Aug 22, Cheryl rated it it was amazing. I set this book aside, in June. This what I do when I know that I am going to love a book and want to have it hovering around just in case I need solace and something to dive in to.
I picked it up a week ago. Photography, combined with memoir writing, combined with excerpts from scholarly essays: the visual, the intellectual, the emotional -- all together provide a great reading experience.
This book deepened my perspective on many objects and notions. Feb 08, Phoenix rated it really liked it Shelves: design. On our connections to eveyday things My own experiences echoes that of the previous reviewer David Block. Turkle opens up an interesting subject for discussion but I was expecting a deeper analysis. The closing essay by Turkle indicates and reviews points of interest but but doesn't satisfy. I was expecting Turkle to say more to tie the ideas together.
The bulk of the book is a collection of essays by researchers at MIT about particular objects that they have imbued with personal meaning. Most of On our connections to eveyday things My own experiences echoes that of the previous reviewer David Block. Most of these are quite enjoyable, the ones that stood out for me include Carole Strohecker on "Knots", Judith Donath on her " Ford Falcon" I was the last owner of a Ford Fairlane and can relate and Howard Gardiner on "Keyboards" I'm reading him in another book Initially I tried to read the book in a single setting, and then got bored - it was good, but not all at once.
I then finished it bit by bit, sipping the experiences. I'd recommend this as a gift book for someone who is a collector or who someone like myself just likes to browse in antique and craft shops for interesting items. I'd also recommend this book for writing teachers as a jumping off point for student essays. Perhaps the best response to reading this book is to write your own personal chapter about similar objects in your own life, perhaps one that connects you to a previous generation.
For example I have a scalloped bowl designed to look like a leaf of lettuce that belonged to my mother and before that my grandmother. Its slightly chipped , but I use it carefully once a year in memory of them. Jan 27, Caroline rated it it was ok. This is a series of very short essays desscribing the objects very loosely defined that the authors used to negociate indentity, family, loss, career and abilitites. The Subtitle is 'Things to think with' but most of the authors describe their feelings, and mostly in terms that suggested that the subtle and immersive shifts of sensory memory cannot be adequately put into words.
Which might be true, but made for tedious and repetitive reading. And many of them felt the need to quote Proust and This is a series of very short essays desscribing the objects very loosely defined that the authors used to negociate indentity, family, loss, career and abilitites.
And many of them felt the need to quote Proust and his inevitable Madelaine, it does not seem possible to write about memory without bringing that up. Also almost all the authors were academics, which again made for repetition in lifestyle, writing style and priorities, and they took the oppertunity to promote their research, even when it wasn't relevant.
I'm sure it would have been a more interesting book if the editor had made an effort to speak to people less like her, with a broader variety of experience. Aug 18, ChromaticRat rated it liked it. Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen was a central text for my unfinished master's thesis about gendered communication in an online community.
It's been more than a decade since I moved on to other interests and I was curious to read about what Dr. Turkle is looking into these days. A lovely collection of thoughtful, languid essays about evocative objects in each of the contributors' lives, this book was not quite captivating enough to speed all the way though before it was due back at the library Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen was a central text for my unfinished master's thesis about gendered communication in an online community.
A lovely collection of thoughtful, languid essays about evocative objects in each of the contributors' lives, this book was not quite captivating enough to speed all the way though before it was due back at the library.
Nov 23, Margaret Sankey rated it liked it. In another compilation by technology sociologist Sherry Turkle, people reflect on the way they interact with objects, yielding essays on a diverse range of subjects--embracing a cello, using piano and computer keyboards, dependence and resentment of a blood glucose monitor, building a home made radio, sensei-made karate liniment, children and stuffed animals, curating a collection of mummies, toddlers afraid of vacuum cleaners, a lost datebook, a grandmother's rolling pin and a beloved old car.
Nov 30, Sharice rated it liked it Recommends it for: Hoarders. People with an active mind. Again, like many books I read, I saw this at work and decided I'd give it a go. I wasn't sure why but I think it appealled to the hoarder in me who can't get rid of objects.
