The Inner History of Devices (Mit Press) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262516756 ISBN 13: 9780262516754

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2011

Synopsis

Memoir, clinical writings, and ethnography inform new perspectives on the experience of technology; personal stories illuminate how technology enters the inner life.

For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening―that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines.

In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an “intimate ethnography” that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: “This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope.” Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: “What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?” The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer.

In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan (“Tokyo sat trapped inside it”); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.

About this title

About the Author:

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.

From Publishers Weekly:

Providing a number of perspectives on how everyday technology "inhabits the inner life and becomes charged with personal meaning," this collection from author, editor and MIT professor Turkle (Evocative Objects, The Second Self) reconsiders "sanctioned ways of understanding" average devices. Divided into personal, clinical and field experiences, the collection opens with blogger and MIT grad Alicia Kestrell Verlager describing how she came to accept a prosthetic eye-and the considerable computer equipment that came with it-as an extension of her body. In contrast, cultural anthropologist Aslihan Sanal looks at the invasive experience of dialysis and kidney transplant for two patients. Child psychiatrist John Hamilton uses the online behavior of his adolescent patients to probe their identity issues, and PhD candidate Anita Say Chan looks at online addiction through the contributor network at tech-geek news site slashdot.org. Perhaps most fascinating is anthropologist Anne Pollack's look at 11 patients with internal cardiac defibrillators, pacemaker-like implants that work as in-chest "emergency rooms," restarting a heart in cardiac arrest. Though entries are brief, they should absorb more serious-minded science buffs, and thorough notes provide further sources to explore.
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About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0262516756
• ISBN 13: 9780262516754
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218
• Editor: Sherry Turkle