Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. Simon & Schuster. 352 pp.

There was a time when Sherry Turkle was optimistic about the social and psychological consequences of the internet, praising online interaction for its therapeutic effect on identity. In fact, in Life on the Screen did Turkle not only embrace the postmodern notion of the self in cyberspace as separated from the body and protected by anonymity, opening up possibilities for playful experimentation and, at times, deception. She was also “enamoured” (Baym, 1997) with the idea of the multiple self as healthy self. In the postmodern perspective, a disembodied self is seen as less unitary and more flexible: Liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints of everyday life, divorced from the embodied self, the individual is eventually free to experiment with multiple virtual identities in what Turkle compares to a “psychosocial moratorium.” Namely, a safe space (and time) in which playful exploration of the multiple aspects of one’s self is allowed beyond adolescence. Such online “identity workshops” can help deal with offline identity issues, including frustration and emotional difficulties, Turkle argues, in a safe and positive way. Theoretically, then, and in line with the postmodern conceptual toolkit, “she believes that adoption of online personae is contributing to general reconsideration of traditional unitary notions of identity,” as Hans Beentjes wrote in his 1996 review of Turkle’s book for Communications.

Developments in social robotics, on the one hand, and the pervasiveness of online interactions in people’s everyday lives, on the other, made her reconsider her earlier optimism, as Turkle recounts in Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. While only sixteen years apart, Alone Together seemingly marks a radical departure from Life on the Screen. However, the contrast is more apparent than substantial. Certainly, Turkle’s later work testifies the departure from the conceptual cluster of “disembodied/multiplicity/fantasy” used to define the cyberspace towards an understanding of online identities as structured around the “embodied/authenticity/reality” cluster (Baym, 2006, p. 41). Yet, the inclination to think of our digital lives as distinct from, if not substitutes for, our offline lives remains, as much as her preoccupation with how computers, the internet, and “sociable robots” are changing how we think and feel. In their reviews of Life on the Screen, both Baym (1997) and Wellman (1997) criticize Turkle for ignoring questions of how online interactions fit with other aspects of people’s lives and are actually shaped by the embodied self. In Alone Together, technologies are seen as more pervasively integrated in people’s lives, but are also understood as responsible for radically altering the conditions under which humans, and children in particular, live. The notion of cyberspace itself may be now outdated, but the fascination for one-way, direct relationships between technology and society continues to thrive in works such as Alone Together or Haidt’s (2024) The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Regardless of whether technology’s influence on individuals, groups and society is seen as beneficial, as in Turkle’s earlier celebration of multiple online identities, or alarming, as in Alone Together or Haidt’s book, the issue of the transformative potential of technologies, for good or for worse, remains. What effects-oriented claims about the role of the internet in (young) people’s lives tend to ignore is precisely that the internet has become “embedded, embodied and everyday” (Hine, 2015), in other words, the ethnographic variety of users and uses.

More relevant for contemporary media and communication studies is the second theme in Turkle’s work, that is, her anticipatory insights into human-machine communication (HMC). In fact, Turkle moved from understanding computers as “evocative objects”–prompting users’ reflexivity about human thought and comprehension–to investigating the “liveness” of social robots as “relational objects” designed to interact with users sociably (Turkle, 2006). The “first relational artefacts to enter the American marketplace” (Turkle, 2006, p. 26) were the Tamagotchis–small creatures that live on screen and demand constant nurturing and care. Observing children’s interactions with Tamagotchis, in fact, Turkle shows how the social robot is attributed liveness not because of its functional affordances, but, rather, because of the emotional connection that young users develop with the machine. This results in greater agency of the “relational artefact”.

Indeed, the current transformations of digital media call for a reevaluation of issues of agency–of humans and machines (Hepp and Görland, 2024)–whether from a socio-constructivist perspective that examines the agency of machines as an objectification of human actions and expectations, or from a materialist and actor-network perspective that emphasizes the distributed and hybrid nature of agency. For Turkle (2006), it is a matter of technological development: Compared to computers, children’s interactions with social robots reveal “a shift from projection onto an object to engagement with a subject” (p. 37). While the conceptual ambiguity around questions of agency persists in contemporary debates (Hepp and Görland, 2024), Turkle’s reflections around the entity-making practices of children interacting with computers (in the 1980s) and social robots (from the late 1990s on) anticipated a crucial theme in contemporary media and communication studies.