Review: Simulation and its Discontents, by Sherry Turkle

Book Review: Sherry Turkle, Simulation and its Discontents, 2009, MIT Press.

Sherry Turkle’s 2009 book, Simulation and its Discontents, follows a line of inquiry familiar to readers of her previous works, such as Life on the Screen (1997), or her most recent publication, Alone Together (2011). While she briefly entertained cyberspace’s therapeutic possibilities in Life on the Screen, Turkle shifts her attention in Simulation and Alone Together to the increasingly disruptive effects of technology on human identity and sociality – the “discontents” of computer use. As the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle has remained interested throughout her corpus in the relationship between computing technologies and the human psyche. And whereas her previous work analyzed the impact of computers on the identities of gamers and general users, Turkle now narrows her purview to professional identities and expert knowledge. As part of the edited series “Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life,” Simulation fittingly examines the uneasy adoption of computer simulations and visualizations into the practice of engineers, scientists, and architects.

Simulation is noteworthy not least of all because it is a hybrid book, halfway between an edited volume and a monograph. Turkle devotes the first half of the book to a discussion of two of her own studies (MIT’s Project Athena in the 1980s and an NSF study in the early 2000s), relegating the rest of the text to case studies from other authors, many connected to MIT’s doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS). William Clancey and Stefan Helmreich each contribute pieces on the sensoriums of scientists exploring alien environments through Mars rovers and undersea submersibles, respectively. Yanni Loukissas analyzes the use of three-dimensional modeling programs in architecture firms, while Natasha Myers describes analogous “cultures of modeling” amongst molecular biologists.

Each of her contributors’ essays would seem to support Turkle’s central tenet – namely, that simulation desires or requires immersion. The reader is presented with manifold stories of students, researchers, and designers being “seduced” by simulation (an oft repeated phrase), succumbing to the other realities and time-spaces effected by computer visualizations. The differences between visualization and simulation are rarely unpacked, however, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. Moreover, because of the text’s emphasis on the effects of technology on practitioners’ self-constructions, the actual technologies of simulation remain fairly black-boxed. The reader is left wondering whether Turkle et al.’s examples are really synonymous forms of simulation, or if there are perhaps ontological differences between one’s immersion into Second Life, molecular models, or a Mars rover. Is the construction of a virtual building within a neutral, unmarked space substantially different from NASA scientists’ more affective engagement with an extraterrestrial environment through a Mars rover?

In her own multi-part essay, Turkle first links educational environments to the workplace by mapping a chronology of simulation from the early adoption of computing technology on the MIT campus during the 1980s to the state of the field twenty years later, interviewing individuals from the scientific and design communities during two MIT workshops in 2003 and 2005. According to this timeline, “In the 1980s, simulations let you manipulate what was on the screen; more recently, simulations encourage you to inhabit worlds, or as the architect Donna Gordon put it, ‘fall into them’” (70). As Turkle explains in the introduction, “Twenty years ago, professionals in science and design flirted with simulation even as they were suspicious of it. Today, they are wary but wed to it” (6). The attention paid here and throughout the book to the discontents wrought by computing – to the dangers of “falling in” – would seem to be a welcome corrective to the techno-utopianism and teleological accounts of technological integration that often percolate into academic writing.

While new technologies of simulation and visualization opened epistemic and ontological doorways for students and faculty during the 80s, they were equally disruptive to early adopters’ interdisciplinary and intergenerational identities. Turkle quotes an engineering professor, for instance, who bemoaned this sea change, wherein “the freshmen and sophomores were the ‘wizards’ who could ‘run circles around the older kids.’ The faculty, once brilliant and revered, were ‘way behind, out of this’” (22). More pernicious than the unsettling of pedagogical hierarchies, however, were the ways in which the power of computer simulations threatened the core values of certain STEM disciplines. For example, physics faculty worried that simulations blurred the lines between experimentation and demonstration, for when “experiments are done ‘in simulation,’ then by definition, nature is presumed to be ‘known in advance,’ for nature would need to be embedded in the program” (40). Faculty thus feared that experiments would become their own referents, confirming what students already assumed to be true. While simulation might expedite research and design workflows, its seductiveness concealed a growing opacity – students no longer needed to understand the programming language undergirding the system, but only to acquiesce to the logic of the simulation.

Turkle parses her informants’ concerns as a conflict between “doubting and doing,” a constant tension between immersive pleasure and distrust of the simulation. Yet in drawing these connections across her two case studies, Turkle seems to be presenting an implicit hierarchy of media forms. As she explains at the opening of the book, “The senior colleagues used pencils; they knew how to revise drawings by hand; in the laboratory, they knew how to build and repair their own instruments. They understood computer code, and when things weren’t working right, they could dive into a program and fix it from the ground up. As they retire, they take something with them that simulation cannot teach, cannot replace” (6). Is drawing with a pencil or using tools to repair an instrument less mediated than creating models in a computer simulation? In arguing that researcher’s embodied knowledges can never be replicated through simulations, Turkle seems to harbor a nascent sense of loss for previous practices and media. The result is a text not so much about technological innovation or expert knowledge production, but about obsolescence, opaqueness, and tacit knowledge.

For all its richness, then, Simulation and its Discontents still contains several theoretical lacunae. Some may fault Turkle for undertheorizing simulation and interfaces, omitting any references to relevant work by Baudrillard and Benjamin, for example. Nowhere in the footnotes do we find citations of other STS or social scientific forays into scientific and design spaces, such as Latour and Woolgar’s sentinel Laboratory Life. However, such criticisms perhaps mischaracterize Turkle’s scope and intended audience(s). She has shied away in the rest of her oeuvre from cluttering her texts with academic citations and STS jargon, attempting instead to produce humanist writings on technology that are far more transparent and accessible for a general audience – or even for the scientists, engineers, and architects with whom she conversed in her simulation workshops. Ultimately Simulation and its Discontents is best suited for an undergraduate social science seminar on technology or STS. If deployed within a graduate syllabus, it could serve well as part of a larger module on public anthropology, public STS, and the theoretical or methodological constraints inherent in writing for more general audiences of consequence.