Life on the Screen

The Internet, with its computer bulletin boards, virtual communities, games and private domains where people strike up relationships or emulate sex, is a microcosm of an emerging ``culture of simulation'' that substitutes representations of reality for the real world, asserts Turkle (The Second Self). In an unsettling, cutting-edge exploration of the ways computers are revising the boundaries between people and computers, brains and machines, she argues that the newest computers--tools for interaction, navigation and simulation, allowing users to cycle through roles and identities--are an extension of self with striking parallels to postmodernist thought. She also looks at ``computer psychotherapy'' programs such as Depression 2.0, a set of tutorials designed to increase awareness of self-defeating attitudes; hypertext software for creating links between related songs, texts, photographs or videos; and ``artificial life,'' attempts to build intelligent, self-organizing, complex, self-replicating systems and virtual organisms. (Nov.)