author

Panopticon's Author Index Tt

Tt Ferdinand Toennies
Sherry Turkle
Alan Turing

FERDINAND TOENNIES
German 19th century sociologist: Compared Gemeinschaft, a pre-industrial, rural village communities -- where everyone else knew each other intimately ... … with Gesellschaft, an urban, mechanical society in which people only knew each other in non-personal, professional terms. Such a view, it is argues, makes the individual easy prey for authoritarian impulses.

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SHERRY TURKLE
Popularist of postmodern/postsructuralist thought and the Internet (and, shamefully, one of only a few women to make it into this author index so far -- that will change, I hope).
Turkle's work centers on psychological and sociological changes underway in people as a result of the new computer and communications age -- something that lies close to the heart of what this Web Site is supposed to be about. In books such as her Life on the Screen, she posits that as a result of this interaction, our very conception of how the world works is altering quite radically.
She takes the example of the PC vs. Mac debate to describe the shift from modern to postmodern values, i.e., DOS-based PCs, or UNIX, supports "a modernist interpretation of understanding, according to which understanding proceeds by reducing complex things to simpler elements." However, unlike DOS or the PC, Macinoshes "encouraged users to stay at a surface level of visual representation and gave no hint of inner mechanisms" (Turkle, p. 34).
In many ways the experience of working on a PC is very different from that of a Mac. The simulated desktop environment of the Mac points "to a new kind of experience in which people do not so much command machines as enter into conversations with them" (Turkle, p. 35). Although of course the Mac works the same way as other computers, its workings are kept well hidden, and "the tools of the modernist culture of calculation became layered underneath the expereience of the [postmodern] culture of simulation." (More to come)
Furthermore, Turkle, in many ways echoing Jean Baudrillard, talks about television as part of the postmodern "culture of simulation," where we learn to identify with the simulated world of television more readily than we do with the "real" world around us. For example:
The bar featured in the television series Cheers no doubt figures so prominently in the American imagination at least partly because most of us don't have a neighborhood place where "everybody knows your name." Instead, we identify with the place on the screen, and most recently have given it some life off the screen as well. Bars designed to look like the obe on Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt (Turkle, 235).

Turkle posits that it may be televsion's predisposition toward simulation that has laid the groundwork for the next development in our relationship with reality and simulation, respectively. Computers and the virtual worlds they now provide are perhaps adding another level (or dimension) of mediated experience to our increasing susceptibilty to simulation. "Perhaps computers and virtuality in its various forms feels so natural to us because of their similarity to watching TV, our dominant media experience for the past forty years" (Turkle, 235).
See also:

Jean Baudrillard
Cyberspace
New Media core concepts
Television

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ALAN TURING
Turing, a British wartime and postwar scientist, was a genius (and I'm not being flip in saying this) who first conceptualized computers as "universal machines" in the 1930s, applied his knowledge to mechanically breaking German wartime codes in the 1940s, and finally pursued the concept -- years ahead of his time -- of computer-originated artificial intelligence.
"Every computer is virtual, each one a shadow of one machine, a machine specified, though not built, in 1936 by the British mathematician Alan Turing in a paper entitled 'On computable numbers'" (Woolley, p. 60). The original Turing Machine was a logical mathemetical machine. His idea of a machine that could simulate the behavior of the human brain had very profound significance.
"The discovery that there could be a computer that could compute any computable number does not sound like the most shattering intellectual advance. But that is because we have got used to the idea of the computer. In 1936, it meant a person. Following Turing's insight, it meant a machine: he had proved, in other words, that it was possible to mechanize what had previously only been possible by means of mental effort. The machine had crossed a critical barrier. Before, machines had taken over the body, now they threatened to take over the mind" (Woolley, p. 67).
(MORE TO COME).

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Last Updated: feb 23 2001

Click below to see a Quicktime movie clip about Turing's thoughts:

Click below to see
a Quicktime movie clip
about Turing's thoughts: