February 13, 2001 CYBERTIMES EDUCATION M.I.T. Professor Reconsiders Children's Online Lives By MARGARET GOLDSBOROUGH ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Chester Higgins Jr./ The New York Times Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., has argued for a realistic appraisal of the risks and benefits to children of the Internet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - CyberTimes Education More Columns Forum Discuss Educational Technology Related Sites These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. ?Sherry Turkle, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology ?Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Science, Technology, and Society ?Digerati by John Brockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - There are few neighborhoods left where children can meet their pals after school for a friendly game of kickball in a vacant lot. Parents should accept this reality of contemporary life and understand that the virtual world can be a boon to today's latchkey child. At least that's the opinion of Sherry Turkle, a professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a self-styled "cyberanalyst." Turkle, who is also a licensed clinical psychologist, holding a joint Ph.D. in personality psychology and sociology from Harvard, argues that "parents need to recognize that otherwise, these kids would be alone. Online communities provide ample, new and exciting spaces for adolescents to explore identity, be happy or sad, get mad, act out -- all in a relatively consequence-free environment. This is the work of adolescence." Turkle has written extensively about the pervasiveness of digital technology and its effect on the human psyche. Her 1995 book, "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet," explores how people of all ages use the Web to develop new types of self-knowledge. As she sees it, computers have ushered in "a fundamental reconsideration of human identity." But unlike the academics who criticize the fractured, non-linear experience of Internet life, Turkle finds the fluidity of online identity to be healthy. She argues that the college years provided previous generations with the time and space for experimentation and personal development. That is no longer the case, she says, given the accelerating development of adolescents, universities' "pre-professional" expectations of their students and the increasingly serious risks posed by sexual experimentation. In addition to recognizing the value of online communities to their children, Turkle suggests that parents also consider that the "dark side" of the Internet can serve as a focus for necessary but difficult conversations -- about sexuality, for instance. Pornography is a fact of life on the Net, and every 10-year-old child knows it. So why not use that as the starting point for a discussion of personal values, Turkle asks? The Internet plays a similar role when discussing or learning about other difficult topics, such as hate speech and discrimination, she argues. A search on World War II is very likely to bring up a neo-Nazi site, a phenomenon that Turkle says can be used as an opportunity to teach about hate speech -- in part so that students recognize it for what it is and learn to discriminate among sources. Such an understanding is one aspect of being truly computer literate, Turkle says. When schools first began using computers in higher education, individuals were not considered "literate" unless they understood something of the innards of the hardware and software they used. Today, Turkle says, students are considered computer literate if they can use software programs but need not understand how those tools work or what their underlying assumptions are. That shift troubles her. We live in a world where economic and political decisions are increasingly based on simulation, she insists, and empowered citizens need to understand the nature of the simulation. "That's my creed, that the purpose of the virtual world is to reinforce, politically and psychologically, the good we can do in the real world."