Chapter 9: Virtuality and its Discontents

In the postwar atomization of American social life, the rise of middle-class suburbs created communities of neighbors who often remained strangers … 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. Technological optimists think that computers will reverse some of this social atomization, touting virtual experience and virtual community as ways for people to widen their horizons. But is it really sensible to suggest that the way to revitalize the community is to sit alone in our rooms, typing at our networked computers and filling our lives with virtual friends?

Chapter 8: Tinysex and Gender Trouble

For every step forward in the instrumental use of a technology (what the technology can do for us), there are subjective effects. The technology changes us as people, changes our relationships and sense of ourselves.

Chapter 8: Tinysex and Gender Trouble

Once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibilities? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?

Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self

If “acting out” is going to happen, MUDs are relatively safe places, since virtual promiscuity never causes pregnancy or disease. But it is also true that, taken by themselves, virtual communities will only sometimes facilitate psychological growth.

Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self

In my interviews with people about the possibility of computer psychotherapy, a ventilation model of psychotherapy came up often as a reason why computers could be therapists … MUDs may provide a place for people to talk freely – and with other people rather than with a machine – but they also illustrate that therapy has to be more than a safe place to “ventilate.”

Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self

The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create … Is this a shallow game, a giant waste of time? Is it an expression of an identity crisis of the sort we traditionally associate with adolescence? Or are we watching the slow emergence of a new, more multiple style of thinking about the mind?

Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self

We are trying (as Marshall McLuhan said) to retribalize. And the computer is playing a central role … These shifts raise many questions. What will computer-mediated communication do to our commitment to other people? Will it satisfy our needs for connection and social participation, or will it further undermine fragile relationships? What kind of responsibility and accountability will we assume for our virtual actions?

Chapter 5: The Quality of Emergence

Romantic machines may have the effect that critics feared from the “classical,” rational ones … When connectionist neuroscience begins to revise the boundaries between brains, machines, and minds, it is harder to argue for the specificity of the human mind.

Chapter 5: The Quality of Emergence

For the foreseeable future, emergent machine intelligence will exist in only the most limited form. But even now, it is providing a rich store of images and metaphors for the broader culture … The language of neurons, holism, connections, associations, agents, and actors makes it easier for people to consider themselves as that kind of machine.