[From PopTech] Sherry Turkle, who did the missionary work in the effect of social computing on the sense of self, talked on the psychology of artificial worlds. Brilliantly. In particular, she talked on the natuure of authenticity. The old concept, she says, doesn’t hold. “We need to take our new relationships on their own terms.” And these terms include accepting that the digital world’s perfection is teaching us a new sense of imperfect human perfection.

The number one question journalists ask Turkle is if children will come to love their objects more than their parents. Turkle instead is interested in how love might change. What kinds of relationships with technology are appropriate? What is a relationship? What models of the self, intention and emotion are suggested by our current technologies? What habits of mind?

Turkle said that we think about our minds as machines more than ever (as in robots and psychopharmacology). She’s concerned that with the shift to a computational model of the mind, there’s been a diminishment of our appreciation of ambivalence (i.e., holding more than one idea in your head). In artificial worlds, the rules are too clear. But resistance is coming from a changing notion of human pefection. We need richer language for talking about our increasingly rich relationships with artifacts. [This is a topic near and dear to me.]

During the Q&A she said that rather than asking about the effect of video games on kids, we should be talking about what habits of mind games inculcate.

Killer soundbyte: “Windows is a powerful metaphor for the distributed self”

Eliot Soloway, the moderator, argued for giving every kid a palm computer as opposed to a PC because the palm is cheaper and because, unlike a desktop machine, the student can own it without sharing it with the rest of the school.

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