Sherry Turkle (MIT) wrote an article entitled "How Computers Change the Way We Think" in the Jan 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought this snippet was particularly interesting and conflicts with the somewhat relieving information I posted about last...."Avatars or a self? Chat rooms, role-playing games, and other technological venues offer us many different contexts for presenting ourselves online. Those possibilities are particularly important for adolescents because they offer what Erik Erikson described as a moratorium, a time out or safe space for the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development. Our dangerous world -- with crime, terrorism, drugs, and AIDS -- offers little in the way of safe spaces. Online worlds can provide valuable spaces for identity play.
But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."
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