THE ELECTRONIC WALKABOUT
Sherry Turkle on the Soul in the New Machine
by Michael Finley
If you have ever visited Australia, you know that the native people of that continent have a coming-of-age process the call the walkabout. In it, young men walk for days and even weeks across the outback, in search of direction and vision. It is an important passage in becoming an adult.
The walkabout has its counterpart in other cultures as well. American Indians have their vision quest. Some Amish groups lift their cultural strictures from their teenaged boys, in order to hasten their development.
Now Sherry Turkle, MIT professor of sociology and psychology, is saying that many young people in industrial societies are using the outback most available to them — the virtual realms of cyberspace — in order to spur their own development. In the process, they may not just be growing in maturity, they may also be developing new ways of thinking, ways that will radically alter the world we live and work in.
The activity Turkle refers to is called MUDing, after the Internet phenomenon of multi-user domain games. A multi-user domain — originally known as a multi-user dungeon, because so many of the games derive from the popular Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games of the 1970s. These games occurred in endless underground labyrinths, with players creating fictional aliases and feeling their way through challenges created by other players.
The MUD played on the Internet or via online services like CompuServe and America Online adds to the fictional aspect of the game because players never see one another.
It is played in real-time. The players of a given game sit at their computer screens, sometimes many thousands of miles apart. There are hundreds of games to be played. Most are text-based — not illustrated. A few are very graphic, with 3D action, animation, and sound. When one player does something, it affects all others. Players can "whisper" to select other players without the rest overhearing. They develop relationships, sometimes "marrying" one another in cyberspace — and sometimes even in real space.
They never know if the red-haired dwarf sorceress hurling gravity-balls at them is, in the physical world the rest of us inhabit, male or really female, 8 or 58, what her background is, etc. For deep-dyed MUDers, the virtual reality of the dungeon is easily as real as what we call real life (RL).
What Turkle has learned in her research (all conducted in RL, to minimize doubts about the reliability of her narratives) is that the people playing these games, numbering in the hundred of thousands, are pioneering a postmodern pattern in the ways we deal with reality.
The last point is the one Turkle stressed in her presentation: how computer interactions are changing our elemental human nature, and making us more flexible, more calculating, but also ambiguous and, sometimes, more confused.
When you first log onto an online service like America Online, she said, you are invited to create one of five pseudonyms. The original idea was that a family of five could thus enjoy a single membership. But many individuals grabbed all five identity slots for themselves. Within the game rooms or in other areas, people discovered they could be anything they wanted to be, that they were not bound in their virtual identities by the facts of their physical identities.
The obese can be thin, the frail can be hale, the shy can be reckless, and the male can be female. Turkle quotes a favorite New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs at a computer, one with its paw on the keyboard. "On the Internet," it explains, "nobody knows you’re a dog."
Finding one's selves
For most people, especially the young people who flock to these games, they are an opportunity for an extraordinary degree of freedom to experiment, a kind of electronic walkabout or vision quest.
Unlike the walkabout, which features real lizards, real deserts, and real lighting bolts, MUD exploration is remarkably free from consequences. If you are killed in a game, you don’t really die. Your character may not even die, if he has taken the sensible precaution of buying additional "lives" at the dungeon commissary.
The electronic walkabout reminds Turkle of the way people imagined the college experience, back in the more innocent 1950s. "Finding oneself" was a big idea for developmental psychologists like Erik Erikson, who stressed identity formation as the cornerstone of a happy life. It was a time for experimentation with ideas, with sex and drinking. It was a time for young people to "find themselves" by being away from home, free and yet protected by the college environment.
With drugs, AIDS, and campus violence, no one thinks this way about college anymore. The cyber regions offer young people many of the same opportunities, and more. The result of this experimentation is not, to Turkle’s mind, the kind of unified identity that Erikson wrote about, however, but something more divisible and opportunistic — an identity that goes with the flow that the environment provides.
