You framed your last book, Life on the Screen, in part as an attempt to update your conclusions in The Second Self about the ways computers serve as conceptual models for thinking about the self. Specifically, you wanted to confront how networked computers create new spaces for social and psychological experimentation. If you were asked to write another book today reflecting on the technological changes that have affected children in the past five years, what themes would you explore? What technologies or media forms are shaping children's sense of themselves and their world?

In the past ten years that new world order has been strained to the breaking point. Today children will talk about computers as "just machines," but then they describe them as sentient and intentional. The very notion of the machine has been reconfigured to include objects with psychologies. Faced with the objects of the culture of simulation, children still try to impose order, but they do so in the manner of theoretical tinkerers, making do with whatever materials are at hand, making do with whatever theory will fit a prevailing circumstance. Different children comfortably hold different theories. Individual children cycle through different theories, one after the other at a pretty rapid pace. To read you some of these theories off the transcripts of interviews with these kids, I have here my current collection of comments about life by children who have played with computational objects -- including some of the toys that Mitchel brought today:

"The robots are in control but not alive."
"Would be alive if they had bodies"
"Are alive because they have bodies."
"Would be alive if they had feelings"
"Are alive the way insects are alive but not the way people are alive"
"The 'Sim' creatures are not alive they are just in the computer"
"Could be alive if they got out of the computer"
"Are alive until you turn off the computer and then they are dead"
"Not alive because nothing in the computer is real"
"Not alive but almost alive"
"Sort of alive"
"Would be alive if they spoke"
"Would be alive if they traveled"
"Alive but not real"
"Not alive because they don't have bodies"
"Are alive because they can have babies" [in Sim -Life there is reproduction and the creation of a new generation is very important for children]
"Would be alive if they could get out of the computer and onto America Online"

Here are some examples of relational objects: Mitsubishi introduced a robot cat for lonely elders. Rodney Brooks, a colleague here and the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, has developed a robot infant doll that looks like a baby, makes baby sounds, and even baby facial expressions shaped by mechanical musculature It has quite uncannily realistic artificial skin. Most significantly, this computationally complex doll has baby states of mind. If you bounce the doll when it's happy, it gets happier. If you bounce the doll when it's grumpy, it gets grumpier. The user is confronted with a relational artifact that demands that the child attend to the doll's psychology. Now why is this important?

In over two decades of trying to talk about people and computers, I have tried to use the metaphor of computer as Rorschach, and I mean that the computer is a projective screen for our other concerns The Rorschach metaphor is very powerful because it's saying that when we look at ourselves in the mirror of this machine, we see ourselves. I stand by my work, but with relational artifacts such as the doll, this Rorschach model of computer-human relationship breaks down significantly. The computational artifact is no longer effectively neutral. People are learning to interact with computers through conversation and gesture. People are learning that to relate successfully to a computer you have to assess its emotional state. People are learning that when you confront a computational machine, you don't ask how it works in terms of any underlying process, but you take the machine at interface value, much as you would another person. And perhaps most important: a first generation of children are learning that artifa cts need emotional nurturance.

Among the first of these relational objects employed in the marketplace were virtual pets, screen pets such as Tamaguchis, and digital dolls such as Furbies. What makes them different from the computational toys and games that went before is that they have a life cycle and to complete that life cycle they demand children's care and nurturance. For example, in order to grow and be healthy, Tamaguchis, these little screen creatures, need to be fed, cleaned, amused. Furbies, the cuddly little owl creatures, seem to learn and love. They arrive in the child's life speaking Furbish; they learn to speak English; they play hide and seek; they communicate with each other and join together in song; they say, "I love you." They add the dimensions of human-like conversation and some simulation of tender companionship to the mix of what children can anticipate from computational objects.

Ron, who is 6, when asked whether he thought that the Furbie was alive, said, "Well, the Furbie is alive for a Furbie and, you know, something this smart should have arms. It might want to pick up something or hug me."

