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The Gendered Mystique, by Leslie Regan Shade
Turkle: Addressing the Real through the Virtual
There is the fear in many of the case studies that Turkle
recounts, that MUDs and MOOs are increasingly seen as a
replacement for RL (real life) and engaged political and
community organizing and sustenance by the many young
college-aged population that inhabits these domains. In a
recent interview,
Session with the Cybershrink
in Technology Review (February/March 1996),
Turkle expressed concerns over this RL apathy, and wrote
that
"It would be exciting to see online communities used more to
address real-world social crises such as those around the
environment, health, drugs, and education. This is starting
to happen; I would like to see more of it. Online activists
are learning a great deal as they build virtual worlds -it's
like thousands of social experiments being conducted
simultaneously, all over the world. I would like to see some
of the knowledge gained from these efforts used to improve
our off-line communities."
For many of Turkle's young subjects, the rainbow is
cyberspace, and this is where they can reassert their middle
class origins and communicate with a like-minded community
which their RL (for reasons dealing with the present jobless
rate, slow economic growth, and highly competitive ladder-
climbing amidst an increasingly down-sized, restructured,
reengineered and deficit-busting economy) doesn't easily
accommodate. Instead, our new 'knowledge society' era,
where the rhetoric of 'life long learning' has become almost
the mantra of the decentralized and competitive
telecommunications market, calls for fluidity in
interpersonal interactions, and the ability to easily adapt
and mutate jobs, geographical location, and goals. This
lifestyle is mirrored in virtual systems, and the challenge
is in making the boundaries between RL and virtual life
permeable, so as to allow the good qualities of virtuality
to infect RL.
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CMC Magazine / March 1, 1996
