The Inner History of Devices

For example, in her essay "Slashdot.org," Anita Say Chan writes about individuals who claim to be addicted to the Internet technical news site Slashdot.org. Chan's informants are unrepentant addicts. They suggest that by losing control of their behavior, they have arrived at a better place, one that enhances their lives and personal learning styles. These individuals have reversed the social meaning of addiction yet are still frightened by their vulnerability to the website. They have, however, learned to live with this ambivalence as it provides for a liminal space, a space between themselves and their technologies where they can create meaningful relationships with devices.

In her essay about compulsive gamblers, "Video Poker," Natasha Schüll notes the goal is not to win, but rather to stay connected with the machine, inside an insulated zone of play. Her informants talk about fantasies of being inside the machines, participating in the turning of the cards, cyborg couplings with the machines.

This image of the cyborg plays out in Aslihan Sanal's essay "The Dialysis Machine," Alicia Kestrell Verlager's essay "The Prosthetic Eye," and Anne Pollock's essay "The Internal Cardiac Defibrillator." In each case the informants come to think of themselves and their machines as one. As humans they have become something new, something half human and half electronic.

Beyond such devices designed to be within or close to the body, people have stories about their eroticized attachments to everyday communication technology. E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman's essay, "Cell Phones," tells how her cell phone became a crucial actor in the final throes of a love affair. Gathman deletes her lover's telephone number within hours of their breakup, but refuses to delete the special ring tone she set for his incoming calls. Long after the relationship is over, his ring tone remains, waiting for his call.

In each essay, informants acknowledge their understanding of the "company line" regarding new technology: that it will improve, even save, their lives. But in each case, the informants also acknowledge moments where they learn something new and are forced to express themselves in highly particular ways, close to idiosyncratic, and often in association with their bodies. Such triumphal narratives signal a break from technology's company line and a movement toward a new truth: that technology is central to forging identity, a theme of the clinical essays in this collection, and one familiar from Turkle's previous books. "The World Wide Web" by John Hamilton, "Computer Games" by Marsha H. Levy-Warren, and "Cyberplaces" by Kimberlyn Leary all speak to how adolescents use life on the screen to crystallize identity by imagining themselves as they wish to be. "The Internet," Turkle writes in her introduction, "appears as a medium in which people discover things about themselves, good and bad, usually complicated and hard to sort out" (22).

But, despite the difficulties, an inner history has begun and through these essays we can better understand the untold stories about our attachments to technological objects. The choice of memoir, clinical writing, and ethnography to share these stories follows the human act of putting events into shifting camps of meaning through remembrance. In the end, each essay in this collection brings us to the question we must ask of every device: Does it serve our human purposes? Asking that question causes us to examine the basic meanings of those purposes.