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The Gendered Mystique, by Leslie Regan Shade
Turkle's First Glimpses at The Second Self
In the mid-1980's, Turkle, Professor of Sociology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was celebrated for
her seminal work exploring users of computers,from children
to hackers. Her pioneering work, notably in The Second
Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, on the effect of
the computer in social life and psychological development,
presented us with some early formulations on the gender
differences in children's early relationships with computer
culture. In her observations, Turkle differentiated between
boys as being `hard masters' and girls `soft masters' in
computer learning styles.
She recognized that one of the ways to make the computer
culture more inclusive was to recognize and accept the
different learning and stylistic paths men and women take in
their programming and design-what she and Seymour Papert
dubbed `epistemological pluralism'. The move towards
object-oriented programming, and a change in computer
interface design from archaic and hostile UNIX line commands
to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) designs, featuring
icons fashioned as familiar desktop objects such as
trashcans and files (the Apple Macintosh version) to the
Microsoft Windows design, is one way the computer industry
has tried to reach out to a wider audience. Recent trends
towards social interfaces for PCs featuring `real-life'
scenarios (living rooms, offices, town centres) is another
way that the computer has been `humanized', particularly as
the computer has become more situated within the domestic
realm.
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CMC Magazine / March 1, 1996
