They place users in virtual spaces or rooms in which they can “navigate, converse and build” (Turkle, 1995, p. 11).  Rooms have different themes, and the users, often called players, interact according to room protocols (Wick, 2001).  While some MUDs are merely “open” cyberspaces in search of a theme, many others present fantasy landscapes peopled by princes and paladins, kobolds and cutpurses, dungeons and dragons (Wick, 2001). Players interact in these landscapes, usually within an ongoing, unfolding quest/game that offers challenges and rewards.

MUD is text based. “On MUDs, one’s body is represented by one’s own textual description, so the obese can be slender, the beautiful plain, the ‘nerdy’ sophisticated,” the young old, and the male female or vice versa, in a dizzying combination of digital selves (Turkle, 1995, p. 12). “Players are able to create a virtual self outside the normally assumed boundaries of gender, race, class and age” (Reid, 1994, in Mazur, 1996). Players also create these virtual spaces in which they move—and their actions and feelings within the spaces—through an ongoing, collaborative use of textual description and graphic signifiers of emotion called emoticons. The cybiquitous smiley face :-) is perhaps the best-known emoticon.

            MUD players can be engaged simultaneously in several intra- and inter-MUD discussions. Over time, regular players in a specific MUD often develop rituals or engage pastimes that attempt to replicate real life customs. Players may celebrate special events. They may “cyberdate.” They may squabble and form and re-form friendships and alliances. They may develop a virtual society in which players become leaders, critics, comics, and fools (Wick, 2001).

            Some people spend vast amounts of time in virtual rooms; others “jack in” only occasionally. Still, whatever their participation level, players will sometimes “put their characters ‘to sleep’ and pursue ‘real life’ (MUD players call this RL) activities on the computer—all the while remaining connected, logged on to the game’s virtual world” (Turkle, 1995, p. 12). Some offline players use software programs that alert them when they receive messages from other MUDers or when a MUD friend enters the room. (Turkle, 1995). Others employ bots, scurrying artificial intelligence programs that serve as their stand-ins by making small talk or answering simple questions (Turkle, 1995).

Internet communication and identity

            What MUD users engage in, of course, is the postmodern version of the ancient human urge to role play. But the implications of this engagement described by Turkle (1995) differ radically from the mainstream social theory that I have argued should be the lodestar for discussions of Internet communication and identity. As I said earlier, and as Wynn and Katz (1997) remind us, the second major assumption underlying Turkle’s project is that cyberspace interaction creates alternate realities that rival or “displace the socially grounded ones of everyday synchronous discourse” (paragraph 1). To begin to dismantle this assumption, I wish to return for a moment to Turkle’s conception of the MUD experience.

            Turkle proposes that as “players move in and out of the active game        space . . . some experience their lives as ‘cycling through’ between the real world, RL, and a series of virtual worlds” (Turkle, 1995, p. 12). The windows style of computer interface allows people to enact this cycling. Users give priority to the application in which they are working, but they also assemble an absent presence in other applications through a minimization function that limits the occupation of visible “real estate” while keeping such applications electronically open in the interface. “[I]n the daily practice of many computer users, windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking of the self as a multiple, distributed system” (p. 14).

            Unlike the self of accepted social theory, the self in Turkle’s specialized optic

            is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different

            times . . . The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that

            exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time. MUDs . . .

            offer parallel identities, parallel lives. The experience of this parallelism

            encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising

            degree of equality . . . now RL itself can be ‘just one more window’

            (Turkle, 1995, p. 14).

For many people, Turkle continues, the experience of cyberspace communication ultimately “challenges the idea of giving any priority to RL at    all . . . When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isn’t surprising that for some this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid distinction” (p. 14).

            It takes a moment to appreciate the boldness of Turkle’s rhetorical hopscotching. In the space of three paragraphs, she moves from characterizing the experience of Internet communication as a metaphor to characterizing that experience as a viable, concrete alternative to normative social contexts and the primacy of the physical being. Turkle embraces what Lakoff (in Boal, 1995) describes as the fallacy of metaphorically projecting bodily-based concepts onto the incorporeality of computer technologies.

            In contrast to Turkle (1995), I would suggest, relying on McKenna and Bargh (1997), “that Internet groups obey general principles of social group functioning and have real-life consequences for the individual” (p. 681). People adopt different roles throughout their lives, experimenting “with different identities developed expressly to meet new situations. Of course, most do so within carefully circumscribed boundaries” (Gordon, 2001, p. 12).

            And so it is with Internet communication, which, far from being extra-social, actively partakes in recognized socio-discursive patterns. Online, the meek and submissive can become domineering and witty. The inhibited can become outgoing. People can temporarily adopt new modes of self-presentation or behavior because “cyberspace is a singularly strong medium in which people can successfully adapt their personalities to meet new circumstances and demands” (Gordon, 2001, p. 12).  But these adaptations occur within the context of regular identity management; cyberspace merely “offers a niche for each of these specific facets of selfhood” (Suler, 2000, chapter 2, paragraph 2). Suler suggests that attention paid to various online identities “can be an efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood” (chapter 2, paragraph 2). Social psychology theorizes the self as a “juggling of the various tasks and positions we accumulate and develop from childhood through adulthood” (chapter 2, paragraph 2).  Far from radically revising the concept of identity, Internet communication is simply “another manifestation of this shifting, juggling maneuver” (chapter 2, paragraph 2).

Summary

            It has been beyond the admittedly narrow confines of this discussion to consider all of the issues raised in Turkle (1995). Still, the conceptions of identity formation that I have challenged herein are among the most important issues in Turkle’s book. Her notions of the digital self as uniquely fragmented and socially ungrounded cannot be sustained when they are interrogated by commonly accepted social theory. Part of the problem, I would suggest, is the tools of analysis Turkle employs. The philosophy of poststructuralism informs much of the critical theory Turkle uses to theorize the digital self. Postructuralism’s seductive complexity enshrines the idea that linguistic identities are inherently unstable because language itself sets forth meanings that are always socially convened rather than written into nature (Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 1997). This instability is often perfectly appropriate for the analysis of written texts, the user’s experience of which is far more imaginatively situated (and thus far less corporeally based) than the user’s experience of Internet communication technologies. Therefore, rather than following Turkle’s lead into extravagant terrain, in this essay I have tried to place the digital self and its constitutive acts within a continuous social context.

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