Everything I own has an emotional value for me, which makes it hard to let go of posessions, no matter how meaningless or trivial they seem. This book made me realise that I'm not alone, that others too put so much value on basic objects.
Some aspects of the theory was a bit beyond me however. Aug 04, Jaime rated it really liked it. I got this book at a book-swap I hosted several years ago, and it's taken me about that long to finish it. It's a book to linger over. Love the collection of essays, the explorations of the "evocative" through the objects we carry or remember, and the editor's presentation of the material.
Especially, from my own editor's point of view, I love that Turkle holds her thoughts until the end, rather than presenting them as an introduction, as editors tend to do. Nov 27, David Metcalfe rated it did not like it. Likely one of the worst books I've ever read. Essentially it's a collection of stories from other people more concerned with sounding smart and obfuscating the core points of their realizations than communicating with the reader.
Incredibly dull, very little personality, and a slow read as you strain to find much of any substance, or meaning in the stories.
Unless assigned as class reading material, I recommend avoiding this one. Aug 13, Robert rated it it was ok. I liked Sherry Turkle's introductory essay, but can't say that the essays by the various contributors really did much for me. Maybe this book was just a chance for her to collect and publish pieces by her academic friends rather than some committed discussion of objects and how we think with them Oct 27, Karla rated it liked it.
What I liked overall about this collection of essays was the theme of seeing objects as important, as carrying meaning and emotion, and that we unequivocally develop connections with the things in our lives. Elevating objects to this status gives me hope that we can move away from throwaway consumerism.
Apr 01, Amber rated it it was amazing. If you find that bric-a-brac and tiny objects occupy your home, and you don't know why - but feel their connection to you, I recommend this book. It was given to me as a gift, and has added a level of understanding to the tiny, seemingly lifeless objects I remain connected to, when I didn't think I needed to understand their presence any further.
Mar 23, Cynthia Dechenes rated it liked it. This book prompted the most wonderful book group discussion! Members of our group shared their own "evocative objects", and stories attached to them. I would highly recommend the essays as a jumping off point for telling our own stories and prompting contemplation of the evocative objects in our own lives.
In point of fact, this notion is based on a vicious circle: in order to make a copy we have to know the model that we are copying, but according to this theory of knowledge the only way to know the model is by copying it, until we are caught in a circle, unable ever to know whether our copy of the model is like the model or not. To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it—it means acting upon it.
It means constructing systems of transformation that can be carried out on or with this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate. But let us ask what logical and mathematical knowledge is abstracted from.
There are two possibilities. The first is that, when we act upon an object, our knowledge is derived from the object itself.
But there is a second possibility: when we are acting upon an object, we can also take into account the action itself, or operation if you will, since the transformation can be carried out mentally. In this hypothesis the abstraction is drawn not from the object that is acted upon, but from the action itself.
My eyes would dance from star to star. Rather, it was the space between, around, and beyond them. At an early age maybe seven or eight , I had started to wonder about all that space. Does it go on forever? If not, where does it end? How does it end? Every answer that I could think of seemed equally absurd. I could not imagine the universe going on forever. But how could it end? If there is a wall at the end of the universe, what is on the other side?
These questions frustrated and fascinated me. No answer seemed possible. As I grew older, I became interested in puzzles and paradoxes. I spent many hours trying to sort out the sentence: This sentence is false. If the sentence is true, then it must be false. But if it is false, it must be true. In school, I was attracted to math and physics, two fields filled with paradoxes and counterintuitive ideas.
I became fascinated by an object that my high-school physics teacher showed us. The object was remarkably simple: two wheels and an axle, with a pin hanging down from the middle of the axle not quite hitting the ground , 40 Mitchel Resnick and a string at the end of the pin.
The teacher asked: What happens when you pull on the string? Since the string is attached to the end of the pin, it seems that the pin should come toward you. At the same time, it seems that the wheels should come toward you. Another paradox! But this object was different from the stars of my childhood: you could hold it in your hands and test it out.
