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The Second Self, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Computers and the Human Spirit Paperback – Deluxe Edition, September 30, 2005

by Sherry Turkle (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 23 ratings
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A new edition of the classic primer in the psychology of computation, with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture—to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.

Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners—people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think—about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.") Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms—how this happens, and what it means for all of us—is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.

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  1. Print length
    372 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    MIT Press
  4. Publication date
    September 30, 2005
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    8.92 x 6.06 x 1.07 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0262701111
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0262701112
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A brilliant and challenging discussion presented with extraordinary clarity.—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times—

About the Author

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MIT Press; 20th Anniversary ed. edition (September 30, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 372 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262701111
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262701112
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.16 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.92 x 6.06 x 1.07 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 23 ratings

About the author

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Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle

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SHERRY TURKLE, a social scientist and licensed clinical psychologist, has been studying people’s relationships with technology since the early personal computer movement in the late 1970s. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is the best-selling author of six books and three edited collections, including four landmark studies on our relationship with digital culture: The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle has edited three books on our lives with objects, Evocative Objects, Falling For Science, and The Inner History of Devices. They explore how our relationships with the object world have significant implications for work, education, and intimacy. In Simulation and its Discontents, Turkle explores the costs, intellectual, personal, and political of living so much of our lives in artificial worlds.

Her most recent book, The Empathy Diaries (Penguin Press, March 2021) turns her method of “intimate ethnography,” on her own life, examining the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped her into the woman and researcher she became, making the point that her emotional and intellectual became one, that her career, as she put it, became “lit from within.” It appeared to critical acclaim. Dwight Garner in The New York Times called it a "beautiful book. . . an instant classic of the genre."

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
23 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

KrissyB
5.0 out of 5 stars Sherry Turkle is brilliant. A brilliant mind and a brilliant heart
Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2016
Verified Purchase
Sherry Turkle is brilliant. A brilliant mind and a brilliant heart. This is the primer for anyone who is interested in computers and the human spirit - the good, the bad and the ugly.
3 people found this helpful
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Kieran
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2014
Verified Purchase
Written by someone who has an instinct about how the future will turn out to be. I used this book to write my own futurist novel. Post Singularity London, this book helped me like several others did in the same way.
2 people found this helpful
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Roberto Balaguer
5.0 out of 5 stars A great help to understand not what what computers do to ...
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2015
Verified Purchase
A great help to understand not what what computers do to our minds but how we can understand our minds by using digital technology. A must for anyone interested in understanding the digital era.
One person found this helpful
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Schmidtty
5.0 out of 5 stars A new view of human behavior today.
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2016
Verified Purchase
A brilliant book filled with information that all should read. The result of excellent research.
One person found this helpful
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W Boudville
5.0 out of 5 stars a worthy update
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2005
Has it already been twenty years since the first edition of this book came out?! When it did so, it was soon regarded as a classic. The intervening years have done nothing to diminish that assessment. Turkle has updated it to form this second edition.

By and large, her analysis in 1984 proved on the mark. As computers have improved in power, and become smaller and more portable, their users tend to identify with them. And here it should be said that the cellphones of today are considered, and are indeed, computers in the context of this text. Certainly, a typical cellphone has a raw computational capacity exceeding the personal computers of 1984.

To some readers, the most puzzling thing may be why some users so identify with their computers, or half-jokingly, attribute personalities to them. There seems to be some innate urge in many people for this.

Needless to say, suppose we project out another 20 years. The trend is for more such behaviour. The sophistication and personalisation possible in those future mobile machines makes this inevitable. And this is even NOT assuming any breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, which might endow the devices with true personalities.
9 people found this helpful
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jcamp@ups.edu
5.0 out of 5 stars A bold academic foray into a new media
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 1997
Turkle's seminal text examines the social implications of our increasingly computer-suffused lives. With a strong emphasis on individual interactions with computers, this ethnography describes an emerging post-modern computer culture, and goes on to interpret it in philosophical terms. A bit utopian, very smart, acts as a bit of a pre-quel to her recent work, Life on the Screen
10 people found this helpful
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Abner Rosenweig
3.0 out of 5 stars Dated in certain sections; Relevant and well-written in others
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2014
Turkle offers some good commentary on the relationship between humanity and computers, and how computing is, in essence, a new category of being that is redefining our humanity. I was disappointed by the heavy amount of ethnographic research early on. While interviews may support sociological claims, they make the writing feel dated. Also, I was reading this book for a more abstract and philosophical consideration of the topics. This philosophical discussion does come in the latter part of the book and is brief but insightful. The book also includes an interesting analysis of hackers as examples of humans with extreme relationships to computers.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Teresa
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2015
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Excellent!
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