It is refreshing to read a book about computers and the Internet in the index of which Bill Gates has only one entry, and Steve Jobs has none. This isn't a yet-again tale of the triumph of the nerds. Sherry Turkle is an academic at MIT, a psychoanalytically-informed psychologist and a sociologist of science and technology - qualifications that show her learning, but which don't account for Life on the Screen being fascinating, well-written and troubling. Her question is, "Who are we and who are we likely to become as com-puters play an increasingly important part in our lives?" In answering it I think she's written the best book yet on what computers and the Net mean for our lives and our culture. But I still fundamentally disagree with her.
A decade ago we were coming to see the com-puter as, in the words of another of Turkle's titles, The Second Self. Now it seems that the relationship is becoming ever more intimate; the computer seems to be coming a part and parcel of the self or - as Turkle suggests - selves. "The Internet ," she argues, "has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterise postmodern life. In its virtual reality we self-fashion and self-create. What kinds of personae do we make ? What relation do these have with what we have traditionally thought of as the 'whole' person ?"
Although she looks at many different aspects of digital life, the best illustrations of Turkle's answer are her gripping, funny and touching tales about happenings on MUDs and MOOs. These are truly virtual worlds, and more and more of us are disappearing into them; castles, seduction parlours, battlefields, games for kids cleverly disguised as grown-ups. In MUDS and MOOs people can be whoever they like. They change their genders, their degree of assertiveness, their sexual predilections at will. Anything goes - from flirtation to cross-dressing to virtual rape and weird fetishisms. And so people experiment with their selves.
Take the case of a young man who, in real life, was ill and unable to exercise. In the MUD he became a dashing young man called Achilles, wooed and won a lovely lady, married her, and with other members of the MUD had a wedding party in Germany while the virtual husband languished in America. The result was not, however, an increase in confidence. He felt devastated by the gap between his virtual self and his real self. Or take the case, one that struck me forcibly, of a woman who had lost a leg. Taking part in a MUD enabled her to gain self-awareness and self-confidence, and to move onto meeting people, including potential partners, off-screen - or, as true Internet addicts say only half-self-mockingly, "on RL", as if real life was just another Net channel.
Combine such freedom to experiment with the modish postmodern outlook that says that all stable ground is gone in culture, knowledge, philosophy and personal identity, and you get a fierce attack on the idea of a unified self. There are few ideas more important. The unified self lies at the heart of our concepts of identity and responsibility; it is an idea fundamental to the novel and the judicial system, among other things too numerous to count. This idea is under all sorts of threats in the current world of changing careers, no jobs, few long relationships, threats of plagues, pollution, low sperm counts and all the things that make us nostalgic about earlier times.
To embrace the idea of a fragmented self is to accept that there is nothing beyond simulation and surface, and to go for what postmodern guru Frederic Jameson has called "depthlessness" and "the waning of affect". I think this is the counsel of despair. The question about computers is whether we are being taken toward better relationships and values both on- and off-screen, or whether we are being seduced into a space that is evasive, escapist and infantile. In Turkle's zeal to show us the fascination and the "fit" between the Net and postmodernism, she has not been conscientious enough about the moral and political issues that the Net raises. I think they are important and scary and need to be discussed at length by people who have been there. Put bluntly, much of this stuff is okay as foreplay but becomes fetishism if you let it take over as the main event in your life.
I'm on the Net much of the time, but I haven't yet reached the desperation she calls "head-banging", where the only way out of obsessive Net addiction is to set up for a new password and then bang your forehead on the keyboard several times, thus gen-erating a random password which is irrecoverable. Bye-bye dungeon, bye-bye dragon, hello RL.
Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle: £18.99. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: (0171) 240 3444.
Robert Maxwell Young (robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk) is professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Mental Space.