Margaret Mead In Cyberspace

By ADAM COHEN

In the early days of the computer age, while her colleagues were building faster microchips and experimenting with artificial intelligence, M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle was asking what the tech revolution meant for the people caught up in it. In her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, she explored such questions as whether hackers were victims of stunted emotional development. In Life on the Screen, she pondered whether a sexual assault of one player by another in an online game is in any way a "real" rape.

Turkle, a sociology professor, is a leading expert on the folkways of what she calls our newly emergent "culture of simulation." Her origins are decidedly nontech; the Brooklyn-born Turkle started out studying French philosophy (and working as a live-in housekeeper) in Paris. Her early writings focused on how people used psychoanalytic concepts to forge their identities. But when she arrived at M.I.T. to teach, she found herself in a world in which people turned to computers, not Freud, as personal reference points.

Turkle's early studies of computer life focused on how people's identities were reflected back at them by their computer screens. But as technology has got more interactive, she has become increasingly interested in the bonds people form with robotic dogs, animatronic toys and other machines with human-like qualities. "The relationships are emotional," she says. "A machine that says 'I love you,' that makes eye contact, pushes our evolutionary buttons."

Right now Turkle is especially intrigued by the complex interactions children have with Furbies, the fuzzy high-tech toys that speak (in "Furbish"), learn words that are spoken to it and respond to being held. Is "Furby love" different from "human love," she wants to know--and how? The hardware Turkle cares about is humanity's own hard drive. "The question for me isn't what the computer does," she says, "but what the computer does to us."

--By Adam Cohen