Plotting a Net Gain : Sociologist Sherry Turkle was ahead of the curve in charting how computers can change the way we see ourselves. If we approach them right, she says, online services can help us develop hidden parts of our personalities.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we get information. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle looks at the Internet and sees a transformation in the way we view ourselves.

Despite all the hype and babble about the information superhighway, Turkle says, most people actually have underestimated the coming knowledge revolution. When we log onto a bulletin board, chat room, forum or other cyberspace sites, she says, we are entering a world of possibility. There, we can change our name, our appearance, even our sex, and test ourselves in that different persona. “We can easily move through multiple identities,” Turkle says, “and we can embrace--or be trapped by--cyberspace as a way of life.”

This is the theme of her new book, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet” (Simon & Schuster). It’s based on her studies, which started 20 years ago when she noticed the way MIT students used computer language (“Let’s debug this relationship”) in everyday life.

And although Turkle has been tracking the emerging computer culture for two decades, the exploding popularity of the Internet world has turned a new spotlight on her. Newsweek magazine listed her among “50 for the Future” for 1995 and Time dubbed her the “Margaret Mead of Silicon.”

“Sherry Turkle is an important thinker and very perspicacious--she was way ahead of the curve,” says Constance Hale, associate managing editor of Wired magazine, which is excerpting Turkle’s book in its January issue. “Her book is groundbreaking. Her theory--that the computer isn’t a tool but that it is giving you access to parts of yourself that you didn’t have before--is revolutionary.”

Like Gates, Turkle says we are on the brink of a revolution, now that computers inhabit life at every turn. But while Gates’ new book, “The Road Ahead” (Viking), focuses on the outward shapes of the computers and software (such as a wallet PC), Turkle is more concerned with the loosening of boundaries between people and their computers.

“If you want to call this an ‘information revolution,’ you can,” she said on a recent visit to Los Angeles. “I think it is more than that.”

Turkle, 47, who was wearing a trim black pantsuit and carrying an immense leather handbag, had just been a guest on Michael Jackson’s KABC-AM (790) talk show. The discussion had turned to such new phenomena as “cyber-infidelity.” Turkle had mentioned a wife who decided her husband’s online affair was better than his looking around for real-life women.

That brought up the question of what constitutes infidelity in a world where nothing is physical. “I think when you can connect via the computer, you can adopt a persona somewhat different than the one you ordinarily have,” she told the radio audience. “People feel that the anonymity and distance allow them to experience different aspects of themselves.”

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Later, she elaborates. In person, Turkle is an engaging conversationalist, jumping from thought to thought with energy and humor. “People can experience other aspects of themselves online,” she says. “I have seen it happen!”

She has seen how people, talking online in a low-risk setting, have slowly developed social skills or been able to discuss physical problems, such as weight or disabilities, that they previously repressed. She has watched men and women gradually move from virtual online worlds into real relationships (“Rush Limbaugh met his wife on CompuServe,” she says).

Turkle put six years into writing “Life on the Screen.” Despite its catchy title and rich use of case studies, the heavily footnoted book, interweaving psychological and social analysis with an overview of intelligent machine development, is not light reading.

“The meaning of the computer presence in people’s lives is very different from what most expected in the late 1970s,” Turkle writes. “One way to describe what has happened is to say we are moving from a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation.” In short, computers have moved from machines that do things for us (our tax returns or spreadsheets) to machines that do things to us, such as provide experiences that will affect our social and emotional life.

Describing e-mail as a “return to conversation over the backyard fence,” Turkle notes that in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where she works, she can log on any morning and scroll through the staff messages. “Someone has died, someone has a baby, someone has won an award--it’s like a small-town newspaper.”

Now, her interest is turning to families. She recently interviewed a woman whose son, just off to college, was studying for his first physics test. The woman had gotten American Online so they could keep in touch and when she sent her first e-mail message, he replied, “Mom, you did it right!” She had insomnia and got up about 5 a.m. and, on an impulse, sent him another message. When he answered immediately, she realized he was very nervous about the test and had been studying all night. So she sent him a reassuring message that his parents will love him however he does on tests.

“Here was a socially acceptable way to talk. She would never have called him at 5 in the morning, but this allows him to be in control, which is what kids that age need to be,” Turkle says.

