It is heartening to learn that a member of the cyber-elite cannot figure out how to turn off her iPod, and that she sometimes fumbles new programs on her laptop. “That’s why they invented 16-year-olds,” said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and MIT professor who has been studying the folkways of computer culture for more than two decades (since long before the rest of us knew to put “culture” and “computer” in the same sentence).
It was the day of the Red Sox victory parade; Turkle’s own 16-year-old, Becca Willard, wore an Ellsbury jersey and gently teased her mother about her technological deficiencies, such as they are.
“Let’s just say that Becca has been my Beatrice in navigating certain innovations,” said Turkle, who before her daughter’s arrival had been sketching Bentham’s panopticon on a yellow legal pad and sipping coffee in her French country kitchen.
She was using the objects in her 19th Century town house, which was bought and renovated by Turkle after her divorce from Becca’s father 10 years ago, to explain the premise of her new book. “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With” (MIT Press) is a collection of essays, edited and introduced by Turkle, about how objects tell stories about their owners.
Objects have long been Turkle’s stock in trade. When she arrived at MIT in the 1970s, fresh from Harvard, Paris and years of studying French philosophy and psychoanalytic thought, Turkle brought a humanist’s eye to the device that her new colleagues had become enamored of: the computer.
To her, it was an “evocative object,” a “companion to emotion, and a provocation to thought.” She looked beyond what the computer could do for us to what it might do to us, as individuals and as a society. As a sociologist of science, she spent years studying hacker culture, child programmers and gamers, groundbreaking work collected in books such as “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit,” published in 1984, and “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” from 1995.
Her new book uses a similar approach to illuminate more familiar objects. A vacuum cleaner, a closet, photographs, a linty pill in an old wallet — each is examined through varying lenses of anthropology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
During the visit, Becca brought her own evocative object into the kitchen: a patchwork quilt made by her paternal grandmother, who died in July. Using the categories her mother presents in her book, you learn that the quilt is a weightier thing than you would imagine.
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It carries a triptych of meanings: It is a transitional object (a substitute for a person, using the old Freudian terminology) as well as an object of mourning and memory (a memento of a person who has died) and, finally, an object of history and exchange; in other words, a gift.
For Turkle, the book is a kind of memoir.
“I have a long history of looking to objects to find myself in the world,” she said, “because the people around me weren’t talking.”
Her essay in the book is about a closet, and the key chains, bibelots, photographs and old high school textbooks it contained. Until she was about 14, Turkle said, she spent most of her weekends in her grandparents’ apartment near Prospect Park, Brooklyn, often sorting through the contents of a kitchen closet that held the family’s pictures and heirlooms.
When Turkle was 5, her mother married Milton Turkle, who adopted his stepdaughter when she was 14. Eventually, after years of field study with other subjects, she was ready to investigate her own life, and found her biological father, living in Queens, in the early 1980s.
He was a retired high school science teacher named Charles Zimmerman, she said. She continued: “When we met, the first thing he said was, ‘Did you find me through The New York Times?’ In fact, I’d used detectives to find him, but what he meant was that he had been advertising in the back of the Book Review. For a moment I thought he’d been advertising for me,” but then the whole story came out: Zimmerman believed he had disproved Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he had been advertising that “proof” for years.
“What also came out is that when my parents were married, he had looked at me, his child, in a scientific way, as an object that experiments could be performed on,” Turkle said. “Suddenly my mother’s silence made sense. I could understand that she literally feared for me, and feared my having any contact with him at any point.”