INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Given that women have more difficulty working with machines, can you analyze the
relationship between women and new technology.
Answer
For many years in the United States people talked about women and computer phobia. And as
soon as there was America on Line, as soon as there was the Internet, as soon as mothers
wanted to send e-mail to their children in college, computer phobia for women went away.
Mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends, got on-line in order to communicate. I don't think the
problem with women and computers is that women are afraid of computers. I think there
simply have not been enough applications that interested women. After all, when the
computer culture began, it began as a culture and as machines that were developed by men
for men, by engineers for engineers. The first computer I worked on - the old IBMs - had a
message that asked you if you wanted to abort, terminate or kill your program. It is not
obvious to women why there should be a language of violence and abortion and killing and
terminating programs. There was no need for that language. So naturally women felt
alienated and turned off. But as more and more women become involved with computation, you
are beginning to see changes in the nature of the language around computation and really
significant changes in the number of women who want to get involved. I am actually quite
optimistic about women and technology. The Internet is about communication, collaboration
and community-building. These are things that women are interested in, and these are
places where women will step up to the challenge of this technology.
Question 2
Can the computer become a part of the body?
Answer
Well, there are many ways in which computers already have become parts of our body: people
who have pacemakers, or implants because of Parkinson's disease, diabetics who have little
chips that help them regulate their insulin production. We are using computation and
information science to extend our control over our bodies in many ways, so that the notion
of using the computer as a prosthetic is already not science fiction but very much part of
daily reality. I think the next step and the more complicated step is moving from computer
as prosthetic to computer as cyborg, where we and the computer really become united with
each other. At MIT, where I work, there is already a group of people who are trying to
develop the notion of computer as cyborg literally by wearing their computers on their
bodies: they wear glasses that have computer screens; they have computers in their
pockets; they have a keypad in the other pocket; they log on to the WWW as they are
walking along the street. They are trying to create a total body environment that is
hooked up to computation. In some ways this is very scary. Many people think that it is
also the future, that we are going to "enrobe" ourselves with computation to
monitor our internal state, for health reasons, to get access to information at all times,
to transfer information from one person to another. The applications that I'm thinking of
are the kind that create a personal information environment, where you are extended into a
computational space. For example, in the current palm pilot, I click and I transfer
information to you; you click yours, and you transfer information to me, so we exchange
names and addresses, I can tell you my schedule, you can tell me your schedule. So already
you see the use of a personal information technology like the palm pilot being used as a
kind of extension of the person into information and space. All of these experiments with
really enrobing ourselves with computers are just the next step in that kind of aesthetic.
Again, it has many advantages, but I think as these things become introduced some people
are moving away from them and just want to experience their bodies, not enhanced, not as
cyborg, just in a physical sense. There are many things happening in the world of
computation now where people are both accepting them and also rebelling against them at
the same time. For example, e-mail. E-mail was touted as such a fantastic thing,
instantaneous communication with people all over the world; everybody wanted e-mail. But
now many people find themselves so enmeshed in their e-mail that they want to turn it off.
They have become slaves to their e-mail and want to not use it anymore because it's too
much. People find themselves spending five, six, seven hours a day doing their e-mail. I
see more and more of the people around me - who are the digital elite, if you wish -
turning off their e-mail. They're not answering it anymore. I think that many of the
things like e-mail that we see as progress and things we're moving towards with computers
are not going to work for us. Because the computer is so young, we out by thinking it is
great - give me e-mail, give me the web, I want to surf the web, I want to be in contact
with everybody. Then we realize, this is no good. It's a beautiful day and I'm not getting
any work done, I'm not really talking to anybody, I'm sitting and doing my e-mail for five
hours. And people stop. I think you are going to see a lot of movement in how people use
their computers and how we use all kinds of information technology. Maybe some of our
dreams about what the computer can do for us will turn out to be nightmares.
Question 3
In which way can new forms of communication impact on religious life, especially with
regard to the Internet? What has changed and what has remained unchanged?
