In an interview I did with a second grade girl a few weeks ago, she
answered my question about what she does with computers by saying that she
thinks of the computer as a friend. Here's the transcript.
L: Well,. . . Um . . . first I really, like, pretend it's really a friend
except I'm writing on it, and, um, it kinds of spits it out from the, um,
printer and that's kind of how how me and the computer work together.
Sometimes I do a wrong thing and I look, and the computer tells me that
it's the wrong thing, he doesn't really tell me, I just look up. (short
laugh)
Sherry Turkle wrote a book, _The Second Self_ about people's (mostly
children's) relationships to computers. Turkle's claim is that computers
have disrupted our beliefs about what it means to me alive and
intellegent. People give human attributes to computers and computer
attributes to themselves.
How different is this from talking about ships and cars as women?
Kathie
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Life's backwards,
Life's backwards,
People, turn around.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Sinead O'Connor and John Reynolds
Fire on Babylon: Universal Mother^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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Katherine_Goff who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu
http://ouray.cudenver.edu/~kegoff/index.html