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Quiz: Sherry Turkle's "Who Am We?"

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1 In "Who Am We," Sherry Turkle calls windows (Windows?) “a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self.” What does she mean by this? How are windows an appropriate metaphor for a postmodernist, rather than modernist, sense of self? Choose three that apply.

the self requires power
the self plays not a single role but many
the self exists not in one context at a time but simultaneously in many
the self is decentered
the self frequently "crashes"

2. Turkle is concerned with identity. Which of the following best describes Turkles definition of identity and her answer to the question of whether online identities might be healthy or not.

"Identity" just doesn't exist either online or in the face-to-face world . Therefore, the fictions of self we create online are just as good as the fictions we perform in the physical world. Turkle calls the whole notion of mental health a "phenomenon of bodily existence which we are soon to discard."

"Identity" refers to the "sameness between two qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona." Identity is strengthed when we can integrate our online experiences into our face-to-face lives, weakened when online experiences remain unintegrated.

Your "identity" is ultimately your true self, "eternal" and "pure." Such truth is possible only in the stable, physical world, and so the selves created online are purely imaginary and therefore "inconsequential and irrelevant," a "free space" for play which cannot theaten one's real self.

"Identity" is a "miniature theater of information" that reflects the whole world in which we live. We can create these theaters most readily online because we're not restricted by our physical, racialized and engendered bodies.

3. How does "play" relate to the creation of identity?

Turkle says that play "essentially builds identity muscles" for use in real life. Stewart is a good example.

Turkle says that play is "inconsequential to true identity," which in postmodern culture is a matter of "authenticity."

Turkle says that "serious play" is "belittled...at our risk," and that understanding it is required to "enrich the real."

4. Turkle says that the virtual life gives us a new language for talking about the simplest things. Which of the following statements is not one of the fundamental questions that, she says, individuals must now ask.

What are the economic costs of online role playing for the individual and the society.
What are the nature of my relationships?
What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies?
What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace?

5. The introduction says (and the focus of the article generally suggests) that Turkle is

a theologian
a clinical psychologist
an economist
a designer interested in theory


 

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