Spiegel der Technik

„The computer, of course, is not unique as an extension of self. At each point in our lives, we seek to project ourselves into the world. The youngest child will eagerly pick up crayons and modelling clay. We paint, we work, we keep journals, we start companies, we build things that express the diversity of our personal and intellectual sensibilities. Yet the computer offers us new opportunities as a media that embodies our ideas and expresses our diversity.
In the early years of the computer culture, the most dramatic instances of such projections of self into computers occurred in the esoteric domain of programming. Now, as in the case of the novelist and the architect, it is quite common for people to project themselves into the simulations that play on their screens, into the screen images and their action. Computer holding power, once closed tied to the deduction of programming, today is tied to the seduction of the interface. When video games were very new, I found that the holding power of their screen often went along with a fantasy of a meeting of minds between the player and the program behind the game. Today, the program has disappeared, one enters the screen world as Alice stepped through the looking glass. In today’s game simulations, people experience themselves in a new, often exotic setting. The minds they meet are their own.“ (Turkle, S. 31)