Indeed, I went home, took apart an old toy truck, and made my own version of the puzzle, testing pins of different lengths. In physics courses, I learned how to derive and manipulate the equations of general relativity, the field most directly related to my paradox.
I tried to approach it through new thinking strategies, through new intuitions and metaphors: I learned that the universe might curve back on itself, just as the land on Earth curves back on itself as you travel all the way around the globe.
But what does that mean? How could I envision that? During college, I had planned to attend graduate school in physics. But at the end of senior year, I decided to work as a journalist instead. I worried that physics Stars 41 graduate school would be filled with too many equations and too few qualitative insights.
I was still fascinated with the mysteries and paradoxes of science. I hoped that as a journalist, specializing in science and technology, I would be able to share my fascination with others. For five years, I covered universities and high technology companies around Boston and then Silicon Valley.
I enjoyed my work, but something was missing. I had lost contact with my obsession. I began to recognize the importance of having obsessions. Then, in , I wrote a cover story for Business Week magazine about research in the field of artificial intelligence.
I talked with many leading researchers in the field. I became increasingly interested in questions about the mind. How can a mind emerge from a collection of mindless parts? But how can a mind function so effectively and creatively without anyone or anything in charge?
At last, I had a new Ultimate Paradox, a new obsession. Rather, I wanted to develop qualitative ways to think about the idea of emergence. I became interested not only in minds but also in other systems in which complex patterns emerge from simple interactions among simple parts. For me, there was something intriguing and beautiful about this self-organized emergence of order from disorder, of complexity from simplicity. I developed an emotional investment in this idea.
Few things got me more upset than listening to creationists attacking the idea of evolution, attacking the idea that complexity can arise from simple pieces. During the year, I studied with Sherry Turkle, who studied the emotional power of things we think with, and Seymour Papert, who described how a particular object, gears, had changed his way of thinking in childhood.
Papert had fallen in love with gears and, in the process, with mathematics. For me, the key insight was not that the computer itself is an evocative object although surely it is for many people , but rather that the computer can be used to create evocative objects. And those new evocative objects could be used to help people learn new things in new ways.
In designing the Logo turtle, for example, Papert had explicitly attempted to make an evocative object to help students become engaged with mathematical ideas and mathematical thinking. Just as the young Papert had fallen in love with mathematics through gears, children could now fall in love with mathematics through the turtle. The idea of creating evocative objects for educational purposes is not a new idea. This approach has stood the test of time, and it continues as the basis for kindergartens around the world today.
I felt a new sense of mission: I could use the computer to create evocative objects for exploring my new Ultimate Paradox, the paradox of a complex whole arising from simple parts. I wanted to create objects that would enable me to explore the paradox, but also to help others Stars 43 explore it as well. But instead of a single turtle, I created thousands of turtles. And I developed a new language, called StarLogo, that enabled students to program each of the individual turtles, then observe the patterns that emerge from all of the interactions.
Students have used StarLogo to explore a diverse range of phenomena. They have turned turtles into birds to explore how flocking patterns arise; into cars to explore how traffic jams form; into ants to explore how foraging patterns emerge; and into buyers and sellers in a marketplace to explore how economic patterns form. It has given me great satisfaction to see students become engaged with my Ultimate Paradox.
For some, it has become an obsession, as it was for me. Over the past twenty years, my research has continued to revolve around the creation of evocative objects for education. Just as the stars of the night sky inspired, intrigued, and provoked me as a child, my hope is to create new objects that help others find their own obsessions.
He cannot detach meaning from an object, or a word from an object, except by finding a pivot in something else. Transfer of meanings is facilitated by the fact that the child accepts a word as the property of a thing: he sees not the word but the thing it designates.
A vital transitional stage toward operating with meaning occurs when a child first acts with meanings as with objects as when he acts with the stick as though it were a horse. Later he carries out these acts consciously. In play a child spontaneously makes use of his ability to separate meaning from an object without knowing he is doing it, just as he does not know he is speaking in prose but talks without paying attention to the words.