Katherine, age 5, when asked if it was alive, said, "Well, I love it. It's more alive than a Tamaguchi because it sleeps with me. It likes to sleep with me."

Jen, age 9, when asked if it was alive, said, "I really like to take care of it. So I guess it's alive. But it doesn't really need to eat so it is as alive as you can be if you don't eat. A Furbie is like an owl, but it is more alive than an owl because it knows more and you can talk to it, but it needs batteries so its not an animal. It's not an animal kind of alive."

So in closing, today's children are learning to distinguish between an animal kind of alive and a Furbie kind of alive. They are learning to have expectations of emotional attachment to computers that is not in the way that we have attachments to our cars and stereos. I am arguing that this is very different because it is much more in the way that we have expectations about our emotional attachments to people.

Consequently, I find your presentation very interesting because it seems that the computer becomes a replacement object for the child in his or her own image. Mirror like -- an imaginative metaphorical replacement rather than a metonymical prop or extension of the body. I think that the reason for this is because it has to with a leap and not with a deep teleology based on a linear model. There is more of a quantum leap or jump and I think that this replacement leap, this metaphorical model has at its own heart to do with transfiguration. That's why the computer is so powerful for the kid because there is a relationship of transfiguring oneself through the computer and the computer transfiguring the child even though there is always a mirroring in-between.

The reason that I say this is because I have been working on the relationship between women and airplanes in turn of the century Italian culture. Fundamentally, the relationship has been one of transfiguration and metaphor rather than a metonymical one. I was fascinated by the previous comment during the lurking discussion when one of the participants talked about a very wide-spread and ancient folkloric Tudor text of dreaming of living outside of one's own body and floating freely in the air. I think that this is also what is going on through metaphor, through the computer, and through replacement images. I think that it would be interesting to include in the discussion of media in transition the metaphor and metonymy issue with the understanding that they are different from each other though, as we all know they often criss-cross. There are metaphors that have a metonymic component and metonymies that have a metaphoric component.

Turkle: The thing about computational objects is that they can both serve as the kind of mirroring and additionally they can serve as a kind of transitional object with which the child forms a relationship that allows for new differentiations of the child's sense that it is being itself. Really to respond to the set of concerns that you are bringing up, I would say that one of the interesting things for me is the versatility and the vocation of computational media, as Mitch was saying, not just as carrying new ideas, but really as carrying a wide variety of kinds of object relationships.

Turkle: At the end of the day, I am arguing that children are developing new categories that are breaking down and reshuffling the very simple ones that we have had in the past. They are saying "sort of alive" "alive for a Furbie" "a Furbie kind of alive not an animal kind of alive" "a Sim kind of alive" -- I'm describing a world of increasing differentiation in thinking about these kinds of properties; a kind of Wittgensteinian family resemblances model ultimately will help. She's not saying that if these computational Sim creatures got out onto America Online that they would be alive like her grandmother.

Halavais: That's what I am asking. I am wondering if you are also introducing new categories of alive for people who are mediated through technologies. In other words there is alive like my mother, who I talk to on a daily basis and there's alive like my grandmother who's also on AOL.

Turkle: Do we experience other people who are differently alive for us? I think obviously "yes," but then at the end of the day if you are asked to say whether these both have a physical reality, they do. I am more concerned with artifacts that begin to nervously break down those kinds of distinctions. In closing, people are always trying to get me to say that we have moved from a psychoanalytic culture to a computer culture -- that we have moved from a world of Freudian slips to a world of information processing errors. I think that the reality is far more complex, that to study these kinds of things we need the full complexity of the Freudian language about ambivalence, transitional objects, ways of experiencing other people, a language for talking about the difference between desire and need --all of these are going to come up as we really try to make sense of these new lives on the screen, so I think that it would be very helpful if we thought of ourselves not as moving from a psychoanalytic to a computer culture but really trying to cultivate, actively cultivate a joint citizenship.