Answer
I think that information technology in the computer culture has thrown people back on the
question of what is special about being a person. And the answers to that question end up
being very simple: it has to do with emotion, sensuality and spirituality, that is really
what makes us different from machines. No matter how intelligent the machines get, it is
our emotional life, our sensual life and our spiritual life that are tied to our
physicality and mortality and emotional nature. I think that in many ways information
technology has increased people's sense of the spiritual and their interest in the
spiritual. Now, religion, in so far as it touches on spirituality, becomes affected by
that new concern and interest in the spiritual life. In so far as religion is organized
religion, there I think that the Internet provides new ways for religious groups to
communicate ideas, to disseminate ideas, to bring people together. So, organized religion
can communicate its message and bring people together on the Internet. But all religions,
in so far as religion touches on people's spiritual life, I think is seeing some sort of
resurgence as part of the computer culture. I call it "a paradoxical effect",
that the more you have information, the more you privilege the spiritual. People are very
complicated. And when you throw a lot of information culture at them, they come to see
themselves as special more and more because of their spiritual culture. As far as
particular religious beliefs are concerned, it is more difficult to say. I know that
people are more interested in spirituality. The computer presence is not making people
less interested in spirituality, on the contrary. And I know that members of religious
groups are meeting on the Internet and learning more about for example Catholicism all
over the world, or Judaism all over the world. What is it like to be a Jew in Iceland?
What is it like to be a Jew in Africa? These are things that previously were very hard to
find out, and now people can find this out first person. So I think that the religious
life, the common life of communities, is becoming more expansive; there's more
information, there's more understanding.
Question 4
Why do you think that the Catholic religion decided to experiment with new methods of
communications like CD-ROMs of Padre Pio or the Pope and official religious Internet
websites?
Answer
There are two things the Internet can do for religion. It can provide information, but it
also can provide communication amongst Catholics all over the world who perhaps want to
share experiences or insights. So that I think what's important about the Internet and
other information technologies is that it's not just about broadcasting information out,
it's about people being able to participate in a community dialogue together. The Internet
is not just about a centralized message being broadcast, it is also about people all over
the world getting together and publishing their own thoughts and feelings. For example,
one of the very important phenomena now, perhaps one of the most important phenomena about
technology and identity, are people making personal webpages. They go on-line, they create
a webpage, they scan in their picture and they start to publish their poems, their music,
their art; there it is for millions and millions of people to see. So it is not just about
receiving a message from a centralized source. It is about people all over the world
feeling empowered as their own publisher. This can take vary scary dimensions, as we had
recently in the United States in the case of these very disturbed young men, these
children really, whose publications on the web were about hate, about destruction. Not
everything that people publish on the web is good, but you have to hope that taken as
phenomena all over the world, people will be expressing much that is good and creative
within them. Whether or not you're Catholic and whether or not you celebrate the Jubilee
in Rome, I think there's something about the year 2000 that just mobilizes your attention.
I was just in Paris and there's the Eiffel Tower and they have this countdown to the year
2000 broadcast right on the Eiffel tower; it's stunning, it's thrilling to see it there.
So I think that the year 2000 has perhaps come to signify for all of us that it's time to
accept fully the technologies that will be the technologies of the 21st century, and
information technology has to be premier among them.
Question 5
Do you think that the use of new technology will result in significant discrimination
between followers?
Answer
I think the case of religion is just one case of how people who don't have access to
information technology don't have access to where most information is now going to reside.
People who don't have access to the web, who aren't comfortable getting on the web to find
information, are not going to have as much information as people who can move very
fluently in this medium. Religion is one case, but employment is another and health
information is a third. In all of these areas, if you're not on the web or don't have
somebody out there doing it for you, I think that you're going to have less information
than other people. And in the sense that information is power, you will be discriminated
against. I think health is a particular area where more and more people are going to the
Internet for information about their illnesses, about their bodies, about problems they
might have that their doctor isn't even that well informed about. More and more doctors
are saying that their patients come in with webpages about the diseases that they suffer
from, with plenty of information where different procedures have been tried and operations
have been had and where there are experimental protocols going on. Patients are becoming
increasingly empowered when they go to visit their doctor. In that sense, if you are not
on the Internet, you will be discriminated against. Of course, there is a lot of false
information on the Internet. And that is another problem. Just because it is on the
Internet doesn't mean that it is true. I think that increasingly computer literacy,
information literacy, is going to be about figuring out how to figure out the value of the
information you've found, because all information is not equal. Some is false.