Then through play the child achieves a functional definition of concepts or objects, and words become parts of a thing. In front of the twenty or so friends and family that were gathered, my four children gave presentations—a poem, a newly composed piece performed on the piano, and a set of written reflections.
I was touched, grateful, and struck by the fact that all four of my children spoke about keyboards. Two described the importance of music and the piano in their and my life; two evoked the experience of listening to me type manuscripts at night as they were nodding off to sleep. I am not sentimental about objects. I admire beautiful things and like to be around them, but I make no effort to purchase or keep them.
I am happy wearing clothes of forty years ago; truth to tell, I am happier wearing such old clothing. I save my feelings for other human beings and the family dog, Nero. What I do value are the sounds of music and the ideas in books. If I could no longer hear music or play it , I would be devastated.
If I could no longer read for study or pleasure or write for others or myself , I would not enjoy life. My preferred access to linguistic and musical objects is via fingers on keyboards. I began both piano lessons and the typing of manuscripts when I turned seven. I took piano lessons for almost six years, then began to teach piano sporadically, and later sat in on lessons and practiced with two of my children. In all, I have played piano off and on for fifty-three years.
While I never learned to touch type, I have seen myself as a writer since second or third grade, and typewriters have been with me ever since. I began with manual typewriters for home and office; over time, I moved in turn to electric typewriters, office PCs, and a succession of laptop computers, on one of which I am typing at this moment.
I am able to write with a pen or pencil, and sometimes do so, but I much prefer to type. Some people are students of keyboards; they sample hundreds of pianos and prefer only a certain model, one Steinway above all the rest. Others love the keyboard on their computer because of its touch—they feel that their hands glide over it with no wasted motion.
But for me, this is not the case. I pay essentially no attention to the quality of my keyboards. All of my attention is focused on the message, musical or literary.
When I play the piano, I try to use an appropriate touch, but I am really studying the music, trying to understand it, hoping to capture that meaning through my meager technique.
When I am typing, my mind is entirely on the contents that I am trying to convey. Above all else, I am trying to be clear; secondarily, I am trying to write in a way that is pleasing to read. And yet, even with my focus so intently on the message, the experience of my fingers on keyboards feels like more than simply a means to a desired end. In the creation of both music and text, if I could bypass the keyboard and directly transmit mental signals to an instrument or to the computer, I would not want to do so.
When I learned to play the piano, my mother sat next to me nearly every day. When two of my sons began to play, I naturally sat next to them as well. I feel an association between the piano keyboard and family love. In the case of writing, the sensations of fingers on keys are soothing in a way that goes beyond my pleasure in what I write: when I want to imagine myself happy, I think of myself in my study or in a comfortable hotel room on the Keyboards 49 road, or even cramped, as I am now, in the economy class of American Airlines Flight , from Boston to Miami, fingers on a keyboard, letting my thoughts proceed at their pace into a typescript.
Stepping back from my personal experience, I don for a moment the perspective of the social scientist. As a scholar, my task is to master the knowledge of the past and to identify ways in which I can add to it. As a sometime pianist, my task is to understand the explicit and implicit instructions of the composer and, ultimately, to introduce my personal interpretation of his or her composition.
In principle, both of these assignments can be tackled simply by thinking about the challenge at hand and arriving at the best possible solution. Indeed, Mozart is said to have created entire compositions in his head and simply to have written them down in the manner of an amanuensis; and various writers have claimed that the job of writing is simply the transposition to paper of words and ideas that have come to them in a flash.
I am skeptical of these accounts. Research on creativity reveals that, even though new ideas appear to come to one as a flash, there has invariably been tremendous preparation beforehand—and this preparation can be documented in the written record. Moreover, thought does not take place in a vacuum—it takes place in various media of expression. By the time one has become an expert some of these media appear to be largely cerebral.