She also quotes a teacher, 30, about her experience on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a live forum where users make up a name, or “handle,” and join any one of thousands of channels or create their own. The woman, who spends about five hours a day on IRC, was concerned, not about the hours, but about the number of roles she played. “It is a complete escape,” she tells Turkle.

“On IRC, I’m very popular. I have three handles I use a lot. . . . So one [handle] is serious about the war in Yugoslavia, another is a bit of a nut about ‘Melrose Place’ and [a third is] very active on sexual channels, always looking for a good time. . . . Maybe I can only relax if I see life as one more IRC channel.”

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Computers were not on the agenda when Turkle graduated in 1976 from Harvard with a double doctorate in sociology and personality psychology. She had spent a year in France analyzing how Freudian thought had been rejected and then accepted by the French; her first book, “Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan & Freud’s French Revolution,” has been reissued (Guilford Press, 1992).

“I thought I would have a career studying how complicated ideas come into everyday life. I didn’t anticipate the next set of ideas I would look at would be from computer science,” Turkle says.

She was hired because MIT wanted somebody who studied the cultural diffusion of scientific ideas. As technophobe Turkle began listening to the computer-savvy students, she realized they were using computer ideas (instead of “Freudian slip,” they would say “information-processing error”) to describe their lives. “It was like a ‘Eureka!’ experience to me,” she says.

Beginning in her own backyard, Turkle organized pizza parties for students playing MUDs (Multi-User Domains), the intricate online games in which participants can alter their real-life identities to improvise elaborate melodramas. She interviewed them at length about their experiences in the fantasies that grew out of the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy games of the early 1970s. She also studied children who were being introduced to computer toys. More recently, she began monitoring Internet chat and bulletin boards.

“I just kept studying people and machines,” says Turkle, who has steadily written articles for academic journals about the computer culture--about women and computers, physicists and computers, children and computers. Ten years ago she wrote “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit” (Simon & Schuster).

Turkle estimates that she has interviewed more than 1,000 people.

Mitchel Resnick, a colleague at the MIT Media Lab, admires Turkle’s ability to get people to open up in interviews. “She can make people feel comfortable sharing their deepest feelings,” he says. “I think often they have been transformed by these [online] experiences and most people don’t understand that world.”

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Although Turkle may meet her subjects online, she insists on interviewing them in person, usually in her MIT office. She doesn’t even have a computer there--it’s reserved for seeing RL (real life) students and colleagues, she explains.

She is, however, surrounded by computers at home. Turkle is married to consultant Ralph Willard, and they have a daughter, 4. Her routine in their Boston home is to wake at 6 a.m. and devote two hours to e-mail, sitting at her Macintosh with a Powerbook nearby to receive faxes. “I have a little computer for my daughter and a palmtop I travel with. I don’t watch TV and I write very few letters anymore--I spend a fair amount of time Internet-surfing.”

And although she signs on daily to a huge amount of e-mail, she says it is worth it. She recently heard from an old high school friend who had seen an article about her in a Boston paper. He had thought about contacting her previously, but with e-mail it was too easy to pass up, he said.

She was delighted. “To me, making possible that kind of connection with your past, with people all over the world, is so precious, I am willing to bite the bullet and sort through all the e-mail.”

And although she acknowledges a darker side of cyberspace (people can get stuck in the selves they have created on the screen, or hurt by an online relationship that turns out to be fraudulent, she says), Turkle has great hopes for the emerging computer culture.

“Here’s the good news,” she says briskly. “Being online can help you develop parts of yourself that have been underdeveloped and it can help your personal growth. Here’s the bad news: Some people find themselves just acting out the same problems they have in real life in virtual life. If they’ve been hostile, they become the ‘flamers’ on the Internet, using the anonymity to act out their hang-ups.”

She doesn’t like the question, “Is cyberspace good or bad?” The point is, it is, she says. “It’s going to demand ongoing conversations about the new definition of work, of marriage, of sexuality, of child care, of every aspect of our lives.”

She thus welcomes the fuss over pornography on the Internet as a signal that we are living in a very different time. “It’s setting the stage for that longer-term reflection. It’s important to keep in mind that we are not going to sort this out in the next two months or two years.”