Question 6
Will the web kill God?
Answer
I see no reason why God should be influenced one way or another by the presence of the
WWW. If there is a God, He's watching all this probably with amazement and good humor. And
if there isn't a God. If there's a God - and I hope there is - He's watching this new
experiment in information and just watching what we're doing with it.
Question 7
Is it possible to reinvent morals that are in tune with the structure of life on the web?
Answer
I think life on the web, life on the screen, raises a lot of very serious moral questions.
For example, when you're on-line, you can pretend to be somebody you're not. Men can be
women, women can be men. I've studied that as something that's very interesting. But it
also has problems. You're deceiving other people. I once studied a man who thought he was
having an on-line affair with a woman who was called something like "Fabulous Hot
Babe". And he thought she was a beautiful young woman. Turned out he was an 80-year
old man in a nursing home in Miami. Now, he was deceived. Is that immoral? Is that just
funny? I think that as people become hurt by these relationships that involve a lot of
deception we will perhaps think of them increasingly as transgressions and not just as
funny. That is an example where there is a morality to what we do on-line. I think that we
are going to be developing the moral codes, the ethical codes, of how we want to live our
lives as on-line citizens. At the moment, there is no shared sense of how people should
behave. There is no shared understanding of what you can expect to find. But I think
that's going to change.
Question 8
You're working on a new book. Can you tell us about it?
Answer
For many years, the question about artificial intelligence, was: are computers really,
smart? Is it really intelligent? Now we are creating computer objects like the Furbies,
toys that talk to you, that play with you, where whether or not these objects are really,
really smart, children play with them and develop relationships with them. They don't care
if they are really smart, they're hugging it. They expect it to love them. I'm trying to
study the ways in which people are changed when in a sense they fall in love with their
computers, when the objects are no longer just objects that affect their thinking, but are
objects that affect their feelings. At MIT for example, there's even a group called
"Affective Computing, Emotional Computing" which is creating computers that
pretend to have feelings for you, pretend to be interested in your feelings. The bonds
that are created between people and machines, when the machine is attentive to your
emotional life, are very strong. I'm very interested in understanding the impact that
that's going to have on people. I'm in the process of writing a book. Right now I'm doing
research and writing the chapters that have to do with children and computational objects
where they feel the objects love them. So for example, 10 years ago when I interviewed
kids about computer toys and computer games and asked the children if the toys were alive,
they would say things like: "The toy isn't alive because it doesn't know". It
would all be about cognition. Or it is alive because it "cheats". Whatever they
thought, it was about cognition. Now children say: "The Furbie doesn't have arms and
it should have arms because it might want to hug me". In other worlds, they see
computers as potentially a source of nurturing. Or: Furbie is alive because I love it.
It's a very different answer than I've ever heard before in talking about a computational
object. Now when children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though
computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to
nurture, that might nurture them. It's a whole new world. Very interesting. For example,
they are creating machines where if the couch I'm sitting on were wired, it could tell if
I was nervous. It could communicate with me. How are we going to feel when our computers
know that much about us? How are you going to feel when you sit down to do your writing,
you sit down to write your book, and your computer says to you: "Sherry, I know you
want to write this chapter, but you are so tense, you are not going to be able to do a
good job. Since in the past, whenever you've been tense, the writing has not worked well,
do something simple. So a little e-mail now." How are we going to feel when our
computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change
our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what
interests me now.
Question 9
Who should you believe: the computer or yourself?
Answer
Exactly, that's the problem. There are so many things in the world now that are making
people see themselves as machines. It's not just the computers; it's also taking drugs.
