From the issue dated January 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i21/21b02601.htm
How Computers Change the Way We Think
By SHERRY TURKLE
The tools we use to think change the ways in
which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical
shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of
the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today
when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think
primarily of the computer.
My first encounters with how computers change the way we think came soon
after I joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
the late 1970s, at the end of the era of the slide rule and the beginning
of the era of the personal computer. At a lunch for new faculty members,
several senior professors in engineering complained that the transition from
slide rules to calculators had affected their students' ability to deal with
issues of scale. When students used slide rules, they had to insert decimal
points themselves. The professors insisted that that required students to
maintain a mental sense of scale, whereas those who relied on calculators
made frequent errors in orders of magnitude. Additionally, the students with
calculators had lost their ability to do "back of the envelope" calculations,
and with that, an intuitive feel for the material.
That same semester, I taught a course in the history of psychology. There,
I experienced the impact of computational objects on students' ideas about
their emotional lives. My class had read Freud's essay on slips of the tongue,
with its famous first example: The chairman of a parliamentary session opens
a meeting by declaring it closed. The students discussed how Freud interpreted
such errors as revealing a person's mixed emotions. A computer-science major
disagreed with Freud's approach. The mind, she argued, is a computer. And
in a computational dictionary -- like we have in the human mind -- "closed"
and "open" are designated by the same symbol, separated by a sign for opposition.
"Closed" equals "minus open." To substitute "closed" for "open" does not
require the notion of ambivalence or conflict.
"When the chairman made that substitution," she declared, "a bit was dropped;
a minus sign was lost. There was a power surge. No problem."
The young woman turned a Freudian slip into an information-processing error.
An explanation in terms of meaning had become an explanation in terms of
mechanism.
Such encounters turned me to the study of both the instrumental and the subjective
sides of the nascent computer culture. As an ethnographer and psychologist,
I began to study not only what the computer was doing for us, but what it was doing to us, including how it was changing the way we see ourselves, our sense of human identity.
In the 1980s, I surveyed the psychological effects of computational objects
in everyday life -- largely the unintended side effects of people's tendency
to project thoughts and feelings onto their machines. In the 20 years since,
computational objects have become more explicitly designed to have emotional
and cognitive effects. And those "effects by design" will become even stronger
in the decade to come. Machines are being designed to serve explicitly as
companions, pets, and tutors. And they are introduced in school settings
for the youngest children.
Today, starting in elementary school, students use e-mail, word processing,
computer simulations, virtual communities, and PowerPoint software. In the
process, they are absorbing more than the content of what appears on their
screens. They are learning new ways to think about what it means to know
and understand.
What follows is a short and certainly not comprehensive list of areas where
I see information technology encouraging changes in thinking. There can be
no simple way of cataloging whether any particular change is good or bad.
That is contested terrain. At every step we have to ask, as educators and
citizens, whether current technology is leading us in directions that serve
our human purposes. Such questions are not technical; they are social, moral,
and political. For me, addressing that subjective side of computation is
one of the more significant challenges for the next decade of information
technology in higher education. Technology does not determine change, but
it encourages us to take certain directions. If we make those directions
clear, we can more easily exert human choice.
Thinking about privacy. Today's college students are habituated to
a world of online blogging, instant messaging, and Web browsing that leaves
electronic traces. Yet they have had little experience with the right to
privacy. Unlike past generations of Americans, who grew up with the notion
that the privacy of their mail was sacrosanct, our children are accustomed
to electronic surveillance as part of their daily lives.
I have colleagues
who feel that the increased incursions on privacy have put the topic more
in the news, and that this is a positive change. But middle-school and high-school
students tend to be willing to provide personal information online with no
safeguards, and college students seem uninterested in violations of privacy
and in increased governmental and commercial surveillance. Professors find
that students do not understand that in a democracy, privacy is a right,
not merely a privilege. In 10 years, ideas about the relationship of privacy
and government will require even more active pedagogy. (One might also hope
that increased education about the kinds of silent surveillance that technology
makes possible may inspire more active political engagement with the issue.)
Avatars or a self? Chat rooms, role-playing games, and other technological
venues offer us many different contexts for presenting ourselves online.
Those possibilities are particularly important for adolescents because they
offer what Erik Erikson described as a moratorium, a time out or safe space
for the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development.
Our dangerous world -- with crime, terrorism, drugs, and AIDS -- offers little
in the way of safe spaces. Online worlds can provide valuable spaces for
identity play.
But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple
aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children
who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little
experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those
who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it
possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
From powerful ideas to PowerPoint. In the 1970s and early 1980s, some
educators wanted to make programming part of the regular curriculum for K-12
education. They argued that because information technology carries ideas,
it might as well carry the most powerful ideas that computer science has
to offer. It is ironic that in most elementary schools today, the ideas being
carried by information technology are not ideas from computer science like
procedural thinking, but more likely to be those embedded in productivity
tools like PowerPoint presentation software.
PowerPoint does more
than provide a way of transmitting content. It carries its own way of thinking,
its own aesthetic -- which not surprisingly shows up in the aesthetic of
college freshmen. In that aesthetic, presentation becomes its own powerful
idea.
To be sure, the software cannot be blamed for lower intellectual standards.
Misuse of the former is as much a symptom as a cause of the latter. Indeed,
the culture in which our children are raised is increasingly a culture of
presentation, a corporate culture in which appearance is often more important
than reality. In contemporary political discourse, the bar has also been
lowered. Use of rhetorical devices at the expense of cogent argument regularly
goes without notice. But it is precisely because standards of intellectual
rigor outside the educational sphere have fallen that educators must attend
to how we use, and when we introduce, software that has been designed to
simplify the organization and processing of information.
In "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (Graphics Press, 2003), Edward R.