But especially during early development, as the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky has taught us, these media are invariably tools that have been created by the wider society—tools ranging from words to pencils, computers, and musical instruments.
Perhaps as an expert writer and a long time journeyman pianist, I could achieve some of my goals without a keyboard. However, I think that I would be handicapped by the absence of an instrument on which to 50 Howard Gardner work.
And I know that affectively I need, enjoy, even love the opportunity to type or play away, for much of the day. Howard Gardner is the John H.
Keyboards 51 Objects of Discipline and Desire There was a little girl who was so delicate and charming, but in the summer she always had to go barefoot because she was so poor. Karen was. The rich shoemaker in town measured her little foot. In the midst of all the shoes stood a pair of red ones just like the ones the princess had worn.
How beautiful they were! As soon as she started, her feet kept on dancing. It was as if the shoes had taken control. She put on the red shoes. And then she went to the ball and began to dance.
But when she wanted to turn right, the shoes danced to the left, and when she wanted to move up the floor, the shoes danced down the floor, down the stairs, along the street, and out the town gate.
Dance she did, and dance she must, right out into the dark forest. My early ballet lessons still stay with me, a long series of carpools from one musty studio to another. I began my training at age four after my parents presented me with my first pair of ballet slippers and drove me to the local studio.
There are many objects associated with ballet, most of which contribute to a culture of continuous selfappraisal the barre, the elastic band around the waist, the mirrored room.
Among these, the shoe is by far the most significant. It acts as an object of identification, drawing a line between the various styles of dance.
To a surprising degree, its constraints and affordances define the movement of the ballerina. Prior to the eighteenth century, this fledgling art celebrated male athleticism and relegated female dancers, clad in heavy skirts, wigs, and heeled slippers, to peripheral roles.
French dancer Marie Ann Cupis de Camargo was one of the first women to cross the gender barrier when she removed the heels from her slippers and began performing the same flashy steps as her male counterparts. In , dancer Marie Taglioni forever altered ballet technique by dancing en pointe the full-length ballet La Sylphide. The resulting performance—ethereal and light—embodied the spirit of the Romantic Age. Women who seemed to possess supernatural beauty and purity captured the hearts of ordinary, earthbound men.
It was reported that some overly zealous fans ate her discarded slippers with sauce. In the nineteenth century, choreographers continued to showcase the technique of the female ballerina, who had since displaced the male dancer as the central figure in ballet.
Beyond these technical and aesthetic expectations, ballet shoes carry symbolic power. In the early twentieth century, Isadora Duncan rejected the rigidity of nineteenth-century ballet by donning loose Grecian robes instead of corsets and embracing the naturalness of the bare foot instead of the artificiality of the ballet slipper. Modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey later based her style of fall and recovery on the movement of the unsoled human footfall.
By the age of eleven, before I had even reached the age of going en pointe, I had already disfigured my feet. The restrictive nature of the shoe, combined with the demanding movement required of my feet within them, resulted in numerous trips to the doctor for ingrown toenails as well as the initial signs of bunions.
My legs developed the hyper-musculature characteristic of dancers forced to raise their bodies up on their toes. I still bear the marks of my early years in ballet.
Yet such inconvenience seemed minor in comparison to my dream that my body might recreate the movements of controlled beauty characteristic of the dance. My ballet slippers enabled me to move in ways I never dreamed possible. I could mimic the ethereal weightlessness of Giselle or throw myself into a series of athletic Ballet Slippers 57 jumps and turns that left me happily gasping for air.
For a time, I felt my body would respond to any demand I could impose on it. When I was four, my parents purchased my ballet slippers in a mall. They were inexpensive, cut from coarse leather, and were sold with the elastic strap fully attached to the sides of the shoe.
My next pair came from a store specializing in dance apparel. Apart from their origins, the most noticeable difference was the piece of unattached elastic my mom had to sew on the slipper, specially positioned to accommodate the dimensions of my foot within this particular shoe. As I improved, I became more demanding of my increasingly sophisticated equipment. I remember my pride when I could finally attach a pair of ribbons to my slippers in addition to the requisite elastic.
