Photograph by Jerry Bauer

This week, Howard welcomes Sherry Turkle, author of "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet"

You're sitting in front of a large computer screen.

You click on a little picture of an antenna and a window opens up onto a chat channel where everybody knows you as Cosmic Charlie.

You size the window and leave the chat channel open on a corner of your screen.

You click on a picture of a tiny piece of paper and open a document you are composing.

You click on a picture of a little castle and open an electronic window into a MUD where you are Zlx, a trigendered witch of the 27th century.

You click on your browser icon and web surf.

Then you cycle for a few hours among your identi-frags. Chat, compose, MUD, surf, chat, compose, MUD, surf.

You do this all day, every day. For years.

What's going on here? What does it mean to have millions of people online, living through at least a couple of identities each, scattered over the entire world? More and more of us divide our attention into windows, then turn on the stereo and groove with it. How is this affecting the way we think?

What kinds of changes are in store for our society if enough of us spend enough time playing and working in a computer-simulated universe where we can all be many people, none of whom answers to the name our parents gave us?

Life On the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, by MIT professor Sherry Turkle, seeks an answer to these questions by examining the relationship between our machines and ourselves.

As Turkle points out, we are learning to feel comfortable about coexisting and conversing with intelligent machines. We are learning to trust simulations and treat them almost like sentient beings. And we are learning to accept a new view of our own selves that fits into a world of pervasive simulation.

Turkle started observing the changing psychology of computer users in the early 1980s, when the personal computer revolution began. She talked to real people with fake names who described life in a MUD (Multi User Dungeon, a text-based on-line environment in which people interact through conversation, improvisatory role-playing and written description), the emotional quality of interaction on an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel, the way their on-screen and off-screen lives collide or merge. Turkle uses the stories told to her by nursery school children and undergraduates to explore the uncertain boundaries between human and machine:

"As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions about what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living Life On the Screen or in the screen? . . . The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain. "

I'll never see those cute little icons on my electronic desktop the same way again. And I'm looking with fresh eyes at the ways the computer is teaching me how to act and think.

Here's what Dr. Turkle sees when she looks at how we relate to our machines:

With networked computers, people are creating alternative identities, forming disembodied relationships, and building imaginary places that are beginning to interest and involve us as much as those in the physical world.

The Macintosh (and Windows) interfaces -- which allow us to run several applications at once, cycling among different work and play identities throughout the day -- encourage us to think of our minds and selves as multiple and decentralized.

These changes can have positive effects, but only if we are willing to accept that they are already happening and be thoughtful in deciding what we wish to do with them. We must be aware of how computer-mediated relationships work if we want to optimize the human side of the relationship.

I asked Dr. Turkle two questions via e-mail:

What do all the millions of newbies, just beginning to venture into cyberspace, need to understand about the ways their minds, relationships, lives might change?

Do you see any connection between the changes you attribute to human use of computers with the radical deterioration of quality of life in industrial society claimed by intellectual critics such as Sven Birkerts, Clifford Stoll, Kirkpatrick Sale, and more populist critics?