It's taking psychopharmacological medications. For example, if you take Prozac, and you
know that this pill makes you feel more like yourself than if you don't take it, it's an
experience of taking a medication that makes you aware of yourself as a biochemical
machine. So more and more people are thinking of themselves as machines. I think that is a
very interesting and important thing to study now, because people in a certain sense have
always thought of themselves as machines. Every generation has had a model for how to
think about the person as a kind of machine. But never before have people had deeply felt
experiences that really rubbed their noses into how much we are machines. I think this is
going to change our relationship with the rest of the machine world.
Question 10
You have studied Foucault. According to him, man is a prisoner of power. Do you think that
the Internet will free mankind?
Answer
Many people who study Foucault are very excited about the possibilities of the Internet
because of the way it distributes power. Once power is not centralized but is in each one
of our control, the possibilities for freedom in some sense seem greater. On the other
hand, the Internet is also a mechanism for the distribution of surveillance as well as of
liberating power. So I think the jury is still out on the balance between liberation and
surveillance that this technology offers us. There's a wonderful part in Madness and
Civilization when he talks about the moment when the power of the psychiatric gaze became
most potent was when each individual internalized it and looked at himself or herself that
way. Similarly with the Internet, if we begin to experience ourselves as always on the
verge of being spied on, because it's so easy to spy on us when we're on-line, I don't
think that this will be seen for very long as a technology of liberation. The discourse
about the Internet has been about the Internet as a technology of liberation. But now
we're beginning to see that it's also a powerful technology of surveillance.
Question 11
How is the concept of identity changing in the computer age? In your book you speak of a
new, decentralized and multiple identity. People who meet on-line wear masks.
Answer
We use the technology of our time to form images of ourselves. For example, the fact that
on the computer there are many windows and people get used to the idea of moving among the
different windows on the screen can become a metaphor for a view of the self as multiple,
as decentralized, and of people being able to cycle through or click through different
aspects of themselves. When people join an on-line service, they very often take multiple
handles, or names by which to identify themselves. So they're "Armani Boy" in
one chat, they're "Motorcycle Man" in another chat, they use their real name in
a third chat. When you take a name, it begins to be the first step in creating an identity
through which you can explore different aspects of yourself. So it isn't that people
develop multiple identities on-line or multiple personality disorder, but they get a sense
of being able to cycle through different aspects of themselves and, I think, develop a
richer appreciation of how inside of every one of us there are many. We used to think of
identity as kind of a unity: you were a "one". Now we think of identity as being
much more fluid, as being really the composite of the many, many selves that exist inside
the "one". I think that our notions of identity are really changing as we more
fully experience ourselves in this new communications medium.
Question 12
Can you briefly describe the history of the computer's impact on our lives?
Answer
I am not a specialist in the instrumental computer. The computer that does things for us,
the word-processing, the spreadsheets - all of that is important, but that's the
instrumental computer. What I study is the subjective computer, not the computer that does
things for us, but the computer that does things to us, to our ways of thinking about
selves, to our relationships with other people. And it's in this regard that I think the
computer has had a very powerful effect on how we grow up now. For example, children look
at a computer and see it as an almost alive quality. They play now with these little
Furbies, these little electronic toys and games, and they begin to think that there is a
biological life and there is a Furbie kind of life, there is a computer sort of life. They
are beginning to animate the world of machines and think of themselves as not the only
intelligent entities on the planet. In other words, the computer is radically changing our
sense of the uniqueness, the specialness, of what it is to be a person. Traditionally,
kids as they grow up thought of what is special about being a person in opposition to what
the children thought of as their nearest neighbors. And those were the pets and the dogs
and the cats. What was special about people is that they were rational. So even little
children had a kind of Aristotelian notion of people as special because they were rational
animals. Now children see the computer as the "nearest neighbor" and now people
are special because of their emotions. So we go from being a rational animal to being
special because we are emotional machines. And I think that there is where we stand now
with the new emphasis on human emotionality and spirituality, as we try to figure out what
makes us special in a world of intelligent machines. I think that is the profound effect
of the computer on how we see ourselves.
Question 13
Can you analyze the role of MUDs in on-line relationships?