A dancer receives her first pair of pointe shoes, toe shoes, at age twelve, roughly corresponding to the age she enters puberty. Progress continues to be marked though a progression of shoes, now all shoes for dancing en pointe.
My own journey through the hierarchy of shoes signified an increase in my skill and helped me identify with the image of the professional ballerina that I upheld as my physical ideal. For a time, both my movements and appearance progressed along what I imagined to be a natural trajectory toward this goal. However, as I continued my studies, there was an increasing gap between the reality of my body and the perfected body imagined in my mind.
My shoes endowed my body with the theo- 58 Eden Medina retical capability to balance and extend my limbs, but my legs were not as long, my torso not as limber, and my neck not as graceful as the one owned by my imagined self, my rival.
Eventually each movement I executed before the mirror forced me to stare at my own limitations. Just as the ballet slippers of my youth helped me become a member of a community driven to transform the body into art, the toe shoes of my young adulthood highlighted both my technical progression and the elusive nature of my ideal physique. As I became closer to my ideal in the realm of technical movement, I was left with a profound sense of my physical shortcomings.
My body would never be beautiful in the exact way I longed for it to be. I quit ballet shortly after this realization. I felt that my body had failed me. I put my toe shoes in a box and there they collected dust for the next ten years. As I entered adulthood, the library replaced the ballet studio as my favorite haunt; the computer became my preferred tool of self-expression; and the academic community offered a new mirror for self-appraisal. Despite my prolonged absence from the dance studio, the movements of my youth remained engraved in my body.
Several years ago, I felt an urge to revisit them. My father was able to locate my old pair of ballet slippers, which he promptly shipped to me via FedEx. As I sat in the studio on my first day of class and began to put on my warm-up clothes, I doubted my decision to return: How would the mirror evaluate my older, less flexible body?
Yet, as I looked around the studio, I noticed that none of my classmates resembled the ideal that had driven me from the discipline I once loved. Slowly I slipped my feet into my shoes and began to stretch, feeling my hips rotate almost imperceptibly outward as they recalled a stance once second nature. I sensed that whatever the shortcomings of the body, I Ballet Slippers 59 was now in a position to see the beauty of the dance.
As a child, I lived to dance. As an adult, I could accept the fact that I loved to dance. When I felt warm, I walked across the studio and joined my classmates at the barre. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.
The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress—communications breakdown. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. In it is my Elite Glucometer, lancet, syringes, and other blood glucose testing paraphernalia. Carefully I open a test strip packet, insert it into my glucometer, load my lancet device with a sharp, new needle, search the tips of my fingers for a choice spot, and prick myself.
I squeeze my finger until a tiny droplet of blood forms and hold the glucometer close until the vacuum pulls in the correct amount of blood.
The counter on my glucometer begins to count down time. I live by its metric. I might use the next sixty seconds to walk to the refrigerator to retrieve my insulin, or begin to make some coffee, or put my head down and think about going back to sleep.
After sixty seconds, the meter displays my blood glucose level in milligrams per tenth of a liter of blood. It is only recently that I have thought about how my meter, the first object I see every morning, has become me. Our interactions define my sense of who I am. My glucometer is credit card size—three inches times two inches, and is about one half-inch thick. It weighs about three ounces.
The meter has no buttons or switches; it turns on only at the insertion of a test strip, which is about one inch long and one-quarter inch wide. At one end of the strip, an opening pulls blood into the testing plate. On its front is a small LCD display. I have always been happy knowing that my meter is one of the most accurate on the market. I have been uninterested in how the meter determines my glucose level. The output is the event. I accept what my meter tells me. Diabetes is all about control: control of blood sugars, control of what one eats and when one eats it, scheduled exercise, and regulation of insulin intake to 64 Joseph Cevetello food.
