Sherry Turkle: "the computer as an intimate machine." (Industry Trend or Event)

How well do software developers and marketers understand the psychology of interactive technology? The truth is, much of what motivates users (and buyers) is still unmapped territory. A few developers have experimented with social interface concepts (Soft*letter, 1/17/95), but otherwise it's tough to find anyone who thinks about how people feel about PCs, the Web, and the experience of technology. So we were glad to catch up recently with Dr. Sherry Turkle of MIT, a leading expert on online behavior and a self-professed "anthropologist of the Web."

"People go to the computer for information," Turkle points out, "but they stick around for emotional and community effects." Online enthusiasts typically join "self-organizing" networks around often esoteric interests and hobbies, they experiment with personal role-playing in so-called multi-user domains (an outgrowth of the Dungeons and Dragons cults of the 1970s), and occasionally they become literally addicted to cyber experiences.

While some of this behavior is extreme, says Turkle, it reflects the fact that the "subjective component" of computing sometimes becomes far more compelling than just using a PC for collecting information and doing productive work. (For marketers who believe that rational benefits and brand imagery are the only basis for powerful sales messages, the notion of playing to psychological needs is clearly a ground-breaking concept.)

Turkle recently offered an in-depth look at the psychology of online computing in a book called Life on the Screen. Some excerpts: * On new expectations about man-machine interaction: "Today, people explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives. When people explore simulation games and fantasy worlds or log on to a community where they have virtual friends and lovers, they are not thinking of the computer as what Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century mathematician who invented the first programmable machine, called an analytical engine. They are seeking out the computer as an intimate machine."

* On the acceptance of artificial personalities: "For today's children, the boundary between people and machines is intact. But what they see across that boundary has changed dramatically. Now, children are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality... They endow the category of artificial objects with properties, such as having intentions and ideas, previously reserved for living beings."

* On the emergence of virtual communities: "The bar featured in the television series Cheers no doubt figures so prominently in the American imagination at least partly because most of us don't have a neighborhood place where 'everybody knows your name.' Instead, we identify with the place on the screen, and most recently have given it some life off the screen as well. Bars designed to look like the one on Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, no one will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt... We seem to be in the process of retreating further into our homes, shopping for merchandise in catalogues or on television channels, shopping for companionship via personal ads."

* On the creation of personal avatars for online interaction: "As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life on the screen or life in the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code."

Dr. Sherry Turkle, professor of sociology of science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 02139; 617/253-1000. E-mail: [e-mail].