Sherry Turkle and Virtual Worlds

Location: Prognosticator's Chair

My students are in the midst of Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's jeremiad about the dangers of technology that throughout her book she calls "always on" and "always on you."

Though few Second Life or World of Warcraft users carry these imagined worlds around in their palm, given the beefy nature of the client software, many do spend lots of time in-world. Turkle's subjects mostly find escape there, and she freely admits that one can use these imagined spaces for "embarking on a potentially 'therapeutic' exercise" (212).  Mostly, however, she focuses on gamers like Adam, on the verge of losing his job, or Pete, who cheats on his wife with in SL, having a relationship with an avatar named Jade.  My students had their worst stereotypes of these immersive environments supported by Turkle's book, which otherwise does such a fine job of critiquing the other from of addiction to online activities, the augmented self of texts, apps, and phones glued to the users' palms.

It would be been interesting to see what she'd make of Fran, the 85-year-old Parkinson's patient, who with her daughter created SL avatars. As Wagner James Au reports, Fran was able to visualize herself standing again unaided, while watching her avatar Fran Seranade do Tai Chi or dance. Soon enough, Fran recovered some mobility.

Tom Boellstorff, author of Growing Up in Second Life, has met Fran and her daughter. He and other researchers are studying what has occurred. It's a heart-warming story of the sort rare in Turkle's book.

I will speculate a bit here, something I warn my students against since for them, the art of extrapolation from solid data may be safer for their grades.  I'll let you readers grade me.

Alone Together began as Turkle's "letter" to her daughter Rebecca. In Paris, Rebecca had spent her time texting and on Facebook, instead of taking in the city's many delights. Turkle was disappointed and has crafted one of the best critiques I've encountered of our relationship with our machines and the loss of such things as "the rewards of solitude" (3).

I hope that my class will remember Joel, Turkle's research subject who is an SL builder, both of content and community. Yet I fear Pete or Adam will stay in their minds instead. I do not possess the professional expertise to question how Turkle's bias might have influenced her writing about virtual worlds, but as a reader, I would have liked more Joels, and maybe a Fran, to balance the negative and all-too-common stereotypes of gamers as addicted, soon-to-be-unemployed, social castoffs.

In fact, I'd go so far, an an educator who has used Second Life and OpenSim grids and SimCity 2000 in class settings, to make another claim. Whatever the validity of Turkle's data, her method of presentation about gamers weakens for this reader her critique of social media, texting, and other potentially addictive behaviors.

That may be my bias, given the ease with which users of those apps can get a regular fix.

Work Cited:

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. New York, Basic: 2011.

Steve Jobs' Mantra & Call to Arms

Image source: Jobs & Woz, with Apple I and II computers, from CiCorp's "Steve Jobs' Garage" Site

Want no further proof that Jobs, like his rival Bill Gates, saw himself as an outsider, in Tim Wu's sense of the term?

While Microsoft quickly eschewed the maverick image to become a necessity for, and symbol of, corporate culture, Apple claimed, but Wu would contend, did not ultimately remain true to Apple's famous quotation from the "Think Different" advertising campaign:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

As a personal note, I still believe in that quotation, and will not own a PC that isn't running the Mac OS. Whether Google seduces me to buy more than a phone remains to be seen; I'm not so sure about Apple's closed iOS ecosystem or, for that matter, any closed system. MS Office's ability to play with other software well has kept me loyal to that aspect of Microsoft's "ecosystem," as well as their well-designed mice. Unlike Steve, Bill Gates' firm knew that a multi-button mouse would prove more attractive to consumers.

In so many other cases, Steve knew better than the rest of us, even knowing what we want before we wanted it. Gesture-based computing will replace the mouse, ultimately. I compare what Jobs did to Microsoft after his return to Apple, in the mobile-computing era, to a car company inventing a starship instead of a better car to outflank its competitors. They are both transportation systems, but one meets yet-to-be-needed needs.

So first came the iPod, then the other iOS devices that tumbled after it.

No consumer could imagine the practical use of a starship, but if one appeared even at a premium price, it would find early adopters and soon, a mass market. That was the mark of Jobs' genius, and I think some of that comes through quite well in Martyn Burke's Pirates of Silicon Valley. At the same time, I'd much rather have had a beer or Woz or Bill Gates.

Test Post: Creative Destruction

 
Old Bell System Land Line, image licensed for reuse by Infrogmation at Flickr

In my childhood during the late 60s and early 70s, nothing except AT&T phones existed. There were no answering machines, no “portable” phones, no fax machines, no dial-in internet via modems. Phones were leased from “the phone company,” not owned by consumers. A technician from AT&T had to come to one's house or office to install a phone, using hard-wired jacks later ruled out by the FCC (Wu 190). On the other hand, the system always worked. A dropped call was as inconceivable as advertising on radio when Herbert Hoover denounced it (Wu 74).

How quickly this changed after the AT&T breakup. Soon consumers faced the then-dizzying choice of three carriers for long distance: a Bell spin-on, Sprint, or MCI. Quaint sounding, isn't it, to have only three choices? Moreover, does it seem prehistoric that "long distance" would be a feature that would worry a consumer?

The irony here is that today, if you want a full-featured mobile service, how many choices do you have?  I'm counting: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint.

The process of creative destruction that Schumpter describes, and that so influences Wu's thinking (160-61), led to the miraculous phones you hold (like drug addicts!) in your palms. It's a fair speculation that AT&T would have been slow to bring such an innovation to market, if they'd ever brought it at all.

Personally, the disruptions of the early 80s seem worthwhile to me. I like the devices we have, straight out of the science fiction when AT&T's Bell System bestrode the land like a benevolent but very judgmental titan.  I do wonder about two things: are new versions of the Bell System, with equally decisive checks on innovation, ahead? And what would today be like if we'd had 1930s answering machines and 1950s cellular phones?