Our mainline culture, where a once-permissible office joke is now grounds for a sexual harassment suit, no longer provides any kind of psychosocial moratorium from the dangers of everyday existence that Erikson wrote about, Turkle said. Without time to walk about and explore, people cannot grow through the stages needed to mature. Without some kind of identity or self-knowing, one cannot be intimate. One cannot even be honest, because there is no center to be honest from.
But our virtual community provides a remarkable safe haven for this kind of behavior. And the benefits are apparent in many of these people’s mental fluidity and creativity.
So should your organization head down to the local cyber cafe and recruit the first dozen netsurfers you see? Probably not. But in an environment as suffused with change as today’s marketplace, you will want people with the mental resilience to spring back to life after attacks by the orcs, krakens and warlocks of the business world.
One of the most interesting explorations on the net involves gender. Turkle spoke of the complexity of a male user pretending to be a female pretending to be a male. This kind of adaptation may be begun as a lark, but it soon becomes apparent to users that "virtual gender swapping" requires looking at the new world from a sharply different perspective. Males report that they never knew what it was like to be condescended to, or "helped out," or flirted with, at every opportunity.
When people adopt an online persona, whether it is of the same sex or not, they cross an invisible line to a new self they may or may not have known was in them. Turkle calls this kind of self-reflective game serious play. "I believe it touches something fundamental in our identities," she said.
She emphasized that these role-playing games, which can involve "virtual sex" — people typing messages of erotic content — are not what Time magazine and other media have described as Internet pornography. MUDs are for imaginary adventure, which can have a sexual nature, and can get at intimate parts of users’ selves. Sex (if you can call it that) is just one of many outcomes.
Turkle described two users, one male and one female, who use gender swapping to discover a more powerful side of themselves. Doug, the male, calls himself a Jimmy Stewart type, too nice to assert himself. He adopts a Katharine Hepburn type of identity, in which he projects the brassy edge he wishes he had in real life. By being that type of woman online, he is gradually learning to be more assertive in RL.
The female, Zoe, was raised in the South in a tradition where women were strongly discouraged from being Katharine Hepburn-like. She was taught that women were not supposed to disagree or even speak up at the dinner table. "The flower that grows too many thorns will never catch a man," her father told her. As an online male, she has learned what it feels like and what it sounds like to tap in to her innate aggressiveness.
More peculiar things, and ugly things, will happen. Turkle has witnessed fake murders and virtual rape, which prompted the questions What is evil? Is it acts, or words?
Small caveat
While fascinated by the online universe, Turkle warned that not all its effects are salutary. The virtual world is incredibly seductive, and those who venture into it run the risk of being overcome. The great danger is that some of us will become so absorbed in it that we no longer function in the physical realm.
Some people can and do get lost in the emotional richness of the interior world. One of the greatest mistakes we can make is underestimating it, thinking of it as meaningless diversion. It is serious play, she said, and we engage in it at our own risk.
Turkle has even had the confusing experience of encountering someone, or something, calling itself "Doctor Sherry" and administering questionnaires about life online. The impostor was not only blowing her cover, but it was violating her prime directive (the Star Trek rule against interfering with other planets’ problems) as researcher.
True to the crazy clock world of MUDs, she figured out that "Doctor Sherry" wasn’t a person at all, but a robot or "bot" character, a piece of code that went around "interviewing" other players. Someone, somewhere, was making fun of what she did for a living.
What about you — are you qualified to understand the distinctions between what is merely virtual yet can have power to do good or harm, and what we call real? Your customers and employees are tuning in to this new kind of thinking and being. Can you join them on that page — not in a dungeon, but in a new kind of responsiveness?
The people now exploring the virtual realms are true pioneers, Turkle said. By going boldly where no one has gone before, they are finding that the self is not as fixed as we have thought, and that this new reality is just as real as the reality we have always known. Indeed, it was always there, from the moment people first discovered the transforming power of imagination.