ABSTRACT
The relation between users and computer technologies in the 1960s and 1970s tended to concentrate on usability testing and notions of whether computers could display signs of artificial intelligence. Theorists also began to move into areas of psychotherapy, including Kenneth Mark Colby et al. (1966), Herbert Simon (1969) and Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Important work in the 1980s and 1990s was conducted by the psychologist and sociologist, Sherry Turkle, who published results of her experiments on such things as the impact of computers on child development in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984), and summarised many theories of the effects of technology on identity in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995). Turkle’s main argument is that we are increasingly comfortable with taking things at ‘interface value’, accepting representations of reality for the ‘real’; indeed, in line with much poststructuralist or postmodernist thinking over the past four decades, the real has simply become a boundary open to constant negotiation. At the same time, we often use this culture of simulation to reflect on the human, so that Turkle believes that the fear of computers as thinking machines that was prevalent in the 1970s has, by the 1990s, become a pragmatic acceptance that computers may be able to think but remain
just machines: we no longer cling quite so romantically to a definition of the human as that which is capable of thought. At the same time, our relationships with computers become more subjective: we attribute personalities and reactions to them.
