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Cyberspace and Identity Author(s): Sherry Turkle Reviewed work(s): Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Nov., 1999), pp. 643-648 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2655534 . Accessed: 28/11/2012 23:32

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- = - Looking Toward Cyberspace: Beyond Grounded Sociology Cyberspace and Identity

SHERRY TURKLE Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Massachusetts Institute of Bechnolo<gy

We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine. Over a decade ago, when I first called the com- puter a "second self" (1984), these identity- transforming relationships were most usually one-on-one, a person alone with a machine.1 This is no longer the case. A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people together in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our com- munities, our very identities. In cyberspace, we are learning to live in virtual worlds. We may find ourselves alone as we navigate virtual oceans, unravel virtual mysteries, and engineer virtual skyscrapers. But increasingly, when we step through the looking glass, other people are there as well.

Over the past decade, I have been engaged in the ethnographic and clinical study of how peo- ple negotiate the virtual and the "real" as they represent themselves on computer screens linked through the Internet. For many people, such experiences challenge what they have tra- ditionally called "identity," which they are moved to recast in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives. Online life is not the only fac- tor that is pushing them in this direction; there is no simple sense in which computers are caus- ing a shift in notions of identity. It is, rather, that today's life on the screen dramatizes and concretizes a range of cultural trends that encourage us to think of identity in terms of multiplicity and flexibility.

Virtual Personae In this essay, I focus on one key element of

online life and its impact on identity: the cre-

For a fuller discussion of the themes in this essay, see Turkle ( 1995).

ation and projection of constructed personae into virtual space. In cyberspace, it is well known, one's body can be represented by one's own textual description: The obese can be slen- der, the beautiful plain. The fact that self-pre- sentation is written in text means that there is time to reflect upon and edit one's "composi- tion," which makes it easier for the shy to be outgoing, the "nerdy" sophisticated. The relative anonymity of life on the screen one has the choice of being known only by one's chosen "handle" or online name gives people the chance to express often unexplored aspects of the self. Additionally, multiple aspects of self can be explored in parallel. Online services offer their users the opportunity to be known by sev- eral different names. For example, it is not unusual for someone to be BroncoBill in one online community, ArmaniBoy in another, and MrSensitive in a third.

The online exercise of playing with identity and trying out new identities is perhaps most explicit in "role playing" virtual communities (such as Multi-User Domains, or MUDs) where participation literally begins with the creation of a persona (or several); but it is by no means con- fined to these somewhat exotic locations. In bul- letin boards, newsgroups, and chat rooms, the creation of personae may be less explicit than on MUDs, but it is no less psychologically real. One IRC (Internet Relay Chat) participant describes her experience of online talk: "I go from channel to channel depending on my mood.... I actu- ally feel a part of several of the channels, sever- al conversations.... I'm different in the different chats. They bring out different things in me." Identity play can happen by changing names and by changing places.

For many people, joining online communi- ties means crossing a boundary into highly

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644 Symposium

experience when, for example, one wakes up as a lover, makes breakfast as a mother, and drives to work as a lawyer. The windows metaphor sug- gests a distributed self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time. The "windows" enabled by a computer operating sys- tem support the metaphor, and cyberspace raises the experience to a higher power by translating the metaphor into a life experience of "cycling through."

Identity, Moratoria, and Play Cyberspace, like all complex phenomena, has

a range of psychological effects. For some people, it is a place to "act out" unresolved conflicts, to play and replay characterological difficulties on a new and exotic stage. For others, it provides an opportunity to "work through" significant per- sonal issues, to use the new materials of cyberso- ciality to reach for new resolutions. These more positive identity effects follow from the fact that for some, cyberspace provides what Erik Erikson ([1950]1963) would have called a "psychosocial moratorium,'' a central element in how he thought about identity development in adoles- cence. Although the term moratorium implies a "time out," what Erikson had in mind was not withdrawal. On the contrary, the adolescent moratorium is a time of intense interaction with people and ideas. It is a time of passionate friendships and experimentation. The adoles- cent falls in and out of love with people and ideas. Erikson's notion of the moratorium was not a "hold" on significant experiences but on their consequences. It is a time during which one's actions are, in a certain sense, not counted as they will be later in life. They are not given as much weight, not given the force of full judg- ment. In this context, experimentation can become the norm rather than a brave departure. Relatively consequence-free experimentation facilitates the development of a "core self," a personal sense of what gives life meaning that Erikson called "identity."

