What kind of relationships are appropriate with machines?
What kinds of relationships are appropriate with machines? How are our answers to this changing?
Turkle focuses on the relationships between users and machines by examining the psychological impacts of machines on their users. Designers take an instrumental view to machines because they focus on what machines do for users, but users’ relationships with machines are based on the way that they influence our ways of seeing the world, the way we think and the nature of our relationship with others. In our one-on-one relationships to computers, Turkle thinks that the Rorschach effect is at play wherein the user projects his/her mental and emotional states on the machine. The machine, therefore, is a second self that extends our mental and emotional state.