Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

At one of our sessions he came in ashen-faced, and I said, "What's the matter?" Actually the first thing that had gone through my mind was that his wife had found out about the relationship, which was something we had been discussing for a year. But that was not the case. He had discovered, actually because the person finally confessed to him, that Fabulous Hot Babe wasn't a 23-year-old woman in Memphis, but an 80-year-old man in a nursing home in Miami. [laughs] The thrust of our conversation now was how he was going to deal with this and how he felt about this.

Turkle: My greatest asset as someone who's studying the cyberculture is, I think, my listening ability. I think it's due to my psychoanalytic training, my clinical training, my years of study with Lacanian and my immersion in a world of French psychoanalysis, where every word is examined in a way. They called it a "return to Freud," and it was a return to Freud in the sense of a tremendous sensitivity to the language that people use to express themselves. I think this makes me a listener.
So other people say, "Oh, a computer's just a tool." And I'm listening to these people and the language they're using as they're describing their tool, and I'm thinking, "Please. There's something to study here." That has given me a tremendous professional advantage because for years people were jumping around saying, "The computer's just a tool. What a waste of time to ask people about their feelings for it." But I'm listening to people and hearing that it's much more than that for them.