Oz Lubling wrote:

This is a synopsis of a very interesting forum/panel discussion that
happened at the museum of moving image this past saturday. The topic of
conversation was Life On Line.

One of the featured guests was Sherry Turkle, noted MIT Media Lab
Sociologist/Psychologist and Author of "Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet," a defining book on the nature of the self
online.

Sherry Turkle's talk mainly focused around variations on the following
theme: "Reflections about the images of self". An identity in the age of
the internet usually has multiple representations, manifested thru a set
of "windows" (telnet, eudora, webpage, chat, irc, palace…). This in
many ways is the post-modern self. A self that is embodied in one
person, but can exist in different variations and different places at
the same time. We have moved away from a multiple distributed time
sharing system to a system of the distributed self.

In her presentation she built an argument based on the ideas of Eric
Erickson, a late 60's sociologist.

Life on the screen exists in a psycho-social-moratorium (time-out) in a
sense that actions happen more or less consequence-free compared to RL
(real life). This time-out, […] can be psychologically compared to the
stage of childhood in most people's lives. In our every day life, every
and any action bears consequence. Turkle argues that in order to
continually evolve, people still need a place where they can explore and
interact with others consequence free.

Self-construction thru self-reparation; people get their lives done in
stages, as good and as much of it as they can with the materials they
have at hand, and are always trying to catch up with what they have
missed. Online environments/life on the screen allows for managing this
dilemma and in many ways extend the process of evolution of personal
growth.

To which G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:

I've read Sherry Turkle's book *Life on the Screen*. I appreciate her
rigorous building up of a position to define the idea of "Post Modern"
identity. However I disagree with the time out idea.

In Turkle's position the physical world has consequences while
cyberspace is essentially playtime, nothing serious you understand. This
is particularly onerous for me as an artist who is working almost
totally within the disembodied environment. What it means is that if I
write my words only matter when they are printed on paper and if I make
art, the work is only taken seriously when it's manifested in some
physical presence in a gallery or museum.

Turkle says, "people get their lives done in stages." What a
revelation! I mean golly, this particular theme has been around since
humans became aware. Somehow the real world in Turkle's universe is
stolid, fixed, immutable and therefore consequential. While online is a
gigantic playpen where people can work things out.

From where I sit the fin-de-siecle dominance of corporate life,
institutional power and global mass media have created an environment so
anti-life, anti-creativity, anti-individuality that in order to maintain
even a semblance of one's humanity it is crucial to engage in discourse
online. Otherwise we become commodities. We fit into whatever the
particular needs of any institution is at any particular moment. We
become well paid, protected, enfranchised and live the comfortable
consumer life style. You know, the serious one, the one which can
purchase objects of consequence in a material world.

Oz Lubling responded:

I don't think that this is at all how Sherry Turkle is presenting the
idea of time-out. The fact that in cyberspace action has no consequence
(or a very different idea of consequence) is not implying that any
action or activity a person conducts in it is futile. This is simply
another medium to explore ideas. The fact that the ideas are almost
consequence-free possibly allows for the development of very new and
interesting/challenging ideas.

[…]