The Second Self

My 4 highlights

• Some adolescents adopt the computer as their major activity, throwing themselves into programming the way others devote themselves to fixing cars.

• For adults as well as children, computers, reactive and interactive, offer companionship without the mutuality and complexity of a human relationship. They seduce because they provide a chance to be in complete control, but they can trap people into an infatuation with control, with building one's own private world.

• creation. A computer program is a reflection of its programmer's mind. If you are the one who wrote it, then working with it can mean getting to know yourself differently.

• If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the idea of self as machine.