Erikson developed these ideas about the importance of a moratorium during the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, the notion corresponded to a common understanding of what "the college years" were about. Today, 30 years later, the idea of the college years as a con- sequence-free "time out" seems of another era. College is pre-professional, and AIDS has made consequence-free sexual experimentation an impossibility. The years associated with adoles- cence no longer seem a "time out." But if our

charged territory. Some feel an uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, some a sense of relief. Some sense the possibilities for self-discovery. A 26-year-old graduate student in history says, "When I log on to a new community and I cre- ate a character and know I have to start typing my description, I always feel a sense of panic. Like I could find out something I don't want to know." A woman in her late thirties who just got an account with America Online used the fact that she could create five "names" for herself on her account as a chance to "lay out all the moods I'm in all the ways I want to be in different places on the system."

The creation of site-specific online personae depends not only on adopting a new name. Shifting of personae happens with a change of virtual place. Cycling through virtual environ- ments is made possible by the existence of what have come to be called "windows" in modern computing environments. Windows are a way to work with a computer that makes it possible for the machine to place you in several contexts at the same time. As a user, you are attentive to just one of the windows on your screen at any given moment, but in a certain sense, you are a presence in all of them at all times. You might be writing a paper in bacteriology and using your computer in several ways to help you: You are "present" to a word processing program on which you are taking notes and collecting thoughts, you are "present" to communications software that is in touch with a distant comput- er for collecting reference materials, you are "present" to a simulation program that is chart- ing the growth of bacterial colonies when a new organism enters their ecology, and you are "pre- sent" to an online chat session whose partici- pants are discussing recent research in the field. Each of these activities takes place in a "win- dow," and your identity on the computer is the sum of your distributed presence.

The development of the windows metaphor for computer interfaces was a technical innova- tion motivated by the desire to get people work- ing more efficiently by "cycling through" different applications, much as time-sharing computers cycled through the computing needs of different people. But in practice, windows have become a potent metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed, "time- sharing" system.

The self no longer simply plays different roles in different settings something that people

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Symposium 645

culture no longer offers an adolescent moratori- um, virtual communities often do. It is part of what makes them seem so attractive.

Erikson's ideas about stages did not suggest rigid sequences. His stages describe what people need to achieve before they can move ahead eas- ily to another developmental task. For example, Erikson pointed out that successful intimacy in young adulthood is difficult if one does not come to it with a sense of who one is, the challenge of adolescent identity building. In real life, howev- er, people frequently move on with serious deficits. With incompletely resolved "stages," they simply do the best they can. They use what- ever materials they have at hand to get as much as they can of what they have missed. Now vir- tual social life can play a role in these dramas of self-reparation. Time in cyberspace reworks the notion of the moratorium because it may now exist on an always-available "window."

Expanding One's Range in the Real Case, a 34-year-old industrial designer happi-

ly married to a female co-worker, describes his real-life (RL) persona as a "nice guy," a "Jimmy Stewart type like my father." He describes his outgoing, assertive mother as a "Katharine Hepburn type." For Case, who views assertive- ness through the prism of this J immy Stewart/Katharine Hepburn dichotomy, an assertive man is quickly perceived as "being a bastard." An assertive woman, in contrast, is perceived as being "modern and together." Case says that although he is comfortable with his temperament and loves and respects his father, he feels he pays a high price for his own low-key ways. In particular, he feels at a loss when it comes to confrontation, both at home and at work. Online, in a wide range of virtual commu- nities, Case presents himself as females whom he calls his "Katharine Hepburn types." These are strong, dynamic, "out there" women who remind Case of his mother, who "says exactly what's on her mind." He tells me that presenting himself as a woman online has brought him to a point where he is more comfortable with confronta- tion in his RL as a man.

