Life on Screen 1-100

Sherry Turkle is in many ways writing an expose on the virtual self, from self analysis. I am very in touch with the issue of being seduced by the virtual world. I have a series of user names, and I am a retired hacker (means I got caught). In regards to the writing, Turkle touches upon the crux of the second self, namely, lure.

As an avid video game player, I can speak first hand to using space exploration in Starfox (for super nintendo) as a means of escaping the project buildings I lived in at the time. That was the first time, then it was focusing my frustrations in school on Soul Edge. I hadn't realized how big an issue the second self was for myself until I noticed my little brother had faithfully inherited the lure, his frustrations voiced through the wanton violence of Grand Theft Auto, his inadequacies in school overcompensated for by his desire to enforce nuclear proliferation and anti-terrorism in Metal Gear Solid.

This is the seduction awaiting each more 'wired' generation, Turkle notes how she is compelled to write using a computer, as if the archaic pen(cil) and paper no longer existed, like they never existed. It's Turkle's ties to the analog past that allow her to express her opinions of how the digital world is changing our society, copy and pasting the 'future' onto the past, and becoming the 'always'. What I take from the early half of this reading is that as time progresses, the fact that we weren't always digital in nature will become forgotten, then become myth. Therein lies the true villainy...