Tufte suggests that PowerPoint equates bulleting with clear thinking. It
does not teach students to begin a discussion or construct a narrative. It
encourages presentation, not conversation. Of course, in the hands of a master
teacher, a PowerPoint presentation with few words and powerful images can
serve as the jumping-off point for a brilliant lecture. But in the hands
of elementary-school students, often introduced to PowerPoint in the third
grade, and often infatuated with its swooshing sounds, animated icons, and
flashing text, a slide show is more likely to close down debate than open
it up.
Developed to serve the needs of the corporate boardroom, the software is
designed to convey absolute authority. Teachers used to tell students that
clear exposition depended on clear outlining, but presentation software has
fetishized the outline at the expense of the content.
Narrative, the exposition of content, takes time. PowerPoint, like so much in the computer culture, speeds up the pace.
Word processing vs. thinking. The catalog for the Vermont Country
Store advertises a manual typewriter, which the advertising copy says "moves
at a pace that allows time to compose your thoughts." As many of us know,
it is possible to manipulate text on a computer screen and see how it looks
faster than we can think about what the words mean.
Word processing
has its own complex psychology. From a pedagogical point of view, it can
make dedicated students into better writers because it allows them to revise
text, rearrange paragraphs, and experiment with the tone and shape of an
essay. Few professional writers would part with their computers; some claim
that they simply cannot think without their hands on the keyboard. Yet the
ability to quickly fill the page, to see it before you can think it, can
make bad writers even worse.
A seventh grader once told me that the typewriter she found in her mother's
attic is "cool because you have to type each letter by itself. You have to
know what you are doing in advance or it comes out a mess." The idea of thinking
ahead has become exotic.
Taking things at interface value. We expect software to be easy to
use, and we assume that we don't have to know how a computer works. In the
early 1980s, most computer users who spoke of transparency meant that, as
with any other machine, you could "open the hood" and poke around. But only
a few years later, Macintosh users began to use the term when they talked
about seeing their documents and programs represented by attractive and easy-to-interpret
icons. They were referring to an ability to make things work without needing
to go below the screen surface. Paradoxically, it was the screen's opacity
that permitted that kind of transparency. Today, when people say that something
is transparent, they mean that they can see how to make it work, not that
they know how it works. In other words, transparency means epistemic opacity.
The people who built or bought the first generation of personal computers
understood them down to the bits and bytes. The next generation of operating
systems were more complex, but they still invited that old-time reductive
understanding. Contemporary information technology encourages different habits
of mind. Today's college students are already used to taking things at (inter)
face value; their successors in 2014 will be even less accustomed to probing
below the surface.
Simulation and its discontents. Some thinkers argue that the new opacity
is empowering, enabling anyone to use the most sophisticated technological
tools and to experiment with simulation in complex and creative ways. But
it is also true that our tools carry the message that they are beyond our
understanding. It is possible that in daily life, epistemic opacity can lead
to passivity.
I first became aware of that possibility in the early
1990s, when the first generation of complex simulation games were introduced
and immediately became popular for home as well as school use. SimLife teaches
the principles of evolution by getting children involved in the development
of complex ecosystems; in that sense it is an extraordinary learning tool.
During one session in which I played SimLife with Tim, a 13-year-old, the
screen before us flashed a message: "Your orgot is being eaten up." "What's
an orgot?" I asked. Tim didn't know. "I just ignore that," he said confidently.
"You don't need to know that kind of stuff to play."
For me, that story serves as a cautionary tale. Computer simulations enable
their users to think about complex phenomena as dynamic, evolving systems.
But they also accustom us to manipulating systems whose core assumptions
we may not understand and that may not be true.
We live in a culture of simulation. Our games, our economic and political
systems, and the ways architects design buildings, chemists envisage molecules,
and surgeons perform operations all use simulation technology. In 10 years
the degree to which simulations are embedded in every area of life will have
increased exponentially. We need to develop a new form of media literacy:
readership skills for the culture of simulation.
We come to written text with habits of readership based on centuries of civilization.
At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional
questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Who wrote these words, what
is their message, why were they written, and how are they situated in time
and place, politically and socially? A central project for higher education
during the next 10 years should be creating programs in information-technology
literacy, with the goal of teaching students to interrogate simulations in
much the same spirit, challenging their built-in assumptions.
Despite the ever-increasing complexity of software, most computer environments
put users in worlds based on constrained choices. In other words, immersion
in programmed worlds puts us in reassuring environments where the rules are
clear. For example, when you play a video game, you often go through a series
of frightening situations that you escape by mastering the rules -- you experience
life as a reassuring dichotomy of scary and safe. Children grow up in a culture
of video games, action films, fantasy epics, and computer programs that all
rely on that familiar scenario of almost losing but then regaining total
mastery: There is danger. It is mastered. A still-more-powerful monster appears.
It is subdued. Scary. Safe.
Yet in the real world, we have never had a greater need to work our way
out of binary assumptions. In the decade ahead, we need to rebuild the culture
around information technology. In that new sociotechnical culture, assumptions
about the nature of mastery would be less absolute. The new culture would
make it easier, not more difficult, to consider life in shades of gray, to
see moral dilemmas in terms other than a battle between Good and Evil. For
never has our world been more complex, hybridized, and global. Never have
we so needed to have many contradictory thoughts and feelings at the same
time. Our tools must help us accomplish that, not fight against us.
Information technology is identity technology. Embedding it in a culture
that supports democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity, and
complexity of opinion is one of the next decade's greatest challenges. We
cannot afford to fail.
When I first began studying the computer culture, a small breed of highly
trained technologists thought of themselves as "computer people." That is
no longer the case. If we take the computer as a carrier of a way of knowing,
a way of seeing the world and our place in it, we are all computer people
now.
Sherry Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 21, Page B26
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education