Case describes his Katharine Hepburn per- sonae as "externalizations of a part of myself." In one interview with him, I used the expression "aspects of the self," and he picked it up eagerly, for his online life reminds him of how Hindu gods could have different aspects or subpersonal- ities, all the while being a whole self. In response

to my question "Do you feel that you call upon your personae in real life?" Case responded:

Yes, an aspect sort of clears its throat and says, "I can do this. You are being so amaz- ingly conflicted over this and I know exact- ly what to do. Why don't you just let me do it?" . . . In real life, I tend to be extremely diplomatic, nonconfrontational. I don't like to ram my ideas down anyone's throat. [Online] I can be, "Take it or leave it." All of my Hepburn characters are that way. That's probably why I play them. Because they are smart-mouthed, they will not sugar coat their words.

In some ways, Case's description of his inner world of actors who address him and are able to take over negotiations is reminiscent of the lan- guage of people with multiple-personality disor- der. But the contrast is significant: Case's inner actors are not split off from each other or from his sense of"himself." He experiences himself very much as a collective self, not feeling that he must goad or repress this or that aspect of him- self into conformity. He is at ease, cycling through from Katharine Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart. To use analyst Philip Bromberg's lan- guage (1994), online life has helped Case learn how to "stand in the spaces between selves and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and still feel a unity." To use computer scientist Marvin Minsky's ( 1987 ) phrase, Case feels at ease cycling through his "society of mind," a notion of identity as distributed and heterogeneous. Identity, from the Latin idem, has been used habitually to refer to the sameness between two qualities. On the Internet, however, one can be many, and one usually is.

An Object to Think with for Thinking About Identity

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was first exposed to notions of identity and multiplicity. These ideas most notably that there is no such thing as "the ego," that each of us is a multiplic- ity of parts, fragments, and desiring connec- tions surfaced in the intellectual hothouse of Paris, they presented the world according to such authors as Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. But despite such ideal condi- tions for absorbing theory, my "French lessons" remained abstract exercises. These theorists of poststructuralism spoke words that addressed the relationship between mind and body, but from my point of view had little to do with my own.

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646 Symposium

In my lack of personal connection with these ideas, I was not alone. To take one example, for many people it is hard to accept any challenge to the idea of an autonomous ego. While in recent years, many psychologists, social theorists, psy- choanalysts, and philosophers have argued that the self should be thought of as essentially decentered, the normal requirements of every- day life exert strong pressure on people to take responsibility for their actions and to see them- selves as unitary actors. This disjuncture between theory (the unitary self is an illusion) and lived experience (the unitary self is the most basic reality) is one of the main reasons why multiple and decentered theories have been slow to catch on or when they do, why we tend to settle back quickly into older, centralized ways of looking at things.

When, 20 years later, I used my personal computer and modem to join online communi- ties, I had an experience of this theoretical per- spective which brought it shockingly down to earth. I used language to create several charac- ters. My textual actions are my actions my words make things happen. I created selves that were made and transformed by language. And different personae were exploring different aspects of the self. The notion of a decentered identity was concretized by experiences on a computer screen. In this way, cyberspace becomes an object to think with for thinking about identity an element of cultural brico- lage.

Appropriable theories ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large tend to be those with which people can become active- ly involved. They tend to be theories that can ke "played" with. So one way to think about the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to- think-with that can help it move out beyond intellectual circles.

For example, the popular appropriation of Freudian ideas had little to do with scientific demonstrations of their validity. Freudian ideas passed into the popular culture because they offered robust and down-to-earth objects-to- think-with. The objects were not physical but almost-tangible ideas, such as dreams and slips of the tongue. People were able to play with such Freudian "objects." They became used to look- ing for them and manipulating them, both seri- ously and not so seriously. And as they did so,

the idea that slips and dreams betray an uncon- scious began to feel natural.

In Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried the theory. Today, life on the computer screen carries theory. People decide that they want to interact with others on a com- puter network. They get an account on a com- mercial service. They think that this will provide them with new access to people and information, and of course it does. But it does more. When they log on, they may find them- selves playing multiple roles; they may find themselves playing characters of the opposite sex. In this way, they are swept up by experi- ences that enable them to explore previously unexamined aspects of their sexuality or that challenge their ideas about a unitary self. The instrumental computer, the computer that does things for us, has revealed another side: a sub- jective computer that does things tO us as people, to our view of ourselves and our relationships, to our ways of looking at our minds. In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through vir- tual space.

Within the psychoanalytic tradition, many "schools" have departed from a unitary view of identity, among these the Jungian, object-rela- tions, and Lacanian. In different ways, each of these groups of analysts was banished from the ranks of orthodox Freudians for such sugges- tions, or somehow relegated to the margins. As the United States became the center of psycho- analytic politics in the mid-twentieth century, ideas about a robust executive ego began to con- stitute the psychoanalytic mainstream.

But today, the pendulum has swung away from that complacent view of a unitary self. Through the fragmented selves presented by patients and through theories that stress the decentered subject, contemporary social and psychological thinkers are confronting what has been left out of theories of the unitary self. It is asking such questions as, What is the self when it functions as a society? What is the self when it divides its labors among its constituent "alters?" Those burdened by post-traumatic dissociative disorders suffer these questions; I am suggesting that inhabitants of virtual communities play with them. In our lives on the screen, people are developing ideas about identity as multiplicity

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Symposium 647

through new social practices of identity as multi- . . . pllclty. With these remarks, I am not implying that

chat rooms or MUDs or the option to declare multiple user names on America Online are causally implicated in the dramatic increase of people who exhibit symptoms of multiple-per- sonality disorder (MPD), or that people on MUDs have MPD, or that MUDding (or online chatting) is like having MPD. I am saying that the many manifestations of multiplicity in our culture, including the adoption of online per- sonae, are contributing to a general reconsidera- tion of traditional, unitary notions of identity. Online experiences with "parallel lives" are part of the significant cultural context that supports new theorizing about nonpathological, indeed healthy, multiple selves.

In thinking about the self, multiplicity is a term that carries with it several centuries of neg- ative associations, but such authors as Kenneth Gergen (1991), Emily Martin (1994), and Robert Jay Lifton (1993) speak in positive terms of an adaptive, "flexible" self. The flexible self is not unitary, nor are its parts stable entities. A person cycles through its aspects, and these are themselves ever-changing and in constant com- munication with each other. Daniel Dennett (1991) speaks of the flexible self by using the metaphor of consciousness as multiple drafts, analogous to the experience of several versions of a document open on a computer screen, where the user is able to move between them at will. For Dennett, knowledge of these drafts encourages a respect for the many different ver- sions, while it imposes a certain distance from them. Donna Haraway (1991), picking up on this theme of how a distance between self states may be salutory, equates a "split and contradic- tory self" with a "knowing self." She is optimistic about its possibilities: "The knowing self is par- tial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly; and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another." What most character- izes Haraway's and Dennett's models of a know- ing self is that the lines of communication between its various aspects are open. The open communication encourages an attitude of respect for the many within us and the many within others.

Increasingly, social theorists and philoso- phers are being joined by psychoanalytic theo-

rists in efforts to think about healthy selves whose resilience and capacity for joy comes from having access to their many aspects. For exam- ple, Philip Bromberg (1994), insists that our ways of describing "good parenting" must now shift away from an emphasis on confirming a child in a "core self" and onto helping a child develop the capacity to negotiate fluid transi- tions between self states. The healthy individual knows how to be many but to smooth out the moments of transition between states of self. Bromberg says: "Health is when you are multiple but feel a unity. Health is when different aspects of self can get to know each other and reflect upon each other." Here, within the psychoana- lytic tradition, is a model of multiplicity as a state of easy traffic across selves, a conscious, highly articulated "cycling through."

From a Psychoanalytic to a Computer Culture?

