Turkle, Sherry

1948–

Sociologist

Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist, best known for her ethnographic studies of computer users during the 1980s and 1990s. In her own words, Turkle writes on “the evolving computer culture and on the questions that surround the relationship between technology and the self.” She is currently Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Sociology of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Born in New York City in 1948, Turkle attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University. She took a year off from college and studied in Paris, attending seminars led by such intellectuals as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Lucien Goldman. She received the Certificat d'Etudes Politiques from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.

After 18 months in France, Turkle returned to Harvard to finish her degree. She then spent a year at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where she studied with anthropologist Victor Turner. In 1971, Turkle began a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology at Harvard University, graduating in 1976. During this time, she also became a licensed clinical psychologist, and undertook psychoanalytic training. Building on her time in France, her dissertation (published in 1978 as a book) was entitled Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution.

With her interests in psychoanalysis and culture, Turkle's decision to teach at MIT in 1975 was not entirely clear to many. As she recently told Scientific American, “Some people said, ‘What's a nice girl like you who knows about French poststructuralism doing in a place like this?’” However, Turkle did not see herself as a student of French culture; she saw herself as a student of popular cultures that grow up around the mind. She sensed that the world of high technology was about to become an extremely important factor.

While at the University of Chicago, Turkle had become interested in Turner's notion of liminal objects—that is, objects that stand on a threshold between one realm and another—through which individuals in society begin reevaluating their culture. Turkle believed that personal computers were going to become liminal objects for Americans. As she describes it, “Right away when I got there, I began to see ways in which ideas about the computer as a model of mind were getting into people's individual ways of thinking about themselves.”

Following the lead of French child analyst Jean Piaget, Turkle began studying how both children and adults were incorporating computers into their daily lives. She noted that young children often practiced a type of animism, asking questions like, “Did the computer cheat?” Even older children and adults, socialized out of animism, nonetheless continued to treat their PCs as “psychological machines.”

Turkle published her research in her 1984 book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. The title refers to her argument that computer users often conceptualize their relationship to their computer as a “second self,” a place where they can reflect on personal identity. It is important to remember that Turkle has always maintained that every [Page 446]person has not one, but rather multiple “selves.” In computing environments, people sometimes self-identify in traditional ways—i.e., along gender, racial, or age-based lines. For example, she observed that girls and boys use different styles to understand computing, which she called “soft learning” and “hard learning,” respectively. At other times, Turkle discovered that the computer allowed its user to create an identity barely present in any other environment—one's identity as a computing hacker or a newbie, for example.

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