Answer
MUDs are really extraordinary phenomena. MUDs are short for multi-user dimensions or
multi-user domains. It is a world where thousands of people from all over the world - the
United States or Italy or France or England - log onto a computer that could be any where
in the world - many of them are in Sweden - and when they get there, they create a
character or multiple characters and they are in charge of playing that character. They
can choose its sex, they can choose its physical description, they can give it any kind of
personality they wish and they play this character in interaction with all of the other
characters. For many people playing these characters gives them an experience of playing
out an aspect of themselves that they may not have explored, that they may have been
afraid to explore. If they reflect on their experiences in MUDs, they can really learn a
great deal about themselves. There is one man who I have studied for many years who plays
on the MUDs, and he's a man who in his "real life" is very timid and very afraid
of asserting himself because he has always thought of assertive men as bullies. But he
sees assertive women as strong and "out there" and forward thinking. On the MUD
he has created a series of characters - he calls them his "Katherine Hepburn
characters", because although they're not called "Katherine Hepburn", they
all have her panache and her assertiveness and her worldliness - and for years on-line he
has practiced assertiveness by playing these female characters. When I interviewed him, he
explained to me the way in which that practice has made him more comfortable with bringing
a certain amount of assertiveness into the rest of his life. So he's a wonderful example
of how people can practice or experiment with ways of being in MUDs. I very often think
about the impact of on-line experiences through the eyes of the psychologist known as Eric
Ericson. What Ericson talked about was the moratorium of adolescence. He said that during
the teenage years people need a kind of time-out, a moratorium, in which they're free to
experiment. So the moratorium, the time-out, isn't on action, it's on the consequences of
the action. It's kind of a free space, play space, to experiment, to fall in love and to
fall out of love, to fall in love with ideas and fall out of love with ideas. I think that
on-line life today is becoming one of the places that people have these experiences of
moratorium, where they're free to kind of experiment in a relatively consequence-free way.
I think that that too is a very important subjective effect of the on-line experience.
Question 14
In your book there is a chapter titled, "Depression 2.0". What do you think of
on-line psychoanalysis?
Answer
I've been studying computer psychotherapy for 20 years. Computer psychotherapy is when
there's a computer program that tries to talk to you, to hear your problems, to offer
advice. These programs are not very good. Depression 2.0 is not a program that really
understands something profound about you as a person. It's only a program. I've found,
however, that there's been extraordinary change in people's attitudes towards talking to a
machine. Twenty years ago, 15 years, ago, 10 years ago people said: "Why should I
talk to a computer about my problems? How can I talk about sibling rivalry to a machine
that doesn't have a mother? How could a machine possibly understand?" And they were
right. But I find in studying people's reactions to Depression 2.0 that now people say:
"Let me try it. If it helps me, I'll give it shot." In other words, people are
willing to take the machine at what I call "interface" value; they're willing to
sit down in front of a machine that they know doesn't know in any profound sense and have
a conversation with it. So my interest in these programs is not that I think that they are
therapeutic, but that they show how ready we are to enter into dialogue with technology.
It's as though these programs are getting us ready for the programs that are to come that
really will be able to talk to us intelligently. So there's been an extraordinary shift.
But I don't think these programs are therapeutic. However, for many people they can be a
way of venting their feelings into a non-judgmental space, because these programs don't
judge you. They don't know who you are, really. So I see the benefit of these programs
more as a kind of interactive diary than really as a therapeutic object. There's something
else, however, that people sometimes mean when they talk about on-line psychotherapy,
which is a psychotherapist who logs onto the Internet, a human psychotherapist, and
conducts psychotherapeutic sessions on-line. The person types in their problem and the
therapist responds. There I think that that's a very different thing from a program
talking to you. There is a person there. There's a difference. I do think there's a
difference because I believe that for the power of the transference of the real connection
between two people to work, I think it's far better for them to be in the same place in a
relationship face-to-face. I think you can have a kind of quick counseling, you can share
information with a person about a problem they have, you can explain to them about the
nature of depression and what it might possibly be. But I really think that for therapy to
work, it needs the profound connection between two people that's best done face-to-face.