Having literally written our online personae into existence, they can be a kind of Rorschach test. We can use them to become more aware of what we project into everyday life. We can use the virtual to reflect constructively on the real. Cyberspace opens the possibility for identity play, but it is very serious play. People who cul- tivate an awareness of what stands behind their screen personae are the ones most likely to suc- ceed in using virtual experience for personal and social transformation. And the people who make the most of their lives on the screen are those who are able to approach it in a spirit of self-reflection. What does my behavior in cyber- space tell me about what I want, who I am, what I may not be getting in the rest of my life?

As a culture, we are at the end of the Freudian century. Freud after all, was a child of the nineteenth century; of course, he was carry- ing the baggage of a very different scientific sen- sibility than our own. But faced with the challenges of cyberspace, our need for a practical philosophy of self-knowledge, one that does not shy away from issues of multiplicity, complexity, and ambivalence, that does not shy away from the power of symbolism, from the power of the word, from the power of identity play, has never been greater as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen. It is fashionable to think that we have passed from a psychoanalyt- ic culture to a computer culture that we no longer need to think in terms of Freudian slips but rather of information processing errors. But the reality is more complex. It is time to rethink

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648 Symposium

Living Networked On and Offline BAR1RY WELLMAN and KEITH HAMPTON

University of Toronto

our relationship to the computer culture and psychoanalytic culture as a proudly held joint

. .

cltlzens Alp.

References Bromberg, Philip. 1994. "Speak that I May See You:

Some Reflections on Dissociation, Reality, and Psychoanalytic Listening." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 4 (4): 517-47.

Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.

Erikson, Erik. [1950] 1963. Childhood and Society, 2nd Ed. New York: Norton.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. "The Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to 'Cyborgs at Large."' In Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gergen, Kenneth. 1991. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books.

Lifton, Robert Jay. 1993. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books.

Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in America Culture from the Days of Polio to the Days of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.

Minsky, Martin. 1987. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Turkle, Sherry. [1978] 1990. Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. 2nd Ed. New York: Guilford Press.

. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

We are living in a paradigm shift, not only in the way we perceive society, but even more in the way in which people and institutions are con- nected. It is the shift from living in "little box- es''1 to living in networked societies.

Members of little-box societies deal only with fellow members of the few groups to which they belong: at home, in the neighborhood, at work, or in voluntary organizations. They belong to a discrete work group in a single organization; they live in a household in a neighborhood; they belong to a kinship group (one each for them- selves and their spouse) and to discrete volun- tary organizations: churches, bowling leagues, professional associations, school associations, and the like. All of these appear to be bodies with precise boundaries for inclusion (and there- fore exclusion). Each has an internal organiza- tion that is often hierarchically structured: supervisors and employees, parents and children, pastors and churchgoers, the union executive and its members. In such a society, each interac- tion remains in its place: one group at a time.

Although people often view the world in terms of groups (Freeman 1992), they function in networks. In networked societies boundaries are more permeable, interactions occur with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies (when they exist) are

l In the words of Malvina Reynolds's great song (1963).

flatter and more recursive. The change from groups to networks can be seen at many levels. Trading and political blocs have lost their monolithic character in the world system. Organizations form complex networks of alliance and exchange rather than cartels, and workers (especially professionals, technical workers, and managers) report to multiple peers and superiors. Management by network is replacing management by (two-way) matrix as well as management by hierarchical trees (Berkowitz 1982; Wellman 1988; Castells 1996).

We focus here on the matters that we know best: the development of networked communi- ties, both online and oSine. Even before the advent of compueer-mediated communication, it became clear that when you define communi- ties as sets of informal ties of sociability, support, and identity, they rarely are neighborhood soli- darities or even densely knit groups of kin and friends (Wellman 1999a). To look for commu- nity only in localities and groups has always been the wrong game focusing on territory rather than on social relationships and institu- tions and it is becoming even more wrong with the growth of relationships in cyberspace.

Communities are clearly networks, and not neatly organized into little neighborhood boxes. People usually have more friends outside their neighborhood than within it: Indeed, many peo- ple have more ties outside their metropolitan

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