The Inner History of Devices

Memoir, clinical writings, and ethnography inform new perspectives on the experience of technology; personal stories illuminate how technology enters the inner life.

Publishers Weekly

Providing a number of perspectives on how everyday technology "inhabits the inner life and becomes charged with personal meaning," this collection from author, editor and MIT professor Turkle (Evocative Objects, The Second Self) reconsiders "sanctioned ways of understanding" average devices. Divided into personal, clinical and field experiences, the collection opens with blogger and MIT grad Alicia Kestrell Verlager describing how she came to accept a prosthetic eye-and the considerable computer equipment that came with it-as an extension of her body. In contrast, cultural anthropologist Aslihan Sanal looks at the invasive experience of dialysis and kidney transplant for two patients. Child psychiatrist John Hamilton uses the online behavior of his adolescent patients to probe their identity issues, and PhD candidate Anita Say Chan looks at online addiction through the contributor network at tech-geek news site slashdot.org. Perhaps most fascinating is anthropologist Anne Pollack's look at 11 patients with internal cardiac defibrillators, pacemaker-like implants that work as in-chest "emergency rooms," restarting a heart in cardiac arrest. Though entries are brief, they should absorb more serious-minded science buffs, and thorough notes provide further sources to explore.
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Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.