Despite a regimented life, you could still lose a limb or a kidney, become blind or impotent. I was diagnosed with Insulin Dependent Diabetes in IDD is caused when the body attacks and kills off the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Insulin injections are required for all who have IDD. IDD increases the probability of heart disease fourfold, is the leading cause of kidney disease, limb amputations, blindness, and can lead to impotency.
Left untreated, IDD would lead to death in about two years. It was at Joslin that I learned to care for myself and to be humble about my illness. While at the Joslin Clinic, I saw patients in wheel chairs who had lost a foot, others walking with IVs, and others with eye patches over one, sometimes two, eyes.
I understood that diabetes was not something to be fooled with. To stay on tight control I test my blood at least four times a day: in the morning, before lunch, before dinner, and before bedtime.
On days when I exercise, I may test two times before vigorous activity to ensure my blood sugar is high enough and one time after I exercise to ensure that I have not gone too low. If I feel strange sometime during the day, I will test again.
What do I do with all this data? I write the data in my log book, in which I keep a tally of my glucose levels. The meter also stores my last thirty readings and can supply me with an average of these last thirty scores.
As The Elite Glucometer 65 I record the number in my log book, I project where I want to be throughout the remainder of the day, whether I can eat, how much I can eat, how much insulin I should inject, and whether I can exercise or must wait to get my sugars higher. If I meet this goal, give or take ten points, I feel a sense of accomplishment, a willingness to meet the day. What on earth did I eat yesterday? I do not expect to be perfect, and I know there are times when things get out of control either because I ate too much or injected too little.
Usually such readings do not bother me. Discrepancies of more than thirty points upset me. Sometimes I will remember a snack or lack of a snack, and that will explain it. Many times I can think of no good reason for the discrepancy. When my mental image of my physical self conflicts with my meter, I have a problem.
Do I doubt myself, or do I doubt my meter? Seeking to maintain my sense of control, I test again. My first reaction is to doubt the meter rather than myself even though I know that first and second meter readings usually differ by no more than five points. One would think that after all these years I would simply accept the first reading.
I do not. I am unwilling to place absolute trust in my meter. I want to find fault in it, although I know it will always come up with two similar readings. The discrepancy between the reading and my 66 Joseph Cevetello expectation makes me redouble my efforts to remember what I could have forgotten, what I might have done wrong.
Only when I remember do I feel in control once again. My meter maintains my image of myself as a man able to take care of himself. It also defines me as a diseased person, one who needs the aid of objects to sustain my life.
The meter concretizes my commitment to remaining healthy and communicates to others that I am different, somehow incomplete. My interactions and dependency on my meter have made me realize that relationships between people and medical machinery are evolving. Perhaps, these new relationships will become so vital to our survival that, like my glucometer, they will seem intrinsic.
Projecting into the future, I can see two scenarios. In one, techno-clad humans live with ubiquitous computing, integrated into our homes, clothes, and bodies. I imagine data glasses receiving information about us from sensors buried deep within our bodies that could communicate a constant readout of blood glucose level.
I, as the wearer, closely monitor myself and, at the appropriate time, communicate with my insulin delivery device to tell it to medicate me. In this scenario, I am in control of these devices, they do what I tell them to. In this fantasy, I am still a diseased person caring for myself. In a second scenario, I live in a world of ubiquitous, body-based, clothing-based computing, but in this future, a small implantable device regulates my glucose levels and insulin needs.
It operates autonomously. In this fantasy, I do not control my disease; my computer pancreas controls it for me. Manfred Clynes, a NASA scientist writing in the s, defined a cyborg as a synergy between a machine and a human being that does not require any conscious thought on the part of the human. I wonder how my interactions with my meter may be a harbinger of the nascent stages of a cyborgian relationship.
Carefully I open a test strip packet, insert it into glucometer, load up my lancet device with a sharp, new needle, search the tips of my fingers for a choice spot, and prick myself. As the meter counts down, I begin to prepare my shot and wait for my meter to tell me what to do. Joseph Cevetello received his doctorate from Harvard University School of Education and is a specialist in e-learning design and technology use in adult learning.
Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify. I lose my composure. And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious. Delicately, analytically,. By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners.
If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Protection often came in the form of a glaringly bright, yellow raincoat that kept me dry on rainy days on my way to school.
A thoroughly synthetic creation made of rubberized polyester, it would have been difficult to imagine anything less natural. It would be difficult to imagine an artifact that more embodies the tension between myself and my environment. More than its function of keeping rain out, however, it represented my fear of letting anything in—people most of all. People were the most unpredictable elements of my world; unlike other objects they were more than the sum of the forces acting on them.
The human factor was a constant irritant for a budding Laplacian like me. Where a person was involved, one could never be assured of predicting the output, even if all the inputs were known. My wish back then was that I could be the human analog of the neutrino I had read about in science articles: a particle that moved effortlessly through the world, almost never interacting.
On the playground, while the other three-year-olds competed for the swings and the slide, I paced along the fence, studying the ground and identifying minerals in the rocks that I found. Rocks, unlike people, were safe. A fear of death, of being smothered and negated, drives us to separate ourselves from our parents.
And a fear of life, of being responsible for ourselves in an indifferent world, 72 Matthew Belmonte brings us back to seek their protection. These conflicting denials of death and of life were attached to the coat: it made me impermeable to the assaults of the outside world, yet it defined me in a way that prevented me from being myself.
In solitude I slipped between the horns of this dilemma. When I was alone, there was neither the threat of attention from other people, nor the demand to submit to the decisions of my parents. The defeat of my will that was signaled by the yellow coat could be replayed as a victory, if I were the one who chose it.
It was thrilling to feel the pressure of the rain and to see it roll off me and leave me dry. It was as if I were marveling at some alien world and knew that a spacesuit was all that separated me from its deadly atmosphere. Alone in the rain, I was master of my own actions and of my surroundings. I believe that my childhood sensitivity to the boundary between self and external world led me in my adult life to study people with autism, whose central, daily challenge is the work of imposing internal narrative flow on a deluge of external sensory inputs.
Ironically, when I was in primary school I never felt much empathy for my autistic older brother. Now as I look back I see both science and autism are compulsions to order, which differ only in their degrees of abstraction. I often consider how similar he and I are, and how I so easily could have been him, or he me.
The Yellow Raincoat 73 So it was this shared desperation for order that drove me into science, and later into the craft of fiction. As scientists we invent perfect models in which phenomena are supposed to be mathematically tractable; the human construction of science is full of ideal gases, incompressible fluids, frictionless surfaces, and blackbody radiators.
Similarly, as artists we filter the complexities of real life into representative texts in which distinct characters are involved in coherent plots evincing meaningful themes. Treating life as theater and inventing purpose and order, I keep chaos, meaninglessness, and death at bay.
My work has taught me that this notion of protection goes a long way toward explaining how people construct theories to gain a sense of control over their surroundings. Then they behave in ways to reinforce these theories. What differs for them is the intensity with which these surroundings impinge. Abnormal neural connections within autistic brains may lead to abnormal perception, increasing the salience of individual events but undermining the ability to connect these pieces of life into more integrated and abstract representations.
I made understanding the experience of such a fragmented perceptual world the center of my work. To proceed, I imagine life as a film being screened by an incompetent projectionist. Perhaps the volume is so high that none of the dialogue can be heard above the hiss of noise, or perhaps the aperture setting causes one bright corner of the picture to drown out all the rest.
However, 74 Matthew Belmonte if I can rewind the film and play it again and again, I can gather a bit more information each time I watch it. My aspiration is to understand all of it. Search Advanced Search close Close. Evocative Objects Things We Think With Edited by Sherry Turkle Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with.
Add to Cart Buying Options. Request Permissions Exam copy. Overview Author s Praise. Summary Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with.
July September Share Share Share email. Reviews A wonderfully evocative there really is no other word for it series of meditations on meaningful objects.
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