The trouble with all the possibilities the computer provides us is that we are tempted to
use all of them before we have really sorted out which ones are better than doing it the
old way. Just because you do in on a computer doesn't mean that it's an improvement. So I
would say that I'm pretty conservative when it comes to psychotherapy. I think it should
be done face-to-face.
Question 15
Can we analyze the problems essential to sexual identity? In the computer age the sex
organs become obsolete. Can technology and the machine become a central prosthesis?
Answer
When people go on-line and take on a persona, they very often take on a persona that's
opposite from their biological gender. So, many men go on-line as women and many women go
on-line as men. I think that part of what's happening there is that people really want to
discover something about the feeling of being another gender. They want to explore some
aspect of their sexuality that has to do with being another gender. They even just want to
flirt as being another gender. I think that for many people this can be very interesting;
it can even be a kind of consciousness raising. For example, I have many students, many
female students, who go on-line as a man and discover that they are not offered as much
help when they go on-line; they realize how much help they are offered as women, even in a
technical environment like MIT, where they are expected to be quite competent. Many men go
on-line as women and have people flirting with them and coming on to them all the time.
And they say: "I always made fun of my girlfriend for complaining about the
construction worker and the catcalls, saying why couldn't she just take it as a
compliment, and now I realize when I'm the one who is being approached, that it's very
distracting, it's humiliating, it's not a lot of fun." So there can be a kind of
consciousness raising. On one level I think gender-swapping on-line can be a very
interesting and very enlightening thing for people to do. Now, some people go on-line
either as their own gender or another gender and really have sexual experiences on-line.
By this I mean that they type to another person on-line sexual feelings, sexual actions;
sometimes they masturbate as they're doing this. There you have two human beings who are
simulating sexual activity by typing to each other. This is a kind of real-time erotic
correspondence. What people find that is really quite extraordinary is how deeply and
emotionally involved they can get as they have what on one level is structured as a purely
erotic sensual correspondence. I think that experiences of on-line sexuality shows how
vulnerable we are to being emotionally touched by another person. Because a lot of people
in the beginning of the Internet jumped into these affairs and were having sex on-line all
the time, and then they realized that the people who they were involved with were falling
in love with them, were having strong feelings about them, were really becoming quite
confused and excited by these involvements. I think that now we take on-line sex and
on-line affairs much more seriously, because we have realized that we're not having them
with the computer. We're having them with another vulnerable person.
Question 16
So the machine becomes a sexual prosthesis?
Answer
Many people talk about virtual reality of the future, where people will wear body suits,
where people will really feel the touch of someone at great distance, because they will be
wired in a way that they really will feel the pressure of another person's touch, even if
that pressure is coming from 3,000 miles away. At this point that is still science
fiction, and we don't know if we'll get there or if people will want it. What's for sure
now is that we are discovering the power of just typing erotically, when you know that
there's another person there in real time expressing these sexual feelings and having a
sexual experience with you. So what's really extraordinary about the cyber-sex we're
having now is how the machine or the Internet becomes a kind of extension of the body as
we reach out and communicate with other people in erotic ways. I think that this
experience of the computer as an extension of our erotic life is actually quite striking,
because for so many years people just thought of the computer as an extension of their
cognitive life. It was the machine that "thought". It's the machine that helps
you think. Now it becomes the machine that helps you feel, that helps you have emotions
and sexual awakenings.
Question 17
What is the significance of rape in the MUD?
Answer
The significance of having a rape in the MUD is complicated. The complexity begins with
even calling something that can happen in virtual reality a rape. In the most famous
example of rape in a MUD, one player in the MUD, one person who was logged onto the
system, took control of other players in the MUD, took control of their characters and
made these characters become like voodoo dolls. He made these characters do obscene things
with each other, even though the people who were behind these characters usually were
doing nothing. They were looking on in horror. So it was as though I have a character, you
have a character, and our characters are doing obscene things to each other, completely
out of our control, because a third party is manipulating them. Each of us would feel
profoundly violated, humiliated, as we were saying obscenities and doing obscenities in
the view of all of the other people in the MUD. People say: "Listen, it's just words,
I mean, why don't people just log off? Why don't people just hang up the phone? Why do
people care about it?" The thing that made this rape so poignant was that you and I
may have spent years developing these characters, creating these characters that have
complex relationships with each other, with other people in the MUD, and so in a sense our
characters are being killed; we can't use them anymore if now they're obscene, vicious
rapists. So the fact that people who play MUDs experience these violations as something
close to rape speaks to how powerful people's feelings about the characters they develop
are. And that's what rape in the MUD is. In the end it's just typing, but it means a lot
more to people.
