Sunday, August 24, 2003

MIT's Sherry Turkle "Technology And Human Vulnerability"

I'll stop promoting myself for a few nanoseconds and give you another good reason to get Harvard Business Review's September issue -- great intevview with Sherry Turkle called "Technology and Human Vulnerability". Here's some blah-blah from the table of contents about it: "As robots become more anthropomorphic, they are engaging with us in disconcertingly emotional ways. That may be undermining what it means to be authentically human, says sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle."

And an interesting quote from Turkle in the HBR piece:
"For some people, cyberspace is a place to act out unresolved conflicts, to play and replay personal difficulties on a new and exotic stage. For others, it provides an opportunity to work through significant problems, to use the new materials of "cybersociality" to reach for new resolutions. These more positive identity effects follow from the fact that for some, cyberspace provides what psychologist Erik Erikson would have called a "psychosocial moratorium," a central element in how Erikson thought about identity development in adolescence. "

I don't think it's available until the last week of August -- maybe tomorrow in fact -- in a store near you.