It was 1995 or so when I first came across Sherry Turkle. Her book, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” was intriguing academics, scaring parents, and launching incomprehensible book reviews from coast to coast.
Now, a quick word of caution: You can’t apply today’s context to the title. The MIT professor’s book was focused not on the just-emerging World Wide Web, but on the role-playing games that had been proliferating online and the people who inhabited the MUDs – multiple-user domains – that helped define them. Guess what: some of them viewed “RL” (real life) as just another role-playing game … another “screen” to be navigated through … and as such a world no more or less valid than that inhabited by any of their avatars.
But no, that’s not the scary part. (more…)