Question 18
Can the virtual world result in losing touch with reality?
Answer
There's no question that for some people life on the screen is more satisfying than the
rest of life. Those people become increasingly involved, swept up, enmeshed, in the lives
they're creating on the screen. This isn't most people, but it's some people who really
are not happy in the rest of their lives. But I think that if you approach your life on
the screen in a spirit of self-reflection, what should happen is that people who find
themselves increasingly swept up in what's going on virtually should ask themselves what
their life on the screen is telling them about what they don't have in the rest of their
life? What people, experiences, are they missing? Why are they so attracted to what's
going on on-line? And I think that if you approach your cyber-life in that spirit, you can
really learn quite a bit and hopefully bring some of the lessons you have learned about
yourself into the rest of your life. When people become lost in virtual space, it's
because there's something they are terribly afraid of, or there's something terribly
unsatisfying in the rest of their life. They should use what they are doing on the screen
as a kind of Rorschach, as a kind of projective test to help them understand what they
really want for themselves.
Question 19
You also speak about genetic algorithms. How can these artificial creatures living on the
computer screen influence our concept of natural life?
Answer
I don't know if you have Furbies in Italy; they're little digital pets or tamagochis. All
of these new kinds of interactive dolls are spreading world-wide. Just as when children
look at these pets and say: "There's a human way to be alive and there's a Furbie way
to be alive", there are now programs that live in computers that reproduce, that
create their intelligence by having interaction with the real world. They are creating a
digital form of life that makes us see how our form of life is different from it. I think
that what is going to happen as you have life on the computer, digital forms of life, is
that people begin to treasure the biological, the sensual, the forms of life that we have.
I think we'll begin to recognize digital life and non-digital life and really value our
kind of life as being very special and unique. One woman I interviewed said to me:
"Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated love is never love, simulated
feeling is never feeling." In other words, many things can be simulated, but in many
ways people who have a romantic reaction to that when they see it on the computer can
think more about the uniqueness of being a person.
Question 20
What do you think about writers like Donna Haraway and Susan Stone?
Answer
These two women are exploring in different but very important ways the world of the
technological aesthetic. Donna Haraway has probably explored more than anyone else the
notion of the cyborg. What is this new monstrous category that breaks down all other
categories when we become continuous with our machines? When the boundary between persons
and things really dissolves? She has furthered our ability to think about that and
conceptualize that probably more than anyone else. And Donna Haraway has also done
something very interesting for feminism, because traditionally feminism always rejected
the notion of the machine and identified women with Mother Earth, so that women and
feminism were poised as opposite to everything technological. Donna Haraway has really
sparked a new kind of feminist consciousness that embraces the technological and shows a
way of being a feminist where you don't have to reject the technological in order to be a
feminist. I think that's a very powerful and very important contribution, because there's
no reason why feminism shouldn't be able to embrace the technological. Susan Stone is
another very interesting writer who has herself experienced a gender change in the
physical, she's a transsexual. She used to be a man and now she's a woman. Writing out of
that very powerful experience, she is able to really delve very deeply into the
experiences of on-line gender swapping with her own kind of spin. I think she's really
made her greatest contribution in the analysis of on-line gender and what that can mean,
coming out of a very powerful experience of what a gender change means in physical life.
Sometimes I think that when people talk about gender-swapping on-line and experiencing
being a man or being a woman if they're not one, they really forget all of the things
about being a woman, for example, that are tied to the physical body. I think that we need
voices like Susan Stone's to remind us of how much of our gender is tied to the body and
is not just kind of on-line discourse.
|
 |
