The Inner History of Devices
Editor
Sherry Turkle (b. 1948), Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
Publication Details
The Inner History of Devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 216 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-20176-0.
It is the third of Turkle's edited trilogy on objects and thinking, following Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007) and Falling For Science: Objects in Mind (2008), and preceding Simulation and Its Discontents (2009).
Description
The volume's premise is methodological. Turkle argues that the standard ways of studying people and technology — surveys, usage statistics, laboratory observation — capture behaviour and miss the thing that matters most: the inner history, the subjective relationship a person has with a device, which is frequently at odds with what they report and always richer than what a metric records.
Her instrument for reaching it is what she calls intimate ethnography: a combination of clinical listening, memoir and close observation, in which the researcher's own responses are part of the evidence rather than noise to be eliminated. Turkle's training as a licensed clinical psychologist is doing real work here, and the collection is in part an argument that psychoanalytic listening is a legitimate research method for technology studies.
The book is organised in three sections — memoir, clinical accounts, and ethnography — with contributors including clinicians, scholars and Turkle's own students, writing about cell phones, dialysis machines, prosthetic limbs, medical monitoring equipment, the internet as experienced by people in therapy, and the objects of childhood.
Key Ideas
- Devices have inner histories. The relationship a person has with a machine has a biography: a beginning, developments, disappointments, dependencies and losses. It is not adequately described as use.
- The clinical as evidence. What people say about their devices in a therapeutic register differs systematically from what they say in a survey, and the difference is informative rather than merely inconvenient.
- Technology as a relational object. Turkle's continuing category: things that people relate to rather than merely operate, which includes far more objects than the ones designed to be relational.
- The medical device as limit case. Several contributions concern machines that keep a person alive. These make the dependency, ambivalence and identity questions unavoidable, and Turkle uses them to argue that the same structure — attenuated — is present in ordinary consumer devices.
Criticism
The methodological argument is also the standing objection: small samples, self-selected subjects, an interpretive framework that cannot be falsified, and a researcher whose own responses are admitted as evidence. Turkle's answer is that the alternative methods are not neutral either, and that they systematically exclude precisely the material this volume is for.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This is the field's clearest argument for taking the felt, private, unmeasured relationship between people and their machines as a legitimate object of study — and for the proposition that a person's account of what a device means to them is data rather than anecdote. It is the qualitative counterweight to reality mining and the quantified self, both of which measure what a body does and are silent on what it is like.
