Highlighted emphasis towards the use of internet, internet communities, blogosphere etc., is what this book lacks a bit. From the one side the reason for that could be the year of publishing (the time when we yet didn't had a wikipedia, skype, facebook). But what would be the excuse for that in the new version? Because it still don't have it all. Thats why this book has received several criticisms. As the reviewer Kelly B. Castriotta from the Journal of High Technology addresses that :"one disappointing aspect of the new edition is that Turkle does not discuss in much detail the role of the Internet in our lives."(Castriotta,2005). But from the other side there has been many books, papers which reflect upon the Web2 phenomena etc. All the things like wikipedia, social networks are becoming very to trendy to study and perceived as worth per se to speak about them in the social science articles. Those are social artifacts what hardly anyone leaves emotionally neutral.
Here rises also the problem of the 'academical catch-up' towards the new technological and social phenomena. Major part of the todays academical social science literature was written around the 70-ties, but since back then the whole landscape of the world has changed drastically. And the academics need to catch-up with their theoretical contemplation's, while the new PhD's are still in the development. Academics can talk about these new IT phenomena in the light that of 'they are there' and we need to do something about it. Some are talking about the violation of the traditional rules and norms, others celebrating the victories of the new age and paradigm-shift. But the problem here is that there is not enough fundamental questions asked about these things, like how the computers are getting so popular in our society and what kind of role they can play in the individuals life and the self? Hence there still is a need for a move from the more social, economic and cultural questions to more individual and ontological, in order to better understand 'why' these things are here.
Therefore that is what, in my view, S.Turkle is trying to address in the Second Self. The words in the title of the book speaks for them selves - 'self' and 'human spirit'. No matter if you are 'blogging', 'youtubing' or 'uploading' and 'downloading' your consciousness from the microchip, the questions like: 'who am I','why am I', and maybe here more relevant 'what and how am I', will be still an important questions for the agenda.
Idea about the self, soul or psyche is changing together with our culture. Since the time of the Scientific Revolution the human mind was compared to and understood as the clockwork mechanism. That is very static and deterministic view. But before that, animistic view about the mind or rather the soul was the dominant. Later with the rational thinkers it went towards mechanistic way, because mind as such was too metaphysical and something hard to grasp. Turkle explained that these technological innovations gave us the tools to describe, characterizes the things which was not before there outside in the nature. That has inspired the whole philosophy and thinking systems of the human beings.
But now the same is happening with the computers. First cybernetics overtook concepts like memory from the psychology. But later occurred reverse exchange of the terms - psychologists, philosophers started to use such a words such as informational processing as the way how to explain the human thinking, or 'error' for the psychological complex. Turkle points that it has affected the epistemological and ontological basis in the science till the nowadays. Hence the way how the scientists and also the 'ordinary citizens' are using the language to speak about ourselves and our minds. Also she mentions even that some scientists, by looking to the computers, are trying to find the same qualities in the our mind, hence to attribute computer characteristics to our cognitive.
That is becoming the problem not only in the Artificial Intellect (AI) studies but also in the philosophy and psychology. Computers has changed the way how we, as the humans, are thinking about ourselves and also the terms, images in what we are thinking. In the beginning of hers book shes starts with the children who are piercing computing toys as thinking and living tools. What can be identified as the animistic thinking. She gives an example when the toy outsmarted the child, and he called it the 'cheating toy'. Hence gifted tool with the intentions - if it can cheat it probably is something alive. Later she describes that the adolescents personalize the computers as well, but from the other side depersonalize them selves as the computers. People are getting emotionally connected and attracted towards the computers, especially like the hackers. In the end the book is giving the thinking material for reviewing the basic definition of what the humans are. In the old Aristotelian view humans were distinguished from the other creatures, because they were rational and therefore thinking. But today there exist something else who can be rational as well. Could be the humans today referred as the 'emotional computers'?
Also S.Turkle uses interesting theoretical combination - psychoanalysis in order to explore the computer and self relation. Before was popular the idea that psychoanalysis in social science was not applicable anymore or almost died. It has been competed out by the cognitive and cognitive-behavioral approaches, at lest in the West. These approaches basically operates with terms of cybernetics and speaks about the human information processing. While the psychoanalysis and analytical psychology still deals with the issues such as self and the unexplored territory and deepness of the human consciousness. It seems that Turkle is giving a new breath to the old and good psychoanalytical conceptualizations of the human psyche. And maybe it can be the opportunity to look deeper inside in our selves and ask, weather there is something more inside in us than the rational models of informational processing and are our consciousness is something qualitatively different and greater than, for example, the Windows Vista?
