AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

I think I should have paid her work more attention when I was doing my dissertation; she was one of the few people around thinking deeply about questions I was interested in. The Second Self had a whole chapter on how children apply animistic frames to computers. Which I did cite at least:

Computers, as marginal objects on the boundary between the physical and the psychological, force thinking about matter, life, and mind. Children use them to build theories about the animate and the inanimate and to develop their ideas about thought itself (Turkle 1984, p31).

author of The Empathy Diaries and The Second Self (among others). She's had a long career at MIT as a professor in science and technology studies (STS) and a long-time student of the culture and practices surrounding technology. As an ethnographer of those cultures she has a role as something of a professional outsider and a reputation as a "killjoy" (her term, from the Epilog of The Empathy Diaries); the Skyler White to the bad-boy Heisenbergs of high technology.

The Second Self

22 Feb 2023 - 17 Jun 2023