Shirley Turkle spent six years interviewing hundreds of people who interact with computers in their daily lives, to discover “what the computer is doing to us as a feeling, emotional, relational people.” A sociologist and psychologist by training, she claimed that she had “never touched a computer” before beginning her study, which culminated in a book, “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit,” (Simon & Shuster, 1984 $17.95).

Her conclusion is that computers are affecting the way humans think about ourselves and the world. Turkle, an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to a crowd of 200 on the topic “Computers and the Human Spirit,” at the Cambridge Forum held in the First Parish Church last Dec. 5.

Many people fear that computers may be undermining our ability to relate to other people, and could be influencing us to behave more like machines. But Turkle said that “the simple theory” that people adopt a more mechanistic view of themselves and the world after prolonged contact with computers was not supported by her research.  Instead, she found a “new romanticism among people deeply involved with computers, which “maintains a sharp line between computers and humans by taking the essence of human nature to be what computers can’t do.”

Combined with intelligent machines such as Merlin, Big Trak, and Speak and Spell, children are creating new definitions of what it means to be human. “The Aristotelian definition of man as a rational animal, which is powerful even to children when they define people in contrast to their nearest neighbors, their pet dogs, and cats, gives way to a different distinction. Now our nearest neighbors, computers, are rational and thinking, and now people are special because they have ′feelings,’” said Turkle.

In attempting to assess the impact of computers on child development, Turkle stressed the distinction between “the computer programming the child and the child programming the computer,” and worried that it was dangerous to try to boil these issues down to the single question—are computers good or bad?

“If you say that computers are good, you risk giving the impression that all we have to do is parachute 50 computers into a school and something wonderful will happen to those children.” Too often, she said the computer becomes merely a “souped-up drill-and-reward, an electronic flash-card” instead of an expressive medium for learning and creativity.

She observed two basic approaches to programming among children exposed to flexible and open computational material: A top-down, engineer style: divide-and-conquer approach,” and a “more negotiating, playful, and interactive style.” Although there are many exceptions, she said that boys tend to take the former approach and girls the latter. Unfortunately, computer literacy tests “tend to define the engineer’s way as the right way.”

When people in the humanities, social sciences, literature, and the arts categorically dismiss computers as “bad,” they are “abdicating the field of building the computer culture to the technocrats,” said Turkle.  She stressed that it was up to all of us to become involved in shaping the role computers will play in our society. “The point is not whether computers are good or bad, but how we can make them good for us. That’s something all of us can work on.”